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!rant
One day Boss was doing code review of my work
Boss to me: What the fuck dev1!?!? All efforts I spent to quit smoking and your XML routine gave me cancer anyway!
Another day, a colleague needed to make change to a program that hasn't been changed in looong time and sees a commit from our Boss done 15yrs ago!!!
Dev2 to Boss: Boss this signal catching routine sucks dicks! How did you become a our Boss?
Me to dev2: He sucked as many dicks as his routine did
Boss to us: Oh look! Performance appraisal is due this week. Bye-bye 7.5%
Here 7.5% referring to pay raise that is average pay raise3 -
“The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.” – Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
credit: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/...
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Xcode storyboard sucks!. At least it could've had a code version of the storyboards (like android XML layouts) so that at least you could properly copy paste a layout from somewhere. Autolayouts and constraints are so flipping confusing that I almost always end up doing all the layouts in the code itself.2
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Holiday in 6 days, wohoo. 3weeks in Thailand. So ready for it.
Currently working on a huge real estate website. Design got approved yesterday, yesterday I finally got partial access to the clients real estate data. Where the data is uploaded to our server as zip files containing a xml file and files attached to it.
Deadline is tomorrow, but has been pushed back 2-3 weeks, which sucks as I probably have to work whilst on vacation4 -
How fitting because that just happened today: MOTHERF*CKING Tomcat.
TL;DR:
Tomcat sucks with client side routing (e.g. in angular2).
How hard can it be to provide a web/application server which is properly configurable?
I lost a whole day by trying to get an angular2 project deployed in Tomcat.
It's not that I could not manage to deploy it. But that you need to put all the files in the ROOT folder if Tomcat so that your JavaScript files can be found is the first dumb part.
But that's not enough.
There seems to be no way in Tomcat, short of writing to XML config files and including one jar library, to disable routing go a webapp. And you need to do this when you have a single page application with client side routing.
But yeah, dear boss, I get the part where Tomcat is lightweight, easy to use and does most of the work for you: when you do not use it.
As a side note, so that nobody thinks I have a grudge against the Apache guys: I see the advantages of a Tomcat if you have multiple webapplications written in Java which you need to manage our if you use it as an embedded application server.
But there are just some occasions where a plain old Apache Webserver is better suited.
Another side note: if I just embarrassed myself because those are settings which can be easily applied feel free to tell me 😉2 -
I just created a wolpertinger.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We have the problem that the number one build tool for scala / java is sbt.
Sbt sucks.
There are many nice plugins for maven.
Sbt can generate a POM from an SBT build.
But the plugins need to be set up, so the generated POM must be modified...
... a POM is XML.
So Python, Pexpect (as SBT needs a PTY and is very cranky regarding exiting properly and running non interactive)… POM XML modification....
Maven - Plugin run.
But we need to do this on... Larger scale.
So, as I'm a lazy mofo, I wrapped the python thingy in bash, mostly because it was simpler than dealing with async / threading in python. Just spawning per project...
So we have Bash, Python, Java, SBT / Maven, hand in hand....
... Is it normal to feel sorry for the build server?1 -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
Why are some defaults still so broken on Windows? Do they just not care or expect poeple will replace everything with third party stuff as the real defaults anyway?
Now through RDP connection stuff I have to spend more time on that #*?%&$§ OS and I would have expected the standard programs to work better. Here some of the stuff that really irks me:
* Groove Music sucks hard, how it doesn't let me edit playlists, but relies on its broken discovery of tracks. So I can play my old Eels songs from some subfolder in music folder, but only by manually loading each song. It never adds the songs to the list whereas the new NIN album is recognized. - It could have been nice, more of a lightweight Cessna, compared to that scary giant nineties Jumbo of media player?
* every time I use the snipping tool for a screen shot they suggest to use that screen sketch tool. I tried. Inside the RDP it was just unusable, when I tried to select the part of the screen. The selection cross wouldn't show or only too late. Unusable.
* using Internet Explorer as the default application for xml files. Sorry it's just so damn slow. And this smiley always gives me the creeps. (liveoverflow had one episode where he described his panic when he first saw an opening internet explorer: Uh, that strange face there, has it been hacked?) - but then nothing happens for a minute, I calm down, and open the file in some useful editor.7
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