This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

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.

I’ve been thinking lately, what is it that devRant devs do?
So after a couple of days of pulling data from devRants API's, filtering through the inconsistent skill set data of about 500 users (seriously guys, the comma is your friend) i’ve found an interesting set of languages being used by everyone.

I've limited this to just languages, as dwelling into frameworks, libraries and everything else just grows exponentially, also ive only included languages with at least 5 users out of the pool.
sorry you brainfuck guys.

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

!rant

I feel darn good today! I caught some A-holes cheating the system on Stack Overflow.

So basically a question was asked with no code examples present and not a single reference to any framework being used.
The tag only had 'javascript', which probably limits to only 157.244.457 existing frameworks.

I'm commenting something like 'Show us your code so we can have a look'.

After 2 minutes, out of the blue, an answer appears. AND WOW! This guy had a Magical 8 Ball™!
He could predict the framework AND had a very specific fix. Just a one-liner! Go figure!

So I'm like thinking.. What the fuck just happened? Did I miss something? «Going over the question two more times»

All of the sudden, up-votes start popping up all over the place. The question was marked 3 times, the answer was marked an up-voted multiple times, and THEN it hit me (I'm kind of slow).
I checked both user profiles and instead of the usual 'air of mystery', these guys were actually dumb enough to include their company name.

AssertEquals == true.

So in the comment section, I raise my concerns on the legitimacy of the question as clearly this was 'telephoned' as we say it in Dutch, meaning as much as 'rehearsed' in this context.
But as if that was not enough, this another guy comes in and COPY/PASTED(!) the answer of guy #1. Again. Up-votes. EVERYWhere.

So I start going over some of the questions and answers of The Three Musketeers or TTM, as I'll refer them as of now.

TTM had posted over 15 questions combined, mostly crap and incomplete no-code questions. And they had answered most of their own questions.
Sometimes another guy's answer was accepted with zero up-votes as a smoke screen while the real winner was one of their own.

I marked ALL of these questions for moderation, left for lunch, and came back to see how far my blast radius reached.
Turns out, pretty damn far! Although their accounts have not been deleted, TTM have lost most of their reputation points.

They will remain on my watchlist for a couple of months. I know that is quite childish of me, but I just call it my 'guilty pleasure'! ;D
And besides, what else is there to do, instead of browsing DevRant?

Watching a cookery program and it made me think it must be hard being a chef.

Then it made me think that being a web developer is a bit like cooking.

You have your ready meal equivalent with WordPress and Wix.

You have your cook at home kits with front-end frameworks like bootstrap and foundation.

You have your recipes and ingredients with package managers like npm and JavaScript modules.

Then you have your own home made cooking using vanilla js, CSS and HTML made to your own liking.

Just like being a good chef, being a good web developer is about knowing what ingredients and methods to include, but also what to leave out, to get the best result!

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

1. Do you know why my computer is so slow?
2. What cellphone do you recommend me to buy? (They always end up buying the cheapest)
3. What do you do at work? (Answer: "I create applications". Anything more complex than that is not going to be understood or they will loose interest)
4. Something is wrong with the: [TV, Cellphone, microwave, etc.]. Could you please take a look? (Believe or not, if something works with electricoty, my family thinks I can fix it).
5. Is it true that if I send this WhatsApp message to all my contacts I will have more options?
6. I need to build an application that (pretty much The Matrix), how much time do you need and how much would cost? Don't you dare to give me wrong numbers. (We have to see the future)
7. (Continuing the previous point, a non-technical client) I don't think that would take so much time/money. (Every time)
8. I want to use the latest Front-End frameworks. I want to see all those beautiful animations in my page and that it runs smoothly... I also need that it runs in IE 5.
9. So, you have been working in the back end? If you don't have a screen to show to the client is like you didn't do anything in this sprint.
10. Why haven't you built and million dollar application? Everybody is doing that right now....

Yep, those are only a few downsides of our profession if we count family, friends and even co-workers. But I can't imagine myself doing anything else.

They asked me if I could recommend any video streaming frameworks. I said no, but I could google around a little. I found one, sent it to them with a note that I hadn't used it but it seemed solid.

One afternoon, right before hometime, a month later and the day before go-live, I come in, to emails with _all_ the managers on it, demanding that I assist immediately. They'd finally tried testing it, and they had found an issue. No details.

I email back, asking for the actual issue they'd found - no response. I phone - that developer has now gone on leave for week, there's a new dev who'll help me. I email him, asking for "precise technical details" of what had gone wrong.

He replies, "when you try use it, it literally causes the apocalypse." and goes silent. I check the skies, no visible apocalypse yet.

Based on some keywords they'd mentioned, I google and find a known issue as well as a patch for their version. I email it over to them.

The response? "If I'd known he was just going to Google it, I would have tried that myself."

Impostor vs Kenner syndrome

We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.

So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.

I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.

It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.

Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.

But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.

The hardest part of programming is not the inner workings of the chosen frameworks and tech.

It's the damn naming.

I will spend hours trying to figure out what to name things for sense and clarity and then a fraction of that time coding it together.

*me, staring out the window*

"Hey dude can you--"

"Ssshhh. I'm naming things."

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

We’re recruiting new team members, and so our recruiting staff wanted some input on what to look for. We told them that we need more frontend devs, mainly for JS frameworks like React and Aurelia.

And now a few weeks later we find out that our newly recruited Java developer is starting this monday. Thanks

Everybody boasting about lots of projects on github, and tons of stuff to show for.

Those that don't - are usually stressed that they don't have anything to show.

I work at a big-ish company, and we have tens of people in IT. Some of them are OK, others are gods.

Today I looked at their github profile. What do you think I saw?
Hello world applications?
Unfinished frameworks?
Forks with 1 line of change?

kind'a... That's for the people that have the richest profile. The rest - at most have a couple of projects with 2 files in them:
.gitignore (empty)
LICENSE (GPL)

So just chill. Do what you like, don't judge yourself too hard, and try to also make some money.
Less stress, be happy.

Hot take: PHP is pretty good nowadays.

I'm a Laravel dev right now and things just get done so quickly. Every language has its problems but the meme of PHP hate seems to be made more out of ignorance these days. You could find just as many problems with any other language.

For those that say I'm biased because I work through the framework more than the language, I'd ask don't you do the same? ASP.NET, Java EE, the millions of JS frameworks, all these also make your life easier within their languages.

In the end, work with what makes you happy and productive and be done with it.

*Opens some Computerphile video on YouTube in Chrome Canary*
CPU > hey ho dude, wait a minute..! I can't process all of this in realtime!!! >_<

Alright.. I think I've still got a copy of all their videos sitting somewhere in the file server.. perhaps I could use that instead.
*Opens said video from the file server in SMPlayer*
CPU > aah, thanks man. Now I can allocate 15-ish % of my resources to that and give you a good watching experience.

Web browsers are really great for being the most general-purpose document viewers, application execution environments (remote code execution engines as someone here called it), and overall be one of the most versatile programs on any PC's standard software suite.

But that comes at a price.. performance. And definitely when it comes to featureful fucking WordPress shitsites (shites?), bloated YouTube, Google, Facebook, and all that fucking garbage.. I fucking hate web browsers and this "Web 2.0" that people keep on talking about. Your boatload of JavaScript frameworks just to ease your own fucking development has a real impact when it happens on dozens of tabs, you know.

Besides, can't those framework creators just make it into a "compiler" * of sorts? So that front-end devs can flail their dicks in an shit-infested environment full of libraries and frameworks all they want, but the framework can convert it into plain JS code that the web server can then serve. Or better yet, the JavaScript standard could be improved to actually be usable on its own!

Look, I'm not a front-end dev. Heck, I'm not even a dev to begin with. But what I do know is that efficiency matters, especially at large scale. Web browsers being so overgeneralized and web devs adding a boatload of fucking libraries or frameworks or whatever, it adds up, both to the CPU's and my own temper.

