github makes it hard to find unresolved conversations in a big PR

Can someone explain to me why a static page with 11 links should have:
- database with 3 tables,
- 47 libraries
- full blown next.js setup
- docker container
- infrastructure monitoring
- pin code based admin access to add additional links

It changed my life, really. 😁

Never let customers define the priority levels. It will end in:
- Normal (never used)
- High (used for small text changes)
- Higher
- OMG fix now
- Highest
- the World is ending if this doesn't get fixed now
- different existential plane of priority
- Priority ∞ + 1

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?
...

- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..

Looking for a job as a deveoper be like:

Job title: car driver

Job requirements: professional skills in driving normal- and heavy-freight cars, buses and trucks, trolley buses, trams, subways, tractors, shovel diggers, contemporary light and heavy tanks currently in use by NATO countries.

Skills in rally and extreme driving are obligatory!
Formula-1 driving experience is a plus.

Knowledge and experience in repairing of piston and rotor/Wankel engines, automatic and manual transmissions, ignition systems, board computer, ABS, ABD, GPS and car-audio systems by world-known manufacturers - obligatory!

Experience with car-painting and tinsmith tasks is a plus.

The applicants must have certificates by BMW, General Motors and Bosch, but not older than two years.

Compensation: $15-$20/hour, depends on the interview result.

Education requirements: Bachelor's Degree of Engineering.

"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

The most unrealistic deadline? Okay, here it goes. For context, this is one of my earliest jobs, and I’m actively using React.

— Kiki, I have a stunning idea! Let’s build a Figma clone!
— Okaaaay, 🧐
— You have two days.
— A what?
— I’ve just stumbled upon an amazing new technology. You maybe don’t know it yet. It’s called React.js, and you totally can build a full Figma clone in two days using it!
— …
— It’s a revolution, and you’re so ignorant for not following it. Are you even a real engineer?
— …

Two days later:
— Forget about Figma! Let’s build an online DAW for musicians!

That guy was nuts. I left when we had an executive meeting, I was explaining tech things, and he suddenly popped out a fucking tambourine and started striking it. One year later, he lost everything and went to get a junior C++ position at an outsourcing company.

Are we overengineering everything in modern frontend dev?

Okay, serious question (but also low-key rant):
How did we go from “just load a page with some content” to entire frontend stacks with build pipelines, 300 dependencies, and five levels of abstraction just to render a freaking button?

Do we really need a separate config for everything (webpack, eslint, prettier, tsconfig, package.json, and don't forget the .babelrc and .env.local)?
Or is it just modern dev trying to look smarter than it is?

Is this the new normal? Or have we lost the plot?

Would love to hear what others think — devs from all backgrounds welcome. Bonus points if you're building sites without frameworks and surviving

I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.😎

USB sounds like a backup in case the USA fails

I feel like being a doctor is like being a contract dev. You're thrown into a bad situation, you know the stack but you don't know the project history, best practices aren't followed, and the only dev is also the primary stakeholder who learned everything he knows from w3schools.

I‘m thinking about running my own spam downvoting bots based on the so far very successful spam detection in JoyRant.

*successful in terms of detection accuracy.

@retoor how frequently do you need to create new bots?
How quicky do they lose downvote privileges?
Other useful things to know?

Also, I haven’t seen you recently, since you deleted your account. How are you doing?

This is Alvin, a small sub that is 60 years old, been to the Titanic wreckage many, many times. Still in active service.

This is the difference between the real engineering and the kind of "engineering" done by so-called "disruptors" that say "move fast and break things".

You're not an engineer — you're a douche that appropriates the engineering culture. You didn't make an "OS for productivity", you made a worse version of Lotus 1-2-3 from 1983. You didn't "reverse-engineer" anything — you copied and pasted funny letters and symbols put together by a language model that is as clueless as you are.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, bitch. I was there when it was written.

I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.

I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.

“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”

Jesus fucking christ.

debugging a colleague's bash script written by copilot.

fun
/s

!rant Writing code in a barebones text editor so that I am forced to think more about my code and debug deeper. Hah! No more fancy IDE's while learning (for now)!

Tried Cursor. It's "Agent" thing have given me the whole new appreciation for my existing codebase. For how every line of code and every micro-decision I make is deliberate. Though it did it in the worst way possible — by "optimizing" my code that I didn't request to be optimized.

I feel like I delegated a surgeon's work to a lawnmower roomba. Yes, both of them do cut stuff, but are they interchangeable?

Cursor's autocomplete is stellar though. Because of how consistent my code is, it almost never fails. It baffles me that the codebase that is consistent enough for the AI autocomplete to never fail somehow causes the same AI, but acting as an agent instead, to completely shit the bed.

My code is consistent because I copy and paste a lot. But, because of how expressive it is (thanks to my zero-framework approach), I only ever need to copy and paste ten lines or so max to do what I need. When I say that I "copy and paste code", what comes to mind? I bet it's acres of boilerplate. Not here.

I'm now applying Orwellian newspeak rules to my naming. For a distinct entity, I create the shortest possible name and try to carry it everywhere I go. Yes, short names will run out, but naming entities differently to avoid conflicts is the job for future me. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, and thinking about variable names in advance is premature optimization too.

For example, if the user entity in the database has lastName field, its variable in imperative code will be the same, and the form input name will be lastName too. Why use "userLastName" and "lastNameInput" or "lastNameField", or even "userLastNameField"? YAGNI.

I'm inching closer and closer to a universal gray goo architecture that can absorb anything. Wait till I replace what I copy and paste with brand new keywords and create a new language. I've already started doing that with the way I write util functions.

