!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

In networking class today:

Student - "But this is just in theory, how does it work in practice?"

Lecturer - "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing."

10am: meeting invite for 9:30pm my time.

*decline with comment: can’t attend*

9:40pm: email, “is anyone from engineering going to attend?”

*ignored*

10:05pm: email, ok the results of the call were X, Y and Z. But we’ve been asked to supply architecture diagrams (which don’t exist). Can we do this today?

*ignore*

10:45pm: email, guys this is urgent can we do this ASAP!

*ignore*

... welcome to the new world bitches, bite me

Manager: Hey, how are things with everything thats been going on? Hows the mood?

Me:

Me: *sends email 45 minutes before a meeting*.

Boss: *20 mins into meeting*, any updates about the issues found yesterday?

Me: Yep I sent an email with an update on everything.

Boss: ok great, *shares screen*, *opens email*.

Ok want to walk us through it?

Me: ...... walk through my email?

Boss: Yeah we have everyone here in the meeting.

Me: ...... yeah I included all of them on the email.

Boss: Right, but it would be good to go through it for everyone’s benefit.

Me: *Reads email word for word, from the screen share*

I will now refer to him from this day forth as “The Time Vampire”.

Boss: Great news, we are getting another backend dev from another team to help us out.

Me: Cool, hopefully we don’t have the same trouble as the others, not replying, never writing anything down etc.

Boss: No, I’ve worked with her before. She’s much more passionate about doing things right, using best practices and all that stuff.

Me: Oh that’s perfect, great news!

Boss: Yep! ... just be aware she has a tendency to get very easily confused. She delivers the wrong thing from time to time and might need to redo stuff semi-regularly.

Me: ... ... ...

Boss: It’ll all work out. Don’t worry. Ok gotta run.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

My teams current process is:

1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.

2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.

3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.

4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.

5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.

6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.

7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.

Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.

That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!

1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.

2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.

3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

Follow-up to my previous story: https://devrant.com/rants/1969484/...

If this seems to long to read, skip to the parts that interest you.

~ Background ~
Maybe you know TeamSpeak, it's basically a program to talk with other people on servers. In TeamSpeak you can generate identities, every identity has a security level. On your server you can set a minimum security level you need to connect. Upgrading the security level takes longer as the level goes up.

~ Technical background ~
The security level is computed by doing this:
SHA1(public_key + offset)
Where public_key is your public key in Base64 and offset is an 8 Byte unsigned long. Offset is incremented and the whole thing is hashed again. The security level comes from the amount of Zero-Bits at the beginning of the resulting hash.
My plan was to use my GPU to do this, because I heared GPUs are good at hashing. And now, I got it to work.

~ How I did it ~
I am using a start offset of 0, create 255 Threads on my GPU (apparently more are not possible) and let them compute those hashes. Then I increment the offset in every thread by 255. The GPU also does the job of counting the Zero-Bits, when there are more than 30 Zero-Bits I print the amount plus the offset to the console.

~ The speed ~
Well, speed was the reason I started this. It's faster than my CPU for sure. It takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds to compute 2.55 Billion hashes which comes down to ~16 Million hashes per second.
Is this speed an expected result, is it slow or fast? I don't know, but for my needs, it is fucking fast!

~ What I learned from this ~
I come from a Java background and just recently started C/C++/C#. Which means this was a pretty hard challenge, since OpenCL uses C99 (I think?). CUDA sadly didn't work on my machine because I have an unsupported GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti). I learned not to execute an endless loop on my GPU, and so much more about C in general. Though it was small, it was an amazing project.

This before a job interview, let's do this!

1) For other devs to stop being such whiny, pussy ass motherfuckers. Legit the ammount of whine in some of y'all is too extreme. Blow, judge and cuss out over the weakest shit ever. Like language wars. Dear lord if there is some pussy ass shit right there it is language wars.

2) To see Perl 6, Clojure and Rust see some hardcore adoption. Specially Clojure since I fucking love Lisp dialects and Clojure is pretty sweet Lisp. Clojurescript is also really nice for those that like working with Js.