(*) Quote marks because source code to source code isn't really compiling, but then uglified JS looks worse than machine code anyway so meh :/

I fucking hate websites that refuse to show their content unless you enable their JS clusterfuck. Yes I am blocking JavaScript because I'm sick of all those goddamn frameworks from God knows what domain. IS THAT FUCKING WRONG?!! I don't hate front-end devs, in fact I respect them for keeping up with design needs of shitty clients. But that fucking Web 2.0 with 50 frameworks per tab and no HTML or even PHP whatsoever for those who block your JS crap.. shove it right up your fucking ass!!!

Interviewer : So what frameworks and library you usually use?
Me : i use volley for networking, gson for parsing, livedata/architecture components for architecture and observability , room for database and java for app development

I : ok so make this sample app using retrofit for networking, moshi for parsing, mvrx for architecture , rx for observability , sqldelight for db, dagger2 and kotlin for app dev. You have 8 hours

Me :(wtf?) But i never used those libs or language!
I : we just want to check how easily you adapt to different surroundings.

Me : -_-

Honestly i don't know of it was a great experience or a bad one . I was stressed the whole time but was able to adapt to almost all of those libraries and frameworks.
At the end i got selected but decided not to go for those ppl. That was just a lucrative opening of a venus fly trap, they would have stressed the hell out of me

I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:

Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"

Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".

*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.

Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.

Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".

Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"

*At this point he was really pissed

Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"

Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."

Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"

*Guy ironically laughs

When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.

Grunt, gulp, bower, webpack, rollup, yarn, npm, requirejs, commonjs, browserify, brunch, rollup, parcel, fusebox, babel,
wrappers for bundlers, frameworks on frameworks, then for css, theres scss, sass, less, stylus, compass, and for templates, handlebars, mustache, nunjucks, underscore, ejs, pug, jade, and about five billion other word-salad tools, all with their own CLIs, each in some way building on npm, but with their own non-congruent little syntax, like no one realized they were reinventing the same problems introduced by domain specific languages, most happy to announce "configuration takes a little time, but it's worth it!"

No, it's not. Just stop people. Just stop. You're not doing anyone any favors by creating another lib, all you're doing is tooting your own horn and self promoting. Use what exists and stop creating more shit for new people to learn, to add to the giant clusterfuck that is the 2019 hotmess known as "web development."

You're not special. You're not important. You're lib or tool will be famous for 15 minutes and no one cares what you've made.

If you want to contribute to web development, do us all a favor and contribute to global sanity by kindly deleting your contribution and any plans to contribute new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)

Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"

Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"

Him: "But given the choice?"

Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."

Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."

Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!

I'm afraid that the wanketeers got a hold of this one.. as if I care how fast or slow your browser is, as long as it isn't completely shit like pre-Quantum Firefox used to be! And does it even make the slightest bit of sense when there's nice and snappy websites like the motherfucking websites, but a shitload of shitsites that load several dozens of frameworks, because long live Web 2.0. 22% faster, ON WHAT?!

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

Just finished my internship.

I entered knowing nothing and spent the entire year on solo projects.

My company does not use any frameworks because "they don't want to run code on a server that they didn't write", they use waterfall, only use version control on half the projects, use notepad++, never once even glanced at my code to check I know what I'm doing - even when i asked.

Also have never heard of a code review, have absolutely no QA in place other than the devs making it and quickly testing it visually, no requirements gathering - just pictures and have never heard of tdd.

Recently was given a project with no designs, no specs other than a verbal half thought out explanation and was dumped with random deadlines like "this needs to be demoed tomorrow night" with no idea about the project progression or what it looks like. Apparently it's all my fault that it failed.

I am very grateful to them for teaching me so much and giving me opportunities to teach myself on nice projects but come on.

What boggles my mind is that the company is 6 years old and has big, big clients. I don't understand how. I once tested a project about to go out the next day that had been "tested" and found pages of bugs. They would have lost the contract for sure...

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

So I watched this video that tries to convince people, that the jQuery library isn't really best practice anymore and showed how you can achieve basic tasks with vanilla JS, aswell as some frameworks (Vue, React, Angualar) and how they handle interactions with the DOM.

It also talked about how nearly every JS question on SO has top answers using jQuery, and how that's a bad thing.

But what I found in the comment section of this video was pure horror: So-called "Developers" defending jQuery to the death. Of course there were some people who made some viable arguments (legacy code, quick & dirty projects), but the overwhelming majority were people making absurd claims and they seemed quit self-confident.

GOSH!

Want an example?
Look:

Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?

Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.

some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.

BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....

"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"

Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?

Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)

"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.

Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.

Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.

"Ah no, reusable frameworks and libraries are a terrible idea. What you need is a bunch of very lightweight files that you can copy / paste from project to project"

- Mobile Architect, Large m.n.c, 10+ years experience.

Dear wordpress developers,
You have my sincerest apologies. I used to think developing with wordpress is what people do when they are feeling lazy and dont want to work with code and frameworks. But no... wordpress,shopify and all those shitty ready CMSs are by far the worst methods of developing websites or web applications. I have spent countless hours in my new job in the past two months simply trying to resolve issues caused by wordpress websites suddenly deciding to stop working after one of the billion plugins required to do the simplest of tasks was updated. The money i need to spend on premium plugins alone makes developing the website no longer profitable in the first place. And god forbid the client asks for a very simple frontend edit that the theme doesnt offer in the theme options menu. Even tho doing the feature from scratch would take next to no time at all if you do it yourself... you end up trying out a hundred plugins just to achieve something in a ways that feels very forced. Nothing will ever top cakephp for me

While I am self employed, my clients can end up like my boss. In this case, one of my clients is the best "boss" I have ever had. We discuss everything from ethics to npm to development to board games. And we still get the job done.

He challenges me constantly to improve, and then we laugh over how we disagree with concepts, frameworks, etc. And we still get the job done.

It's fantastic to have a client who understands that you should be paid for your time, that lets you get what they hired you to do done without micro managing you (you trust me to actually do what you hired me to do? *gasp, shock*), and still enjoys the small talk. Though some of our ethics and society discussions can be rather large discussions.

Made a Website.
What this friendly old Lady wanted: a update to her poem/song website that looked horrible.
What she got: A goddamn masterpiece considering there is NO backend and I got nearly no ressources to work with.
It took forever to put that stuff together since I thought I dont need any frameworks at all. I didnt know PHP at all back then, so I just went all out with everything that pure HTML and CSS could give me.
I even went outside to make nice photos to put into the Background.
....so, he said no PHP or anything? YES! If you wanna add content you change the HTML and upload stuff via Filezilla. I dont really want to see it ever again. But not because it looks bad.

I know, its not really coding since its HTML but I Count this!

Rant about my application - mate thinks he can add features that are insanely hard to implement. Dare initiated. $150 if he does it, he buys me 3 rounds if he looses.
Proceed to give him the link to the repo. He downloads it and runs it in VS. Complains that it doesn't work and is broken...
"Have you installed the frameworks?"
"What frameworks"...

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Me and my friend (let's call him Tom) have done tons of projects before and got some decent knowledge, but we got a dude (Bob) working with us on that final project of Uni and he doesn't know what Git is nor what frameworks are so we chose CodeIgniter ONLY to make it easy for him.

2 month after starting the project and getting like half of the work done (mainly me and Tom) Bob 'kind of' learned PHP, CodeIgniter and Git so he wanted to contribute because the project manager will review all the commits done weekly.

So Bob did some HTML (what now?) and wanted to push it on the repo and even using Gitkraken as opposed to the Git CLI he managed to merge two f*** branches, and when he doesn't mess up the repo he totally ignores the files' structure of the project and makes his own thing.

Worst thing is, when Tom tries (I gave up a long time ago) to teach him something or to give him advice he's all like "Oh okay" "Yeah" "Got it!" but he doesn't understand anything and he won't admit it ! It's like talking to a wall...

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

Advice to new coders? I got multiple, unrelated to each other.

1. Start with the FUCKING BASICS !! Invest some time with fundamentals, don't just directly jump on frameworks like React or Angular.

2. You and everyone else are always going to blame your technical skills if you're unable to land a job. But you have to realize that is not always the case. Your attitude and energy towards the interviewer plays a vital role too.

3. You're gonna have to take a hit to your salary expectations starting out. It's just the way this industry works.

4. Think of yourselves as a freelancer working for companies. Those who call themselves Employees get stagnant and dependent on their company pretty fast.

