No matter how large and insurmountable the problem might first seem, it can always be hidden into smaller and smaller parts, until a solution can be found.

!dev

Had to cancel the pavilion reservation for a local park today... Had reserved it for my son's 6th birthday party. This is what made it finally all hit me. I'm not doing ok today.

Try to be excellent to all those you talk to, even users. You never know how they're doing at the moment.

When the outside company that's testing your new site comes back with 10 problems:

2x are real issue
1x suggested wording change
2x them using bad data
2x are things that don't, shouldn't, and never existed on the site
3x can't be reproduced by anyone, including them

I'm thinking we way overpaid

The bathroom here doesn't leave me worried I'm going to catch hepatitis.

"Don't bother spending time learning MVC. We'll never use it here."

o_O

Well, that was 4 years ago, I'm still working here, they're not, we're using MVC.

"This thing you wrote to read text files isn't working and I don't have time to figure out so why don't you come fix it."

Well, no shit it isn't working. Your genius ass decided not to include the extension on the path... Something you would have realized had you taken the 15 seconds needed to read the error message. The fuck were you thinking?

I'd like to work for a small software house that pays decent, understands a life/work balance (40hr/wk), has a relaxed environment, worries more about the end product than timelines, and gives you Fridays to work on pet projects and training.

Take the time to do a little research into the company, then tailor your CV to the company and the position. Don't be afraid to add a little pizzazz, but also don't lie... There's a difference between something that's a little misleading and an outright false claim.

Coding has given me a creative outlet. It's filled me with more frustration than anything else I've experienced. It's given me profound joy through successful projects. It's provided me a career which supports my family.

Coding has done a lot for my life...

That moment when you get asked if you know a language and database that your shop has never used, because an ex-employee in a different department decided to build a mission critical app on their own accord, and it just went tits up.

Coffee. No other tool does as much for my productivity.

So, looking at the news coming out of WWDC... Is it just me, or is this something a collection of "about damn time" and "oh look, yearly specs upgrade" combined with a splattering of "wait, that wasn't already a thing?"

Never accuse a co-worker of making a really stupid change to your code unless you know for certain that they made the change instead of you.

Why, the best superpower of them all... The ability to materialize coffee based drinks from thin air.

My first dev job was for a .net shop. Until then, I had only worked in Java and PHP. This place didn't have the normal team structure, and I soon found that I was going to be working solo on the projects I was responsible for. I'm my first week there, I was tasked with making make revisions to an application in a new language, with a new toolkit, solo. A few weeks later was the most intense day I've had as a dev, as I put in the change control to release my update to production.

At that point, fuck jobs. I'm going to a tropical island to sip fruity rum drinks with little umbrellas in them while watching downloaded internet porn.

When bugs stop you, you might turn to a duck. Me, I just remember that winter is coming...

I still say there is nothing like music for distracting me. Sure, it often helps me focus, without a doubt... Who here hasn't found themselves in the groove, then without warning, one of those songs comes on that pulls you out of the zone, bouncing your feet along with the beat, barely keeping from singing out loud?

if(darkSide || lightSide)
{
May[4] = with.u;
}

"You need me to fix a report? Ok... Since I don't have access to that server, email me the report."

"Umm, it doesn't have connection info. Can you send me the username/pass for the DB?"

"Ok, so the DB isn't set to work normally on this report and has to be a UDL file... Can you send me that file?"

"All done, here you go!"

"WTF do you mean you're getting a database connection error and you're looking to me to fix it? You seriously don't remember that it's all shit you gave me?"

Ever have one of those moments where you're running a service you built to update about a decade worth of police records, realize about halfway through that you fucked the loop and you're copying data from the first record onto every other record, and then just really wish that you had checked things better in test before running this on the prod server?

I'm sure the only reason I'm still here is because the audit log contained the original values and I'm good at pulling data out of it.

var gotGud = false;

while(!gotGud)
{
try
{
makeCode();
gotGud = true;
}
catch(AbilityException ex) { }
}

!rant

"This vendor system is broken and we need the data in its DB. Here's a report used to use from it. Build a new report in SSRS that we can use to pull out all the records."

+1 day tearing apart their data warehouse to find where things are.
+1 day duplicating their sample report

"Well, you did a good job duplicating what we had, but we want something that will pull every single bit of possibly related information that's in the system, and not just what was on the report we gave you."

ffs!

What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Sometimes I love this industry.

In a meeting with customers to agree on the scope of a new project...

Me: "Hey, we could do this awesome thing that will save you a lot of time that nobody's brought up or mentioned and will take us an extra 4 weeks to implement."

Horrible, but it's my way of training my PMs to leave me out of meetings.

I know I can't be the only one of us that listens to dev related podcasts. Does anyone have any good ones they'd like to share? I'm looking for something more entertaining than Software Engineering Daily, yet more informative than MS Dev Show.

You set a value to a variable at line 80. At line 237, you set the value again, calculated in the same way, with the same, untouched parameters. The variable isn't used at all anywhere between these two points...

If I have to do maintenance to your .net code, and can tell that not only did you learn on COBOL, but that you're a bad COBOL programer, Fuck You!

This is how you make a Surface Pro 4 look good.

Hey, instead of using simple authentication to talk to this vendor system, we want you to use personal authentication tokens that you can't generate because we never turned that feature of the system on.

.... Seriously?

Maintaining other's code