3) To completely nuke Microsoft browsers. I am not a Microsoft hater by any means. But their browsers bring more pain than joy to everyone and they know it. If they choose to let them exist then by all means fix them! This is Microsoft! They got the resources!!

That's it really.

My boss just designed this and asked me to implement it, without asking for any input.

I was a UX designer at my previous job. This makes me want to cry.

I thought there was no worse freelancer site than fiverr.

*insert "Boy you were wrong" here*

freelancer.com

No. Just No.

- Limited to 8 bids as a free account
- You get 1 bid back every 90 FUCKING HOURS
- CLIENTS ARE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN ON FIVERR
- HALF OF PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SELL YOUR UPWORK ACCOUNT TO THEM
- 5€ FOR 2000 WORDS OF TRANSLATION? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? END YOURSELF PLEASE
- "Design a custom social network (video chat, chat, forum, shop and payment gateway) quick!!!" for 100€, within one day.

What the fuck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Was looking at a Back End Dev job posting and one of the requirements is Photoshop.

.....

PHOTOSHOP

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

fuck!!! today I have fallen for the windows is updating prank
Co workers opened the fake windows update website, disconnected the keyboard and mouse
let's just say I sat there for a really loooong time.. cursing windows

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

#10yearchallenge

My boss intentionally changed my IDE font color to black since im using dark theme. I was literally confused a solid 30 minutes.

FFFFUUUUUCK

Story time!

So me, alcoholic I am, went to a local cafe because I didn't have enough booze anymore at home. Turns out that there were quite some people that wanted to get to know me!

And most importantly, there was another sysadmin (that likely saw through my funsies with some people there that I displayed termux' apt update and apt upgrade to as "evil hacking" 😜) that actually wasn't a bluff - he pretty much interviewed me on the spot and was apparently pretty impressed by my skillset. And so am I by his - he asked some pretty techy questions that only a fellow technologist could come up with. In a local cafe of all places!!! Who would've thought?!

I'll probably be going to that cafe some more 😋

I may have received the best email ever all these years (and a year as a Lead).

A client acted as a boss telling me to "work this weekend to finish the project a little earlier"

Enjoying my cereal so far..

Secretly I hate people!

The CAPTCHA that can be copied. Noice.

You know what's funny?

Being called Jason.

Developers when talking about APIs and similar stuff: "So if you connect to our API you can get XML or JSON-" <pause>
<looks at me with a smirk like "haha! JSON/JASON LOL!">
<I gently smile like saying "yes. yes. I know. Thank you">

Sigh

I worked in the same building as another division in my organization, and they found out I had created a website for my group. They said, “We have this database that was never finished. Do you think you could fix it?”

I asked, “What was it developed in?”
He replied, “Well what do you know?”
I said, “LAMP stack: PHP, MySQL, etc.” [this was over a decade ago]

He excitedly exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s it! It’s that S-Q-L stuff.”

I’m a little nervous at this point but I was younger than 20 with no degree, entirely self-taught from a book, and figured I’d check it out - no actual job offer here yet or anything.

They logged me on to a Windows 2000 Server and I become aware it’s a web application written in VB / ASP.NET 2.0 with a SQL Server backend. But most of the fixes they wanted were aesthetic (spelling errors in aspx pages, etc.) so I proceeded to fix those. They hired me on the spot and asked when I could start. I was a wizard to them and most of what they needed was quite simple (at first). I kept my mouth shut and immediately went to a bookstore after work that day and bought an ASP.NET book.

I worked there several years and ended up rewriting that app in C# and upgrading the server and ASP.NET framework, etc. It stored passwords in plaintext when I started and much more horrific stuff. It was in much better shape when I left.

That job was pivotal in my career and set the stage for me to be where I am today. I got the job because I used the word “SQL” in a sentence.

I know sex is cool but have you ever entered BIOS with only one key press?!

> I didn't brought any condoms
> Just pull out Anon, we'll buy some later

You could say I went straight to production and now I'm considered "legacy"