5. Your objective is either to learn or earn. If there is both, amazing job. If there is either it's good enough. If there is none, time to jump ship !!

6. HR is there to protect the company from you not the other way around. Be better at spotting crocodile tears.

7. Try to find a WFH job over a WFO job. If you have an urgency, then either works but keep applying to WFH jobs. It's the best thing.

8. Focus on what you're building instead of what you're building it with. Devs have a tendency to fight over what tech stack they should use instead of focussing on the larger picture.

9. You're gonna get overwhelmed at some point when you're gonna get terms thrown at you like XML, JSON, API, Figma, Git, SOAP, REST. Don't worry though you'll get there.

10. You should know how to google your solutions, like really. This is like 60% of the job.

I love static sites and fancy new frameworks. Had an interview some time ago at a medium sized company. They specifically wanted someone to build static sites and introduce the company to Vue and Gridsome.
I got really excited for my first project. It was a wordpress site and I had to build a custom WP theme for it. Not exactly what I expected. Also I had no prior PHP knowledge, nor any experience with Wordpress. So I got really upset, because it wasn’t the technologies I was used to.
The first week was hard, I wanted to quit. But once something clicked. And I realized I know this. This is not PHP, not Wordpress, not Vue, but just simply a programming language. At the core everything programming language is the same. PHP became comfortable, Wordpress conventions didn’t bother me. I realized I can use great technologies with WP too. I get to know twig, added some sass, compiled everything nicely with webpack. And after a month I have a beautiful, fast and efficent site. I love it.
I realised that I don’t love the languages and frameworks. I love coding itself. I love creating efficent and reliable, clean code. No matter the architecture.
And my advice for you is to stop hating particular languages and serious debates on what is better, and hating your job when you can’t code in your new shiny framework. Love coding itself, because it’s a wonderful activity. We are creators, we are artists. Not <insert specific programming language here> developers.

I've been hunting for a new job for several months because my current company isn't growing my skills any further. There have been many setbacks, a few rejections, and that awful lingering imposter syndrome. So I finally dug myself out of my self pity and began learning things that my current company doesn't implement – JS frameworks, UX practices, etc. Today I had an interview that felt more like a conversation and collaboration than getting grilled about terminology and bug fixes. No matter what the result, I've been inspired to learn again 😌

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

Hmm. when you prove to be more knowledgable than the programmer that was pulled in, to interview you and he starts to go totally defensive and return spiteful responses
( like, what does a rookie like you know? i bet you never had an actual job )
when you calmly asks if any standard like PSR-2 is expected, if there are any preferred frameworks and what version control is used...

well, that went well..
Didn't get that internship..

I am a firmware developer with 4 years experience. C and sometimes assembly is my bread and butter.

Like 2 years ago, I was really interested to make a switch to application development. Got referred by my friend to her startup.

But I was a bit rusty with my data structures, high level languages and interpersonal skills.

The first question was to find the number of occurences for each word in a paragraph. The language choice was Java. But I was allowed to use C++ since it was the closest relative to Java that I knew.

And I started implementing a binary search tree from scratch and started inserting each tokenised word into it, wrote a traversal algorithm.

The interviewer, luckily, was a patient guy. After I completed my whole mess, he asked is it possible to do this in a slightly better way with constant time access without traversal.

I said yes, we can with a hash table but I dont know how to implement one. He replied I dont expect you to implement the hash table but see you use it. I asked him if I am allowed to used the standard library, for which he said ofcourse.

*facepalm*.

Finally I understood his expectation, referred cppreference.com and used an unordered_map.

Later there were some quesion on databases for which I tried my best to answer. And I frankly replied that I am not comfortable with JS frameworks as of now. Got rejected.

So the mistake is I never asked basic questions like what is the time complexity expects, if I was allowed to use standard library, didnt spend some extra time on studying stuffs needed for the domain switch and most importantly I panicked.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

That log4j RCE is some fucking nasty business!!! Its exploits have already been observed multiple times in our company scope.

Time for some unplanned Saturday evening hot-patches :/

P.S. Why the fuck leave such a feature enabled as default??? I mean really, whose brilliant idea was "let's leave the message parser enabled as well as the LDAP query hooks... BY FUCKING DEFAULT!!!"

I mean really, is anyone using that? ANYONE?

And then they laugh at me when I say "stay away from frameworks", "use as little libraries as possible", "avoid foreign code in your codebase",...

you know what.... JOKE'S ON YOU!

the more time I spend in this industry, the more I come to realize that it's a very blurry line between PROGRAMMING and CONFIGURING.

How much programming do you do these days, really? Isn't it just configuring your frameworks and libraries and engines to do what they do in the way you want?

Does it still make you programmers...?

And then what are these .conf files for your application? A declarative configuration for your... imperative configuration...?

So as all of you web developers know. If you are stepping into the world of web development you stepping into a world of unlimited possibilities, opportunities and adventure.

The flip side is that you step into a world of unlimited choices, tools, best practices, tutorials etc.

Since even for a veteran programmer, this is a little overwhelming, I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you guys for advice.

I know that 'there is no best' and that everything 'depends on what you want to achieve'. So how about just say the pro's and cons or when to use and when not to use. Or why you prefer one over another. Everything is allowed! :D

Maybe it will help others too. Start a nice, professional discussion:)

These are the parts I'd like advice about:

- frontend: what frameworks, libraries
- backend: language, framework, good practice
- server: OS, proxy (nginx, Apache, passenger), extra tips (like don't use root user)
- extras: git, GitHub, docker, anything

Thanks in advance everyone willing to help!:)

Also, if you only know frontend or backend. No worries, just tell me about your specialism!

A big shout out to all the polyglot developers out there who understand that languages and frameworks are just tools with trade offs.

May we always evaluate thoroughly and choose the best tool for the job at hand.

Cheers 🍻

Bonus Round:

What tools are you currently wielding while reading this rant?

Perhaps more of a wishlist than what I think will actually happen, but:

- Everyone realises that blockchain is nothing more than a tiny niche, and therefore everyone but a tiny niche shuts up about it.
- Starting a new JS framework every 2 seconds becomes a crime. Existing JS frameworks have a big war, until only one is left standing.
- Developing for "FaaS" (serverless, if I must use that name) type computing becomes a big thing.
- Relational database engines get to the point where special handling of "big data" isn't required anymore. Joins across billions of rows doesn't present an issue.
- Everyone wakes up one day and realises that Wordpress is a steaming pile of insecure cow dung. It's never used again, and burns in a fire.

Does any other front-end developer have the fear that we'll run out of handy words or phrases for JS frameworks and have to import massively long sentences to use what we need?

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

Comment of the week! I'm so sad he didn't catch the reference, but if the guy offers to teach him I'm down to learn 😂

On another note I can't blame him, I probably would have run npm -i gamma 😅

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...

Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.

Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

Despite common sense, I think technology is not making our lives easier. It's just build chaos on top of chaos.

Take server-side programming for instance.

First you have to find someone to host your thing, or a PaaS provider. Then you have to figure out how much RAM and storage you need, which OS you're going to use. And then there's Docker (which will run on top of a VM on AWS or GCP anyway, making even less sense). And then there's the server technology: nginx, Apache (and many many more; if, that is, you're using a server at all). And then there are firewalls, proxies, SSL. And then you go back to the start, because you have to check if your hosting provider will support the OS or Docker or your server. (I smell infinite recursion here.)

Each of these moving parts come with their own can of worms in terms of configuration and security. A whole bible to read if you want to have the slightest clue about what you're doing.

And then there's the programming language to use and its accompanying frameworks. Can they replace the server technology? Should you? Will they conflict with each other and open yet another backdoor into your system? Is it supported by your hosting provider? (Did I mention an infinite recursion somewhere?)

And then there's the database. Does it have a port to the language/framework of your choosing? Why does it expose an web interface? Is it supposed to replace your server? And why are its security features optional again? (Just so I have to test both the insecure and the secure environments?)

And you haven't written a single line of code yet, mind you.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

I'm finally writing unit tests consistently thanks to a simple file organization decision.