The average meeting: "I think that's a really great idea. Let's circle back on this and take a 60k view, leveraging the low-hanging fruit so we can identify you championed this technology".

Seriously? Championed? As if the other bs language weren't enough. And this is language that they use to convince clients. "My consultant championed A.I.". Are you fucking kidding me? It sounds ridiculous. Needless to say, we lost that client.

Job hunting and interviewing disgusts me.

I feel like I am in some kind of dating nightmare (and I hate dating). It's really weird trying to sell yourself to some company and they judge you based on how you think, how you talk, how your professional life has been up until now. I also judge them based on my professional values.

It makes me feel really awkward to talk to people trying to sound all calm and professional when I am kind of dying of nihilism inside. Tired of having to get to the stages of interviews where I need to do some idiotic tech assessments that are irrelevant to the job spec. Some were fun though.

Thankfully no AI interviewer fuckery yet, but if I do run into such a thing, I'm gonna pull out and expose the company that does this.

Getting close to final stages with some places which seem decent enough to sell my time to, and salaries are so much higher than what I currently get paid (fuckin peanuts).

I just want to become a mushroom at this point.

lol the UI has a new background and some color updates, but features that users requested last year and myself and my team have been working on for the past 6 months (and can generate millions of revenue for the business) get pushed back in the deployment pipeline.

these people are fucking retards.

This is AMOLED display at 250x zoom.

My secret addiction: defining all colors/ properties in CSS3 variables so that I can easily make my website theme-compatible, and then never making any themes for it.

Hey, at least it keeps my colors consistent....

util: YOU CANT PASS VERSION IN THAT FORMAT IT MUST BE A VERSION OBJECT FROM THE VERSION MODULE IN THE VERSION CINEMATIC UNIVERSE BLAHBLAHB LAHBLAH BLAHBLAH (...) CANT COMPILE THOUGH EVERYTHING ELSE IS CORRECT.

me: fuck you, it's just a string. i'll pass it however the fuck i want, using whichever format i feel like, and your standards will suck my dick day and night.

util: NOOOOO!!! I WAS PROGRAMMED TO THROW AND DIE AND BURN ON THIS VERY SPECIFIC AND INFINITELY STUPID CONDITION THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO!!

me: well you're a build tool so i guess i could just replace you with inhouse, right? i mean https://github.com/Liebranca/... im just the kinda guy to do it.

util: WHAT?!! NO PLEASE I DIDN'T MEAN T- **FUCKING DIES**

me: get uninstalled bitch.

How bad would you say it is to have plain javascript in the root of a functional React component lifecyle loop scope.

I sometimes do hardwired modifcations right before the return because I know it needs to run everytime and the performance hit is minimal... Or is it ? 🤔

And sometimes it's just not worth the hassle of all the dependancy management just to save a couple of operations ..?

See pic attached .. Even looking at this picture now I realised I've accidentally added another React hook BELOW this code, luckily only 1.

I think my reasoning for this was to allow some provider functions to be passed around and used anywhere in this app which accesses the context. Is this a no-no too?

My "Coding Standards" for my dev team

1.) Every developer thinks or have thought their shit don't stink. If you think you have the best code, submit it to your peers for review. The results may surprise you.

2.) It doesn't matter if you've been working here for a day or ten years. Everyone's input is valuable. I don't care if you're the best damn programmer. If you ever pull rank or seniority on someone who is trying to help, even if it isn't necessarily valid or helpful, please have your resume ready to work elsewhere.

3.) Every language is great and every language sucks in their own ways. We don't have time for a measuring contest. The only time a language debate should arise is for the goal of finding the right one for the project at hand.

4.) Comment your code. We don't have time to investigate what the structure and purpose of your code is when we need to extend upon it.

5.) If you use someone else's work, give them the credit in your comments. Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

6.) If you use flash, you will be taken out back and shot. If you survive, you will be shot again.

7.) If you load jQuery for the sole purpose of writing a simple function, #6 applies.

8.) Unless it is an actual picture, there is little to no reason for not utilizing CSS. That's what it's there for.

9.) We don't support any version of Internet Explorer and Edge other than the latest versions, and only layout/alignment fixes will be bothered with.

10.) If you are struggling with a task, reach out. While you should be able to work independently, it doesn't make sense to waste your time and everyone else's to not seek assistance when needed.

11.) I'm serious about #6 and #7. Don't do it.

Unofficial slogans for programming languages:

Javascript - JustShitting out frameworks every week.

Python - Shit programmers become slightly less shit and call themselves "data scientists" here.

C# - We know we are better than you, and even though we don't need to say it, we will say it anyway.

Pascal - The only recognized version of Pascal is from one single vendor.

Haskell - Stay is school if you want to use this professionally.

Swift - (honestly don't know what to say here, Lensflare can fill in on this one.) Maybe this: The first rule of Swift club is we don't talk about Apple club.

Java/Kotlin - We are in everything, including your mom's vibrator.

C - The rest of the programming world doesn't exist. Especially in embedded. Happily using K & R compilers for 3 decades.

C++ - We will pretend to care about the rest of the programming world, but like C, we will do whatever the fuck we want. or, Being held back by the ABI for at least a decade.

Rust - I feel bad for you for using other programming languages.

These are probably highly inaccurate, mostly just wanted to talk about Java being in your mom's sex toy.

Who else is sick of generative AI being pushed into everything and techbros gloating about replacing software engineers? It's like they are excited about people losing their livelihoods and it's disgusting.

The MDN docs for gradients in SVG include the word "hideous".