I was assigned my first ever huge software project in college (a complex board game made in only pure java) and was assigned a group by my professor. Since I'm doing well in the class, I was given kids who want me to teach them everything (from GitHub to simple oop) on top of programming most of the system because they can't or don't want to. So to make things easier I gave out some relatively simple and specific jobs in GitHub using the issues system that apparently nobody reads. Thankfully one person decided to take initiative and start their feature but one commit later the entire system crashed and everything is broken FML can't wait to program this entire thing by myself.

I think in my case its a monitoring system I'm still writing which does already work (just far from done).

I got this as a crazy idea while thinking that it would be impossible to make and then thought fuck it and I wrote it.

Written in php, and as long as you can write a module for it, you can pretty much make it monitor anything you'd like.

I'm using it to monitor a few websites and servers I run :)

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
-------------------------
Hey everyone!

Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!

@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.

Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!

p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!

I spend around 50% of work time on personal projects.

Banks be like

You don't have much money?
Here, let me keep taking some of that from you until you get more, k?

Oh, that was more than you had?
Now you owe me even more, nerd.

What, you can't pay that either?
Better ask me for a loan so you can pay off your debt to me. Loser.

What? You still can't pay?
I'm gonna take your everything!

Ok yeahhh it’s not me.

Just got told I didn’t pass an interview that lasted 15 minutes with him talking about the company and no questions for me.

My interviewers lately have just been unfortunate

Me in 2018 : I'll code xLearno.com all on my own!
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.
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Me in 2019 : xLearno.com is a team of 5 🎉
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Just a quick lesson that I learned in my entrepreneurship career, "You want to go fast, go alone! You want to go far, go together 😍"

Ran into a devRant user at a random bar in NYC last night. Super cool meeting you in the wild!

Days and days, 5+ hours later I finally figured out the issue.

The client is just fucking retarded, that's all.

5+ hours of my life wasted, much awesome!

Spent all night debugging and couldn’t produce an acceptable result, I’m tired. 😪

I work at a startup. My boss wants me to work on a project which will create a lot of value because it will be one of it's kind. So it will become a part of the company's IP.
Should I ask for equity (to be provided on completion) before I start working on that?
If yes, how do I ask without being offensive?

Terminal vs GUI

Downloaded Unity today, let the journey begin🌝

Testivus On Test Coverage

Early one morning, a programmer asked the great master:

“I am ready to write some unit tests. What code coverage should I aim for?”

The great master replied:

“Don’t worry about coverage, just write some good tests.”

The programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

Later that day, a second programmer asked the same question.

The great master pointed at a pot of boiling water and said:

“How many grains of rice should I put in that pot?”

The programmer, looking puzzled, replied:

“How can I possibly tell you? It depends on how many people you need to feed, how hungry they are, what other food you are serving, how much rice you have available, and so on.”

“Exactly,” said the great master.

The second programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

Toward the end of the day, a third programmer came and asked the same question about code coverage.

“Eighty percent and no less!” Replied the master in a stern voice, pounding his fist on the table.

The third programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

After this last reply, a young apprentice approached the great master:

“Great master, today I overheard you answer the same question about code coverage with three different answers. Why?”

The great master stood up from his chair:

“Come get some fresh tea with me and let’s talk about it.”

After they filled their cups with smoking hot green tea, the great master began to answer:

“The first programmer is new and just getting started with testing. Right now he has a lot of code and no tests. He has a long way to go; focusing on code coverage at this time would be depressing and quite useless. He’s better off just getting used to writing and running some tests. He can worry about coverage later.”

“The second programmer, on the other hand, is quite experience both at programming and testing. When I replied by asking her how many grains of rice I should put in a pot, I helped her realize that the amount of testing necessary depends on a number of factors, and she knows those factors better than I do – it’s her code after all. There is no single, simple, answer, and she’s smart enough to handle the truth and work with that.”

“I see,” said the young apprentice, “but if there is no single simple answer, then why did you answer the third programmer ‘Eighty percent and no less’?”

The great master laughed so hard and loud that his belly, evidence that he drank more than just green tea, flopped up and down.

“The third programmer wants only simple answers – even when there are no simple answers … and then does not follow them anyway.”

The young apprentice and the grizzled great master finished drinking their tea in contemplative silence.

Found on stack overflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

At first I thought this was a funny joke. But he was serious.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Unpopular opinion: superhero movies fucking suck.

what did you do to get promoted into a senior engineer role?