I'm not doing pure TDD, but at least I'm writing the tests immediately after writing a module, and I make sure they run ok.

What I'm doing is Instead of putting the test files in a "tests" dir at the root of the project, I have the tests right next to the source code.

So if I have a dog.x file, I also have a dog.test.x file next to it.

I'm not inventing gunpowder here. I've seen several people do this.
But it's something that is not generally made a default or advised to do.
Like I said; test frameworks in general go with the classic "tests" dir.

But for me this is day and night in whether I write the tests or not.

Which makes sense. Imagine the classic scenario of the "tests" dir, and you just created a file deep into a hierarchy, let's say src/lib/console/windows/dog.x

This means that if you want to write tests for that, you need to make sure the hierarchy tests/lib/console/windows/dog.test.x exists

If the test file already exists, but you want to access both files, you need to traverse deep for each.

Also, it's actually harder to keep track which files have unit tests and which do not.

Meanwhile, if the test files are next to the source, all these problems disappear.

That doesn't mean there are no other challenges with testing, like testing untestable things, like system calls or http requests, but there are ways to deal with that.

No matter how many frameworks and supersets I try, I always conclude that nothing beats vanilla JS. ES6 in particular is such a beautiful language, and I love having fine control over what happens under the hood.

When I'm done I can just transpile it to whatever ES version, although it's slowly becoming a non-issue.

Boss: we need to standardize the CMS we use.

Me: well 90% of what we build are custom Wordpress deployments...

Boss: yeah but Wordpress is best suited for all our clients.

Me: well yeah, I know...we could use Django or Rails and give the clients more customized solutions...

Boss: yeah but not all of our developers know those frameworks, and they require maintenance...

Me: -_- we could really use Jekyll for most sites we build

Boss: yeah, but what about our clients that want a blog?

Me: ...we can build a blog with anything...

Boss: ...we just need to standardize what we use.

1) Submitted my CV
2) Got an email to schedule a phone interview for the next week, I gave ~5 appiointments on the next week that were good for me
3) Next week passed, no answer to my E-mail, I asked in a mail, what happend
4) Got reply, that we should schedule the phone interview for the next week
5) We aggreed, in the appointment, they did not call me
6) I asked in a mail, what has happened
7) We aggreed in a new appointment
8) This time they called me, after a short conversation I was told, that I they send me task as homework right after the phone call and I will have to do it in one week
9) They did not send it
10) Next day I asked, whats going on
11) They sent me the task, and said that I can ask them, if have queations
12) For me it was not clear, if I was allowed to use frameworks for the task, so I asked it
13) I neveg got reply and did not ping for the 4th time

This was the most annoying and ridiculous recruiting process I had to deal with. It was just a waste of time.

I can't understand the people who are in love with Qt. Did you ever actually use it?

It has shitty UI components (compare them with Microsoft WPF or even WinForms), and it is fucking full of bugs. Really. I've never seen that many bugs in other frameworks.

I'm a Linux guy, but try .net if you want to see what a great framework is actually like.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

I'm thinking of opening a small onsite web development class for teenager (maybe between 10-20 yo). The problem in Indonesia is most of us learn programming language at an older age, maybe because of the language barrier and lack of good tutorials in Indonesian language.

I want to change that by teaching them early, so that in the future, Indonesia can contribute more to the world of software and web development. Maybe even create new JS frameworks.
JK. ;)

But I don't know where to start. I mean, I've never even posted any article or tutorial (I'm not good at writing). How do I develop the curriculum? I've thought about creating a web quiz, but what do I write? How do I make the material?
Has any of you ever done this?

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

C: what technologies are you using in this product?
Me: we are using celery which uses kombu to communicate through redis. Additionally, we have beat tasks that run and check the state of workers
C: was someone hungry when they named these frameworks?
Me: Possibly, but I just got hungry naming them.

I've been teaching the new interns. Some are progressing really nicely and understanding the caveats and concepts of the frameworks, but others are a big pain in the kernel

I sent them some code outlining what they would do, filled with `// TODO`'s. Every day I would ask them if they had any questions and they just said they were having some progress. At the end of the week, they say "the code that you sent me doesn't work. I ran it and it didn't do what you said it would do." Well that was your job! My bad for having high expectations I guess

Recently I've started thinking about how we are always told "No you can't do that" to everything. That feels like a theme in our industry.

I've also been thinking about how often people say well done to each other, or just comment that something is good in a pull request. Everything is always focused on bugs and mistakes - not good bits.

The first point conflicts with the idea that when using languages and frameworks you should follow their philosophy or you're gonna have a bad time - but in all other instances you mostly don't have wrong answers, just answers that can be better so a lot of stuff is opinion based.

I've decided to change my ways and focus just as much on good stuff as bad when I review code and to make sure I'm focusing just as much, if not more, when people do something good.

I think I do a good job, but I don't think I've been told I'm doing a good job or that anything specific is good more than a couple times in the last year - mostly in mandatory reviews. What about you?

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

What To Learn?

I'm a beginner in web development and have knowledge about html, css, JavaScript, jQuery, Sass, NodeJS, Express, MongoDB, Passport. You can consider me to be a beginner full stack developer, but I'm confused about what to learn further. There are so many front end frameworks that one can spend his entire life learning them. React, Vue, Angular, Backbone, etc. But I always want to learn backend properly, then there's Rails, PHP, SQL, Python. Can anyone atleast tell me what to learn and why exactly? This thing's making me mad and anxious.

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

LoL.. I knew this one successful independent developer who told me:

"Why do all these companies use inefficient technologies - seriously? What I usually do is: I present myself to a company, I ask them what they would like to happen, what their problem domain is and then I present a solution. A lot of companies I've consulted for were jaw-dropped that an entire efficient and complex system was only a size of 52 KiloBytes because I just used simple languages to accomplish the task".

He has a point.. look at all these companies nowadays forcing you to Java, GlassFish, NodeJS and what not. Just the frameworks and libraries alone hog down 10 minutes of build time (sometimes 30!!), the worst companies using frameworks that require you to rebuild an entire project just to see a change in the UI.. they don't even add a watcher, and even then.. omg, not to mention averaging project file sizes of 100+ MB.

Sigh.. where is the development world going?

let RANT = $state(true);

Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.

I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.

For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?

I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.

And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.

And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.

And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.

But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.

As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).

RANT = false;

PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.

Just like JS frameworks, everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel with an OS, now more than ever. Some give it a better tread, but things are hardly ever adopted by the end-user, unless proven to be a leader.

This is where Windows and macOS excel.

I have a love/hate relationship with Ubuntu, and use CentOS 7 for my servers (so I can get genuine, hands-on Debian/RHEL experience) but honestly, it ends there for me - which, again, is close to lightyears away from what the average person would use outside of our industry's cliche.

However, just like JS frameworks, there's a reason that each one exists; to fill a gap the others don't. This is where it gets a bit personal to me, and reflects a habitual mistake made by the human race, in general.

If we simply worked together towards setting true standards based on non-competitive collaboration - we'd be happier, positive, and much more productive.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

Why React is soo complicated? Seriously why do we always need to use some stupid shit like this

const [state, setState] = useState();

what the fuck is this? Who designed it that way, why it should always look like shit for no reason? Why its API feels like spaghetti? When i am comparing other front-end frameworks they feel like heaven in their structure.

AND WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME HAVING A QUOTE ON A PARAGRAPH ELEMENT, WHY DO I HAVE TO USE FUCKING HTMLENTITES FROM 2000?

FUCK&apos;ERE

It's going to be a long rant here and probably my fist rant ! And yes I am pissed up with a community growing in dev world .
There are so called framework experts who are so good that they can spin up a nodejs server with express and mongodb .
So to the people who bash on php , who bash down MySQL for no fuckig reason other than they have heard these are not so cool.fuck yourself incompetent piece of crap!!! I can hear all day about how algorithms and datsructure are not important form these people.fuck you because if you don't know /understand /want to understand the basics of computing how the fuck can your brain be trusted with anyting serious??If you can't write down proofs of basic / standard algorithms and till bash down on people who do those please fuck you because those are the people indirectly responsible for your Job so that u can work on fancy frameworks and cool IDE's .
Instead of whining down dedicate some time to your maturity and knowledge because that what we devs are all about.we like solving problems right?.
I repeat if you are anything like stating up it career in mid 20s maybe.leave everything if you can .Forget all fucking frameworks and technologies start with basics of computing, right at instruction level using assembly .Then move to a higher language when u know and reason about what your CPU is actually doing.
If you can't do that and keep on crying and bashing down things wihout proper explanations fuck yourself with a cactus .

