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For every developer, who lives a nocturnal life.. the toughest job is baby sitting for a week..
At least for me.. Already missing the 3 AM idea cracks and coding..
Waking up at 6am is not my cup of tea and getting the kids ready for school.. I would rather prefer to work all night...
Another 3 days to go...11 -
Went to recruit some interns at a CS school in my area. Talked to their teacher in charge of internships and asked her about their students skills in Java. She said they all are very solid in JavaScript. I left immediately.3
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Me: “I want the AWS instance with 2TB of RAM.”
Friend: “What on earth for!?”
Me: “I need to run the Slack client and Chrome at the same time.”9 -
if(isStressedOut()) {
procrastinate();
}
meanwhile (somewhere else in the code)...
void procrastinate() {
procrastinate();
}9 -
Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.4 -
An entirely typical exchange at work:
PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?
ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?
PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.
ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.
PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.
ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.
6 hours later…
ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.
PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.
ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?
PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.
ME: Babelsets?
PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.
ME: There are users!?
PM: Of course!
ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.
PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?
ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?
PM: Yeah.
6 days later…
ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?
PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.
ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!
1 hour later…
ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.
PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?
ME: What cron?
…
ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.
PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.
ME: Right. I’ll change it...
PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.
ME: What visual?
...52 -
GF: What are you doing there?
Dev: I've been trying to reproduce a bug for two hours now...
GF: You need two bugs the opposite sex, otherwise they won't reproduce.
From a sad true story.8 -
When you start to get frustrated during testing and stop using "foobar"...
(Usually it get more vulgar the more frustrated you are)5 -
There's too many web apps out there that advertise having great accessibility, but whose only claim to that is that they work okay-ish with screenreaders.
There's more to accessibility, darnit! Not just blind people, also remember people with impaired colour perception, people who have to use increased font sizes, people with poor contrast perception (can we please not do light-gray text, links, or buttons on white background anymore?), and many more.
The amount of apps alone that just are impossible to use properly with increased font sizes due to cut-off unscrollable text or buttons pushed out of the visible part of the page is staggering. Or where you get permanently stuck inside a rich-text editor if you can only navigate by keyboard, or where whole parts of the page are impossible to properly use with background images turned off...
I'm aware this might sound unreasonable and I know it's extra effort to learn all the rules, but once these things are not an afterthought, but rather something to take care of starting even during first implementation, it starts to come naturally.
But would it be unreasonable to ask of an architect to not put the restrooms, conference rooms, managers office, where they can only be reached by stairs? I don't think it would be. Sure it makes placing them more complicated, but excluding people from being able to use the building due to circumstances beyond their control feels a bit elitist and snobby to me.
Saw an app last week where a lot of features were behind click-handlers on elements that are not supposed to be interactive like <div>, <li>, and <span> tags. How's someone who can't use the visual clues even supposed to know that the element is interactive?
And yes, there's some of these points where ensuring accessibility is not just the devs job but also the designer's responsibility (contrast rules for example), but in my experience if the devs notice "oh hey, this could be problematic" then the design people usually listen.
Honestly in the case of accessibility I believe that putting off some features for later to make time to ensure that what's there is accessible, even if it only affects 1% of visitors, belongs into the "social responsibility" category, and most clients I've worked with were open to the subject.
I do believe it's something that everyone should take time to learn.
PS: I don't mean to attack anyone, I just wish it were something that more people watch out for.5 -
Wow fuck today. I took the day off to watch the eclipse yesterday so coming in today was like Monday squared. Right off the bat I have somebody from last week that I had spend around 8 hours working to get their system right call in and tell me they were cancelling even though everything just got working right.
Also got tasked with documenting the servers which wouldn’t be rant worthy if the dev that set them up didn’t get cranky whenever I ask for credentials or even a rough overview of how the server stack is configured. Then I get a ticket about how a customer is going to get his data from his ‘web guy’ but this customer has been keeping his data in our system for the better part of a decade. Wtf you getting bro? And who is this web guy? What data does he have? Nobody seems to know. And just to smear shit on top it turns out I swapped the addresses on the car parts I sold on eBay and now I have to do 2 returns and cross ship and almost definitely get negative feed back. Fuck everything.
All this before lunch. After lunch I still have the same problems but at least I got chicken!1 -
Although this is gonna sound like bullshit, this happened to me for real. Since that moment I use even more backup services AND I regularly check EVERYTHING.