Well, customer is always right......

You ever open some code that was committed a few years ago by an employee long gone and it's so shit you have to get up and go outside to take a deep breath of fresh air?

Don't forget to git push before reinstalling Windows :)

TL;DR: Fuck.

Longer fuck:
I only did git commit and forgot to push changes. And the rest is pretty obvious.

"Shouldn't be a problem. I can get <insert new feature here> implemented by <insert wildly optimistic time>. "

What is wrong with me?! Why do I keep doing this!?

Me: * Browses devRant for about 10 minutes *

Phone: 0 notifications

Me: * Puts phone in pocket *

Phone: * seizures in pocket *

Phone: 3 new Jira issues, 9 Sentry warnings about critical bugs, 2 emails from my boss, roughly 60 Whatsapp messages and 3 new notifs on Slack

Why does this happen so often :/

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

Just got a rejection email from the only interview I’ve gotten.... I know it’s normal but I feel so dejected and imposter-syndromey. When I get rejected from a non dev job it doesn’t make me question my ability, but because this is the first time sending out dev resumes it’s so daunting and I feel useless😞

!dev

I’ve been ranting & posting a lot about my career, relocation, work life balance etc. in the last year.

Just wanna say, relocating was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Professionally and personally..
Although it was a bit scary and I didn’t have any money left after relocating..

It’s 6PM, I’m sitting in the garden, listen to some classical music and don’t spend a single thought on work.
Tomorrow I will arrive in the office around 7:45, I will do my work. My boss recognizes my teams effort and thanks all of us for the work on the end of each sprint.

There are no personal fights in the team, everyone is getting along with the others.

I do some good work, get a good salary and don’t have to mix up work and personal life.

The people here are awesome, everyone is welcoming and supportive.

If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to buy my dream car by the end of summer because the government doesn’t take all of my money. They take their taxes before I get my salary and the money I get is the money I HAVE..

Ireland is awesome.
At this point: thanks for the Irish guys here who provided information about work and life over here! And also to the other devs who supported me here👍

Since a very christian colleague joined my team, i learned how important cursing is in order to do this job. I honestly can’t do my work without the occasional diarrhea of foul words.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

Recently in Computer Science Class...
The teacher said we should copy a text/ sentence to our clipboard. A student asked where the clipboard were and looked behind the keyboard. He isn't the smartest.
Thought that was funny.

Attended one of the best meetups ever. To give you an idea how awesome it was..

Speaker took the first ~20 minutes introducing himself.
His intro card deck kept referring to himself in the third person (he is the only employee in consulting 'company'). Ex. "Mr. Smith began his humble career .."

The powerpoint presentation began with him clicking each page, not executing the slideshow (ex. pressing F5).
Finally someone asked "Can you make slide bigger?"

S:"You can't read that?..um..sure...I guess .."
Starts fumbling around the zoom ...
Dev: "No, can you start the slideshow?"
S: "I don't know what you mean...there...I zoomed it, is that better? Now I can't see my notes..just sec.."
<fumbles again with the zoom>
Dev: "No, not zoom, start the slide show, press F5"
S: "Oh...you want me to F5 it...OK..."
<he *clicks* the slide show button>

Finally getting into code, trying to get out of powerpoint ...
S: "How do I get out of this fullscreen?.."
Dev: "Hit escape"
S:"No..um.."
<keeps trying to click on 'something'>
S:"I see visual studio, but its not on the big screen... "
<keeps click on 'something', no one is sure whats going on>
Dev: "Hit Escape to stop the slideshow"
<finally hits escape, then able to put Visual Studio on the big screen>
S: "Ahh...there, I figured it out."

Speaker had no end of making wild/random statements like:
".Net Core is the future of Microsoft, if you're using .Net 4.5...forget it, its not even supported anymore."
"When I was at Microsoft Build, I asked them why not put all the required .Net assemblies in one directory. Looks like with .Net Core, they listened to me" (he was serious)
"I don't use SQL Server Mgmt Studio. Its free and it sucks. I use <insert a very expensive SSMS clone>, its great, you guys should check it out", then proceeds to struggle to open a query window to write some SQL.
"When you use .Net Core and EntityFramework, you have to write your own stored procedures. If a developer can't write stored procedures, he shouldn't be in this business."

I was on the edge of my seat, hungry for the next crazy bat-shit thing to come out of his mouth. He did not disappoint. BEST MEETUP EVER!