Meanwhile I was sitting in my Python class.
Suddenly she starts teaching about CGI Scripts and how widely they are used in these days' web interfaces.
:3
Being a web dev myself, this felt so sad.
Considering the advent of so many web frameworks that make it so much easier for the developer to ship a website, who'd use CGI scripts until it's a total nessecary.

Now , what's much worse is she wants us to write a CGI Script for making a resume generator?
I don't know what to do with her..!

Hello fellow developers!

I know this is devRant, but I don't know of a better community with such diversity of developers like you guys and I need your input.

I decided to go on a language journey. I come from a background of php/javascript and feel the need to expand my horizons.

I'm going to write the same app in each language to get the feel of it and become familiar with the syntax and language concepts.

Since I'm a web developer I'll focus mainly on languages used on the web like: Java, Python, Ruby, etc.. But I want to cover others as well, like Objective-C/Swift, C++/C#.

I'm having trouble figuring out what kind of an app would cover most of the ground. I know the basic guideline for this is a TODO app for web frameworks, but I
don't feel like writing a TODO in Swift or C# really cover what the languages are intended for.

I don't know enough about the environments yet to come up with a good idea.

I want something, that can be language independent but would utilize the power of each language in one part or another and is still simple enough not to require weeks of development.

Does anyone have a brilliant idea what that could be?

A couple of years back I wrote what would be a strong contender for the title: the ugliest mvc framework ever written in php.
Bright side: now I know the pitfalls of mvc very intimately.
Brighter side: never have to work on that code again.

Now I can use ready made mvc frameworks and still know where to look if shit goes south.

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

I hate React. I keep reading that people have problem of grasping it, but that's not the case for me. I get it, I understand it, but I hate with passion HOW it's done knowing how nice it's done elsewhere. What really triggers me is how ugly it looks, both from architecture and code level. To me it really say a lot when even code shown in documentation looks ugly, and while reading it you ask ourself constantly "why it's done this way?". When I read React being called an "elegant" solution something explodes in me. Did you saw Svelte? Vue? Damn, even Alpine.js?
I just cannot how overengineered this API is. Even doing simplest things there produces so much junk code written only because this is what library requires. Why? I feel like working with it is a punishment.
And scalability and maintainability? I've never seen large-scale projects more messed up than those wrote with React. And yes, you can blame teams working on them for lack of skills, but it is the library which encourages or not good practices also, and I've never seen such bad situation with other libraries/frameworks.

I don't understand Laravel...

I'm just a software undergrad in my final year. Coming from JS side of things (Express, NextJS), I find Laravel so complex, and maybe unnessecarily complex?

Like, when I wanna learn Laravel, I understand the MVC structure. However, going deeper into it, there are libraries/names like
1. Vagrant
2. Facade
3. Artisan
4. Guard
5. Gate
6. Policies
ALL OF THESE
WHICH I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT TIES TO THE FUCKING MVC STRUCTURE

I'm seriously giving up... My courses forces us to learn this framework, and I feel more and more inadequate because I have so many things to learn, including things for my FYP, which involves the use of NextJS. And can I mention HOW EASY AND MINIMALISTIC JS FRAMEWORKS ARE?

LIKE, I JUST WANNA MAKE A STUPID FUCKING APP MAN, WHY MUST I KNOW SHIT LIKE ARTISAN MAKE, WHAT THE FUCK VAGRANT IS, HOW GATES ARE RELATED TO POLICIES, HOW POLICIES RELATE TO VIEWS, WHY THE FUCK DOES FACADE EXIST, and other fucking stupid questions I need to ask in order to utilize Laravel correctly?

Don't even get me started on JETSTREAM, FORTIFY, LARAVEL/UI, BREEZE. Like, WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST HAVE ONE SINGLE PATTERN, AND THEN HAVE GOOD TUTORIALS RELATED TO THAT ONE SINGLE THING?

I don't know, am I just stupid? Looking at Laravel, I feel like my braincells die more and more looking at the words used, the unusual terms, and the pain that comes with trying to learn it, because I don't have time. I'm going to fucking fail this subject because I have too much other stuff in my life to learn about.

I'm fucking tired man...

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

What is the best PC spec for development?

Things I mostly work on: Node frameworks, React Native and some Java and C++ (QT)

I know that even a dual core is enough for this but it takes a while even for a webpack build to complete in my current build.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

In a time where a web dev is expected to know, well.. everything... Backend -JAVA, python, nodejs and C++ would be great.
Front- angular, react, other 10 libs
DBs -sql, mongo, redis, elastic, kafka, rebbitmq
Also be devops on the side with AWS and docker kubernetis and more stuff

How the f is that possible?

In my real job for the last couple of years and different companies, I usually use 1 language/framework & 1 main DB.. and although it's possible in some companies, but in mine, ppl dont get access to AWS etc..

So let's say there's me.. a server side dev for years.
So I decide to be better and learn Golang.. cool lang, never needed in my job, after few days of not using it I forgot all I learned and that was it.

Then I realized I gotta know some frontend cause everyone want a fullstack ninja nowadays.. so I tried Vuejs.. it was amazing .. never got to use it at work, cause i was a backend, and we didnt use frameworks on our products back then..
Also forgotten.

Then I decided to learned nodejs, because this is the coolest thing ever.. hated it, but whatever... Never got to use it at work, cause everything was written in other lang which the whole team knew... Forgot the little i knew.

Then I decided, its time to see what Angular is, cause everyone started using it... similar idea to vuejs which i barely remembered, but wow it's a lot of code to remember, or I'll have to google everything.. so I went over it, but can't say i even learned it.

Now Im trying to move on to python, which, I really am learning in depth.. however, since I dont have real experience with it, no one gives me a shot at being a python dev, so again i feel like I'm trying to memorize syntax and wasting my time..

Tired of seeing React in all job ads, i decided to have a look what's that all about.. and whadoyaknow... It's fucking the same idea as vue/angular with again different syntax..

THIS IS CRAZY!

in how many syntaxes do i need to know how to make a fucking crud api, and a page with same fucking post form, TO BE A GOOD PROGRAMMER?!?

Salesforce lightning web components have such bullshit limitations that they claim is because of security but it's just because it's overengineered garbage.

Want to use web components? Nope.

Want to pass in a value to a function in a click listener expression? Nope.

Want to use scss? Nope, compile it to css yourself.

Want to use the fucking document object? Guess what it's overridden except for very specific third party frameworks.

Who in the fuck thought it was a good idea to override the document object? Your app isn't more secure, literally the entire internet uses the document object and it still becomes available in runtime anyway so what the fuck??

LWC is the biggest garbage I've ever seen, you know a framework's a big red flag when there are developers solely for the framework.

There is a new security release coming out that apparently removes some of these nuances (understatement) so there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.

Reading through one of my posts I’ve realized how much ego programmers can actually have. Guys, some of you have already mastered or grasped more than just the foundations of the industry standard languages, as well as developed a very solid intuition behind some design patterns and a solid understanding of some frameworks and libraries, say NumPy, say React... we get it.

You don’t have to be such condescending assholes and be offended by some of the jokes we, programming beginners, make to release stress or just to have fun.

You already have some amazing developer and engineering skills. Do not ruin it with such a detrimental attitude; I make this post because I myself have made this mistake, and I still do to this day. But if what I’ve felt reading your comments is what non-programming people feel when around me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found that some people hated me or just wanted to kill me.

I don’t know if this will get downvot’d or if more people think like this. But I needed to share this, even just as a reflection of my very own attitude.

Thank you for your time,

D.