Had a backup of my important data (still used mainstream services back then) on:
- Hotmail email attachments
- Google Drive
(Both link to another email account).
- A few data backup services
- DVD
- USB
- External HDD.
I wanted to copy some backup data over again:
1. Walk to my staple of HDD's, tried to grab it, somehow missed and knocked the whole fucking pile over. HDD broken.
2. Well fuck, let's go put some of my clothes in the washing machine for clean clothes at study/monday. After this shit being in the washing machine for just a few minutes, I realized my backup USB stick was in one of my pockets, in the washing machine. FUCK. Couldn't stop it so I waited till the end, tried it and well, it wasn't working at all anymore.
Fuck my fucking life slightly right now.
3. *remembers about the backup disc*. I forgot to keep it in its case, very deep scratches and so on, unreadable. FUCKING FUCK.
4. Right, I still have those online services! *tries to login to all of them (including hotmail/gdrive) but forgot the password. Well, let's login to my backup account then (hadn't used that one in years). Account was suspended for some reason.
Started to get really anxious because every online backup service was linked to that email address.
Contacted customer support. They really couldn't restore it because of some issues they weren't allow to tell me. Sorry but I couldn't retain access.
5. Well this is fucked up. Couldn't get into any of the backup/hotmail/gdrive accounts anymore.
I tried contacting their support but never got any replies.
This was the moment I realized I fucked up big fucking time because damn, this stuff at this level hardly happens to anyone.
FUCK.39 -
I'm a junior developer working on a project that's completely out of my scope. I've missed deadline after deadline and my boss + the customer are getting very pissed off and impatient. This project has got me feeling sick. I'm not sleeping well and honestly thinking about leaving my job just because of this 1 project.
I've tried speaking with my manager but she just says, complete it ASAP to the best of your ability. It will take me months to get it right but I am really struggling.
I'm just looking for some advice please? Has anyone else been through this? Do you think leaving is stupid?
Thank you ranters 😃13 -
The person who found this toilet paper company, probably was a programmer. Also probably the best way to describe Array with an Object4
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Seriously, fuck Xcode up the ass with a hot poker. What a piece of shit. It can’t even handle graphics as well as MacDraw circa 19895
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# Day 0:
Me: "Hey boss, I want to let you know that I need this kind of information from the customer for these features, otherwise I cannot finish the project's milestone in two weeks."
Boss: "OK, just continue as far as you can get. We have to get this finished."
Me: "Well, I cannot go any further for these tickets. I need that input. Shall we leave them in todo?"
Boss: "OK."
# Day 7:
Boss: "Whe didn't you start on these tickets in todo?
Me: "As I have told you, I need some information."
Boss: "We gotta get this out of the door!"
Me: "Yes, if we want to meet the deadline, we should. Yet I cannot guess the feature. Also, let me create a column: `to clarify` and move that ticket there. As I have said: I need that information. You have to contact the customer about it and get their feedback.
Boss: "OK."
# Day 13:
Boss: "Why isn't this project finished? There are still tickets open."
Me: "You never provided the information I asked you about."
Boss: "I want an explanation not an excuses."
Me o_O: "This is the explanation. I was asking you on multiple occasions about the required feedback. You never provided it. See the columns name? It's called `to clarify`. We created it last time together. That clarification never happened even though I told you that I need it. I cannot do magic. I can only implement features, and while I can sometimes make intelligent guesses to their use cases, I rather implement their actual ones than my fictional ones.
Boss: "You should have told me."
Me: ಠ_ಠ9 -
I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.
Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!
Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.
Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode57 -
There was a time where Nvidia drivers took few minutes to install. Looks like I missed that time, eh?
Have been waiting here for at least 30 minutes and it is still "Preparing to install". Thanks Nvidia. -
And so begins week 3 of 5 without full computer access. I'm able to do some research needed but I'm still very limited. The only programs I can use are IE11, and the three basic MS Office programs. Oh well... at least I'm still getting paid by the hour1
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I Remember what my senior told me once:
"You know you're in the wrong job when you see source code filled with comments written by ur senior dev scolding other devs for code fuckups" -
The computer lags, windows 8 lags, vagrant lags, chrome lags, phpstorm lags, EVERY-FUCKING-THINGS LAGS.5