Let's focus/master computer architectures, coding paradigms, datastructures. Everything comes after that...the problem with todays academics is that they are more focused on immediately deploying students to industry; theyre more focused on teaching specific frameworks and specific language instead of teaching how things work...i bet most students (at least in my country) are having troubles with endianess or encoding or even byte manipulation or what a thread is....If im going to be the teacher for example of an oop subject, ill let the student choose the language they want as long as the oop paradigm is intact ,it will be fine.. i dont friggin care whether you know vue or angular or swing if you dont even know what a callback is..

My old boss who somehow has gotten his small team of 4 PHP development contracts with Vodafone and Tesco etc. No QA, no tests, no frameworks allowed.

Sets random deadlines and used to suddenly drop demos on me for projects I'd just started and he had no idea of the state of them. Needless to say one project I was so rushed with no idea what I was actually making (for real) that I got sacked.

!rant

So I'm looking for advice.
I'm 16 and I'd like to eventually work at some sort of tech startup, probably doing something like web development as that's what I've done the most of. I have been teaching myself and practicing programming for years and have experience with HTML, CSS, JS, NodeJS, Socket.io etc. but don't necessarily have a lot of experience with some necessary frameworks such as ReactJS or AngularJS, so I couldn't really apply for any of the job listings I've seen so far. I currently work in retail so it's possible that I could work somewhere such as an Apple Store.

What's the best next step? Is a university course the right option or should I be trying to find something such as work experience?

If you got to the end, thanks for reading my long winded and badly written post. Looking forward to hearing the advice of some fellow devs.

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

A quick rant about dependency injection.

I see far too often in projects, a huge over-reliance on dependency injection / IOC frameworks which permeate throughout the entire codebase.

I cringe every time I see a constructor annotated with @Inject and 10 params.

The benefit of these frameworks is how easy they make it to manage many dependencies. What I dislike about them, is exactly that. I feel that they make it TOO easy to manage many dependencies.

How trivial is it to simply add another constructor param? exactly. And people then wonder why their dependency tree looks insane.

I am a strong believer in injecting dependencies the traditional way, via the constructor with no fancy framework. The reason being that it forces you to think more about the dependencies you are adding to your classes, and consider if they are really all needed.

The other problem I have with it, is it basically encourages you to inject everything because its so easy. The purpose of dependency injection is inversion of control and allowing classes to depend on abstraction rather than concrete implementation. All that goes out the window when you @Inject 6 different concrete classes.

Use dependency injection for its intended purpose, not as an excuse to be lazy and avoid thinking about dependencies.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

TL;DR: TIL for heavy queries use PDO and not some frameworks DB class

ffs I was trying to save 300k+ lines at once with Laravel for weeks. Mind you from a text file. 1gb ram on the vps so while trying to prepare the text to save: Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size of bla bla Bytes Exhausted

ok so lets put it in a loop: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded (set_time_limit(0); lol)

optimising, varying the code got me into a situation when the content got saved in the BD but inconsistent (duplicates) and the table had often more than 1,5M rows. That was what told me its not a performance issue, my code is the issue. (dah)

I was starting to think it would be easier to export a prepared query to a sql file and load the file into the db as thats the fastest possible option...I even started to think about switching to python, then it hit me, Laravel has a shitload of routes to the DB so I switched to PDO

benchmark on 1vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with SSD
379k lines with 11 columns in less than 10 sec with a loop of saving every ~6000 rows (if i tried choking it to save the whole thing at once it went up to 16-17sec)

Note: I posted this as a comment, but figured it could be a rant on its own.

I absolutely hate what frameworks like Bootstrap did for the web. True, 10 or 20 years ago quick personal / pet project sites looked plain and boring, and only sites with dedicated developers had a nice layout. But what did Bootstrap bring? Those "minimal effort" sites still look boring as fuck, except now they have Bootstrap look & feel. What's even worse is that thanks to Bootstrap, every fucking UI kit is just Bootstrap with more bloat. To further prove my point, if you google "material CSS" you'll find a ton of projects, and except for the official Google projects, they all look & feel like a mutilated incest child of Bootstrap and MD because instead of making their own implementations, everyone just started with Bootstrap. And the same goes for all sorts of templates which look & feel nothing like Bootstrap, but thanks to its shitty influence devs still start with Bootstrap instead of writing clean CSS which does what a template needs without extra bloat.

I've been a frontend engineer at 6 companies for the last 10 years. Both big and small companies currently at the largest I've ever worked for. I'm totally over it. Maybe burnt out is the term. I have zero motivation to do any work or coding. I'm not a lazy person. I love working, solving problems, learning new things. I'm just sick of what I do. I used to love following all the newest tech trends, following devs on twitter, checking hacker news and creating side projects. Now I feel like my job has lost all that joy and excitement. I work remote and have been for the past 3 years. I wonder how much of that, not having any social feedback and interaction around the job has attributed to me feeling like this. All the JS frameworks suck. PR reviews, process, requirements; I'm just tired of everything. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what did you do? Were you able to find the passion for programming again?

I'm really tired of all the hype that Python lately gets, mostly by begginers or at most mediors.

I get that a lot of people like it's syntax, but it has just a few use cases where it really shines (like CI scripting or ML). In other cases it always has a much better and much more mature alternative.

As a web developer I would always pick PHP over Python. It has really mature frameworks like Symfony or Laravel which are using PSR standards, well documented and implemented common patterns, option for strict typing and probably most importantly tons of libraries for pretty much everything. For example I could find implementation of payment gate for even the smallest banks in our country, thus saving several days of implementing it myself. And PHP will always humiliate Python in performance. Yet, pretty much every comparison article of those two will state Python as better option for webdev, mostly because it is evident that the person who wrote the article never even tried to do a proper atleast midsized project in PHP, but has ton of experience in Django.

And what exactly is my point? There are two in fact:

1) You should always use the right tools for the job.
2) Even if you could do something doesn't mean you should do it.

In the end of the day I shouldn't really be bothered by people hyping Python, but those fanatics really made me hate the language, even if I would normally consider looking into it.

How do you guys cope with being a junior dev and constantly receiving criticism about your work from your team leader?
I started working as a developer quite late: I did go to college in my early years but I was lazy at the time, so I didn't complete it. So I worked about ten years in a totally different industry, but I always wanted to go back to being a developer.
I've managed to do it when I was 34: I was a web developer in a small company and I was pretty much the only dev, except for an older dude who only knew Visual Basic 6 and kept programming things with it (in 2020ish!). In those years I always felt like a was way ahead of my colleague, and my efforts to apply best practices were not so welcome.
I eventually got tired of that situation, because I was feeling like wasting my time: I was already quite old and stuck in a jurassic environment
Then, I landed in a new company. Completely different environment: they use modern frameworks, TDD, static analysis, code reviews and stuff, and they do one to one meetings every two weeks. From the beginning, I felt like I was the dinosaur there: they were way ahead of me and I struggled to keep the pace. I immediately said that to my manager, but he was like "don't worry, it's just the start. I'm sure you will do great". Except I did not. I started collecting criticism about my work and I keep receiving it. When I tell my manager that constant criticism is not good for my self esteem, he replies "I can understand, but you have to manage it and I cannot avoid to correct you when you make mistakes". But it became really difficult for me to receive constant criticism, I very rarely have a compliment or a good word about what I do.
Is it just me? Should I finally grow up now that I am almost 40 and accept that working always sucks and you cannot be satisfied of what you do? Or am I simply a bad developer and should look for another job?
I am starting to get tired of this situation.

I feel like saying "I know C#" (or Java or other similar languages) to mean that you know it as a language as opposed to more of a framework is ridiculous. We should say what programming language level we know (high, mid, low...) since the difference between say C# and Java is pretty much the same as the difference between say WinForms and WPF. Depending on which two languages and which two frameworks you choose it can be a much bigger difference between the frameworks than the languages.
In a CV I'd like to say "I know x-level languages with experience in [actual programming language + frameworks]" instead of saying I know C# and then recruiters and HR people and such assume I don't know Java at all, but know MVC, WebForms and whatever else even though I might specialise in something else and would take me pretty much the same to get proficient in Java as it would take me to get proficient in that framework or something that's technically C#.
It just makes so much more sense to me. As a dev you're supposed to know the principles, the syntax should be secondary. A pointer is a pointer regardless of it's marked with a * or IntPtr or just a value in a register with no special marking that it's a pointer...
Can we, as devs, come up with something like this?

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

I don't know if it's age, having too many other things I can/need do, not having any more major personal tech itches to scratch, or just seeing no point in learning any new tech unless I need it for work... But I've just been coding less personally... And maybe even at work...

I feel like in terms of being a dev, there's nothing else I want anymore, nothing I want to learn unless I actually need it...

I haven't done any major personal projects in maybe the last year or more (although I have made small tweaks to a few of my existing ones).

And well I don't care anymore about React, Angular, or the latest JS frameworks or have any interested with Cloud or Docker....

And as long as I have a decent job, even though it's pretty boring and not much growth.... I don't care and no longer bother trying to get a better one...

Wondering if anyone else feels like they have peaked or just lost the drive and motivation to get better?

I don't know maybe it's just work... Ok my team I think I'm probably the best and will I'm tired of telling other people what they should do.... And maybe also tired of looking for or chasing "opportunities" that don't seem to lead to anything.... Except wasted time and effort?

So where I work now, there is this developer in my team who I feel like doesn't know how to do any kind of tests for web apps. I was given the task of testing some of their additions to the application we develop and, I swear, it's like they never even made a dent in the application according to what they were supposed to do.

So instead of testing the "changes", I basically had to rewrite the entire part of the application that was their responsibility! It was like they didn't even know what was going on at all and this developer has been working at the company for two decades!

I'm kind of tired of dealing with this developer at this point because project management is constantly pushing some of their tasks on to me because they can't seem to finish it for some reason. :-/

Obviously, I will continue to work with this co-worker of mine because they are a member of the team and respect them as a member, but seriously, they should do more research on their own time of modern web development languages and frameworks to save us all a headache. They came from the world of desktop app development so I feel they haven't adjusted to the industry change very well.

Got a bad question here. I've got my homepage (login + some archives with access permission) which I made in HTML + php (yeah I know). But I just hate how php looks. So I'd like to rewrite that whole little bastard now using some other language (not php obviously). What do you recommend? Which Lang's/frameworks are being used. I heard python and java spring were good but I wanted to hear the opinion of some real devs I guess. I'm rather a back end dude (c++) but I think it would be useful to learn some web programming too (not interested in fancy animations and shit, just a good ol' single colored site that displays the content)

So i'm visiting the JavaScript bubble every now and then when i'm writing on the userscript i develop to fix bugs in our ticketing system or fix some clients website they negelected. Every time i'm searching for answers to the weird problems that inevitably turn up i have to filter out all the threads that derail with the classic 'google jQuery basic arithmetic plugin' craziness to find an actual vanilla solution to my problem.

All the time i wonder why on earth people put up with this framework hell. This is part serious question and part rant but seriously, how did we come to this? With all that jQuery, React, Node, whatever stuff i'm kinda losing the overview over what's even todays standard. I always try to keep my code as vanilla as possible without using external libraries. But it seems the entire web development industry is heading the completly other way. I tried to look into a few frameworks but i never really see the appeal. Just now i looked up react native because the last 20 rants talked about it and immediately noped out because they fucking create a DOM in js, why the fuck would you do this?!

Worst thing about this framework shithole is that some frameworks are beeing pulled into the mix for very weird and unnecessary reasons. Best example is a charts library i recently used to visualize a database of temperatures that was completely written in native js but pulled jQuery in for the equivalent of window.addEventListener('load',function(stuff)) and i was furious. I rewrote the code and could throw out the jQuery dependency with no problem. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Alright since you made it here: I'm not trying to throw any of you under the bus for using frameworks. I just fail to understand why you would use these. To each their own and unless your site has the performance of the ticketing system i use at work that takes like 15 seconds to load one fucking page i won't complain at all. But pull in a framework just to do a task you can easily do in native js in remotely the same timeframe you are on my list.

Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".

What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?

React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.

All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.

Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?

I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.

Isn't it curious that most development libraries, frameworks, widgets in an ecosystem see a decrease in popularity when they reach a "no longer under active development"/ maintenance stage (especially exacerbated in the front-end)?

As if we just can't settle on a convention. As if, even for limited-scope solutions, a final stage can never be reached, there must be perpetual growth. As if we must constantly trade a solution for a shinier one, that just might provide us with 2% profit based on a doubtful forecast... or not. Sounds a lot like the investment capitalism that resulted in the 2008 subprime crisis. Not sure what to make of this thought but

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

**Front End Job Interview**

Recruiter:We want people that have 7 years in react
Me: Well I have 5 considering react came out in 2014
Recruiter:So why did you come here ?
Me:I’m broke, I need a job and I have skills
Recruiter:Ok then..
Recruiter:For your code question,we want you to make a responsive web page with these frameworks and the source code.
*gives link to source code*
Me:Ok I can finish this in 3-5 days
Recruiter:we expect that you have 2 days to finish this
Me: Ok challenge accepted
*Finished website in 2 days*
Recruiter:This is a well made website, I’m impressed
Me:Thank you, it took time but I did it
Recruiter:You know what that means
Me: What?
Recruiter:Welcome to the club, you start next week
Me:LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOO, WOOOHOO, I’ll make you proud with my skills!!!!.

Moral:If you have a little humor and skills, you WILL get the job

I started the job a week later and it was AMAZING

*Based on a true story*

I just came out... as a senior developer. Got a promotion and that's great. But I have been a generalist software engineer so far. I do frontend, backend (which is what I'm best at), some devops, management etc etc. But as a senior dev, I'm starting to feel that I have to specialize in something. I'm the guy who can do anything, but when discussing about tech stuff the other senior devs looks more "smart" (it's only one of the small things that frustrate me). I like being generalist, but I'm starting to feel the necessity of specialzing and be a reference in some technology, contributing more to company frameworks, open source, etc.

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

Over the last few weeks, I've learned two things about the head of my division:

1. They "don't care about code quality"
2. They want to try a "low-code" approach for the web frontend of a completely custom piece of what is currently desktop software

This is despite the fact that we have three full time developers with a wide range of both front and back end skills on the payroll, a deep library of existing components for various frontend frameworks, a custom CSS library, and a decent deployment pipeline for frontend code.

But sure, let's try low-code. Let's see how far that gets us.

MORE WEBDEV ADVENTURES

Took a break for a while due to personal stuff. Just got a job (have to get a stupid work permit from school first to actually be able to work tho), had some shit happen with two close friends that now hate me. Right now I'm upset about something that another really good friend did. So I've been doing some webdev to distract myself for a bit.

So I'm turning my URL bar that I had into a little command bar. It'll be what I use to configure stuff along with URLS and shit. I was building a little config menu that I really hated doing, was just becoming too much of a mess. Currently changing the look of it just a bit, then I'm gonna work on the functionality of it later.

Made my weather divs dynamically generated. Turned like 65 lines in the HTML file to ~20 lines of JavaScript that makes that ~65 lines. And it turns out that it doesn't really affect the loading time at all, which was my original worry. My next task for that is to save the weather predictions so the script doesn't have to grab a whole 14kb file every reload (I know, that part's a little bad). The entire page with the icons and all comes out to ~30kb so far. The icons make up about half of that, but they'll never all be in use because only 5 are on screen at any time and there are 7 total. Plus the fact that one may be in use multiple times (like this very moment actually).

Then I want to have an RSS reader which I've been putting off for a while now. Trying to get everything else done before I do that.

At this very moment, the page takes about 1.4 seconds to load. I'm trying to avoid putting anything I don't need in it. Like I'm using vanilla everything. No frameworks or anything. But that's just my personal preference.

I'll make sure to share it with you guys when I have everything built and functional. I've had a lot of interruptions while doing this. My personal life tends to get in the way of shit I try to do, because I let it get to me.

Anyways I'm just rambling at this point. I fucking love you guys

any mathematician turned devs here?

I think developers with a formal mathematical education should be the ones actually developing softwares. Ordinary developers are just good cooks who know to prepare these recipes by knowing to mix and manage the Ingredients through their experience, developing software using various libraries and frameworks, I don't understand what innovation we devs do in it, makes me feel less passionate about my work sometimes.

(I embrace the fact that being a developer requires an arstisic craftsmanship to do it properly)

been about two weeks since my rust journey begin, and i've got to say, i love it. web frameworks with static type checking; amazing, standardised package manager; what a breeze, and macros; despite stating that i don't really see them as useful in earlier posts, they are really helpful. as well, in response to the slow "cold-start" build times, it's the price to pay for top-of-the-line compilation-time error checking. rust is amazing)

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

Isn't it fun when you are given a library or framework and that in order to debug it you have to use some hacky way of hooking the code to a special instance of the project?

Even more fun: the developers by default don't debug the project with tools, but rather with logic. Ok, that's a good way to debug but it shouldn't be the only way to debug. I don't want to go back to the age of coding on paper. At least give me a stacktrace that's halfway clear on what's happening there. Even worse is when the framework doesn't document its own problems! stacktrace.someMagicalMethodNoOneKnowsWhatItDoes(). Having to read the even more mystic and overly verbose documentation! You're just left there trying and guessing shit, even for the senior devs!

And do you know what's more fucked up?! Fucking using println() to debug!! And they take this shit seriously! I don't understand how these people call themselves programmers. No breakpoints? What the fuck, man!

Just give me Visual Studio for fuck's sake. I don't want to code in a broken IDE with a broken framework. Development on its own is already hard enough, so don't make it harder by giving me crappy frameworks and crappy IDE's that only work half the time.

Debugging without a debugger, with broken IDE's, with broken frameworks, I'm sorry but that's just not for me. And then the framework dares advertise that it 'lets the developer focus on business code!' (how many times have you heard this crap before?). Right, the only thing I focus on constantly is trying to figure out why their broken framework doesn't work.

Arghhh.

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

A colleague told me today Bootstrap and others CSS frameworks was shit... I answered him if you have no time to deal with CSS hell on a project with people not able to produce good CSS code, you need to use this.

What do you think about that ?

Webpack? More like Fudgepack 😡

OK sure, I know it's cool to rip on Webpack without taking 5 minutes to understand it, but I really have tried. Every time I want to do anything which used to be trivial with grunt, gulp or brunch, it requires a whole bunch of sorcery and every post I see online around the same topic inevitably ends with something like "that's not modular", "WebPack doesn't work like that", "you're holding your phone wrong" etc. And it's not like I'm someone who is afraid of new or uncomfortable things. I try new languages almost as often as there are new JavaScript fads (OK maybe not THAT often). I use "weird" keywords and experiment with different key maps all the time. I swap my daily window manager on an almost quarterly basis (and xmonad is no picnic as an introduction to Haskell). But what the fuck is it with so many people in positions of influence in the frontend world always taking one step forward, two steps back and an occasional hop sideways when it comes to tooling (and dragging everyone else along with them)?

How did such a turd of a tool become defacto for so many frontend frameworks? Do hard core JavaScripters just really really hate outsiders and want to deter others from their precious as much as possible? Fuck Webpack and fuck everyone responsible for helping it permeate so thoroughly through the software development industry.

Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢

I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.

I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.

But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?

I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.

Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...

Good Morning Folks!!!

I haven't been posting in a while, besides the fact that I went thru a crazy psychiatric crisis 6 weeks ago, there have not been much news to share here.

Now, recovering and working again luckily, I have to face again the stupid pointy haired boss.

So, this fucker asked me for an estimation to build a simple web app.
He: Hey, can you make an estimation for this app
Me: sure, here it is.
He: *to the client*, here's the estimation for the web app you requested
Client: Uhmm, can I haz desktop for winbug$??
He: Let me check with dev
Me: Sure why not, we can do F# using MVU which is basically the same as using modern web frameworks
He: Sure, I'll tell that to the client.
Client: Oooohhh, C#, we lovez C#, can I haz discount?
He: Client wants discount to make it in C#.
Me: Oh, you can give him a discount to make it in F#, I never said C#
He: But your cv says you used C# ten years ago.
Me: Sure, but is not keeping up with functional design patterns, which is what I do.
He: Ok, so I'm offering him the discount in F#
Me: Great.
He: So, project is approved, thanks for the discount, you have 3 weeks to present the product in C#.
Me: Sure, I'll start when I get the downpayment.

Me: I'm considering saying that I didn't understand that he wanted it in C#, and just do F# and not let him know until the project is done.

Thoughts??

May's last week was very hectic. I had just finished my final exams and there were going to be semester project evaluations in that whole week.

@safiullah and me had decided to make a whole Social Network with all features in it, for the DB course project.
All other classmates were making small management systems like ticket booking and etc.
We thought that if we really wanted to learn DB concepts then we should come up with something different than a management panel.
Hence we did it. This was the first time we used a framework. Well, I had written that PHP framework while i was learning about how frameworks work and the way they are made. So it wasn't a big thing but it was something which could be used as a base for clean and organized code.

It took about a month of commits and pushes and it resulted in a very good social network. It had all the features and algorithms present in a starter social network.

For us students, we were happy to see what a fine job we had done. We learnt a lot and used new concepts.

When we went to the instructor, she asked us to sit down and show the project. @safiullah placed the laptop, and logged out from the social network so that he could show her a demo.
She exclaimed,"Why did you do it (Log out) ?"
He replied: "To show you how it works🤷🏻‍♂️"
She:"Get to the previous state and leave it"
Then she asked different questions like what was a post request in php and how it differed from get? what library for DB connection was used... etc.
We explained each and every step.

She saw the frontend design and said "You've just added text to the elements" as If we were showing her a theme demo with hard coded text accomplished by inspect element.

She did not take a look at any other page than the one we had shown her at start. She navigated to no other page and asked nothing about what total features were implemented and how they were done?

Then she said Thank You and we left.

After some days marks were uploaded in LMS and we were just two points above the average.

She took no look and gave us the least when our project was the best.
I'm 100 percent sure she thought that we were showing her a project copied from somewhere else. 🤣

Random recruiter from LinkedIn sends an “opportunity” in a well stablished German company in Madrid ..

.. has three entries in requirements for jquery, associated with, and I quote “OOP, Object Programming, and other frameworks” ..

Goes on to require knowledge of “css, scss and saas”, along with “Don HTML” ..

And requests “experience with the principles of agile user interface methodologies” ..

And Angular 1 ..

How would you respond to this one!?

I actually did, corrected the mistakes, told what other mistakes were at the differences between libraries and frameworks, .. and that I don’t like Angular and I’m not interested in learning the old one at all ..

I've decided that I want to make a REST API using Flask/Python. I've researched it for a few days, but can't seem to find anything close to a definitive answer: How should I structure the application?

I've found a lot of people talking about using Blueprints, and I'm leaning towards that, but I'm wondering if there aren't "better" frameworks for building a REST API? What do people here recommend that I look into?

What do people think of automated code generator frameworks such as Yeoman and Plop? Any experiences to share using those or similar frameworks?

I like the idea of automation, it means code will be consistent (especially across teams), and it means less boilerplate writing that potentially breaks thought processes.

But then does it just waste time? It's something extra to develop, test and debug. Further most of dev time is reading, thinking and modifying.

Yes WP sites can be bad.
But as bad as it can be, just as easy it can serve as a good kickstarter for the next website.

If just the developer behind said website has some kind of dignity about the code they produce and respect for their fucking job!

1. Don't use bloated plugins.
2. Always vheck out alternatives.
3. Don't ever use paid plugins/themes... just don't.

I for one, whenever installing a plugin, if said plugin generates any kind of unexpected output such as a notice it's an immidiate uninstall, and then rolling my own.

I also use a bare minimum boilerplate theme which does not bundle any frameworks, additional libaries or other kinds of that bloatware for all my wp sites, this ensures that every site is somewhay unique.

I've seen so many "devs" being lazy as fuck, using the wrong themes/plugins to "code" the site.

No! using page builders such as visual composer or bloatware slideshows does not count as good tools.

If you buy a theme from themeforest thinking it will save you hours of custom development, then fuck you... go drown in acid.. because guess fucking what?
It will save you absolutely jack shit in the long run..
Anything stating otherwhise is marketing bullcrap