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Skillserlang, js, elixir, haskell, ruby, php
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LocationBelarus
Joined devRant on 5/13/2016
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Every day.
I am a PHP developer.
Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.
It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.
First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.
They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.
Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.
PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.
You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.
PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.
Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.
When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...
PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.
Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".
Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.
Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.
Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...28 -
A colleague of mine had to debug performance problems in a foreign, proprietary application that is ancient.
To be crystal clear: Only reason that thing exists is because some old geezers fear change.
Asked me for help cause it's an _ancient_ MS SQL server that is luckily running on hardware owned by us.
Finding the credentials was already a funny task.
We had to access the vault (not joking here, we have a physical vault for storing sensitive data and critical backups), grab a folder and find the necessary data cause no one ever dares to touch that thing.
The application is btw for a sort of ERP / inventory system that is used in some ancient shops not yet migrated...
Yeah. Story speaks for itself.
Anyway, after dusting off ourselves, we were able to connect.
Was a bit ... Interesting. Everything's in german. The worst kind of german.
After looking at the first tables, I started giggling.
My colleague knew immediately that this was a sign of danger (insert Simpson meme here), raised his eyebrows and asked "How bad is it....".
Me, still giggling, "lemme take a further look, this is gold".
*long sigh from the colleague*
Well... It ended with me putting my hands in front of my eyes, turning around and saying: "I cannot look at it anymore, it hurts too much...."
To summarize:
- German table names
- When a table exceeded 300 plus columns, they added another table with the same plus suffix "_ddd"… where ddd is an zero filled integer sequence like 001
- To join this mess, they created views... Named "generator" - Sequence Number ... Some had the beginning of table names appended, which doesn't make it less confusing.
- the process list was listing queries running longer than 5 mins.
Which isn't at all surprising when generating carrtesian products of N tables with left join.
I've seen shit.... I've seen a lot of shit.
But that shit scared me.1 -
Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".21 -
Well that was a fun call I just had.
Owner of the company I freelance for: Hey I forgot to tell you something.
Me: What?
Owner: I bought you a plane ticket to fly to Puerto Rico. You're heading out in a month.
Me: What?! Why????
Owner: To set up cryptocurency mining rigs.
Me: Just because I know a bit about mining doesn't make me an expert.
Owner: We have $80k in our pocket in investments from outside parties, with another $20-30k on the way. You get 20% of the coins mined for as long as you manage it.
Me: So we're gonna set up several rigs, utilizing a b250 motherboard, g4400 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 10 GPUs each. We'll have AMD rigs for monero and Nvidia rigs for Ethereum and others. We'll use awesome miner for profitability switching on the fly. Each machine is probably going to be $5k each, possibly $4k with bulk discounts. We'll need at least 1500W per rig for power, 2000W to be safe, so we need to make sure we have ample power delivery to the mining warehouse.
Owner: I thought you weren't an expert?
Me: I'm not, but when there's money involved my motivation to Google goes into overdrive.28 -
Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.
I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.
But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.
Education I think.
I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.
I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"
"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"22 -
We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
A super creepy webcrawler I built with a friend in Haskell. It uses social media, various reverse image searches from images and strategically picked video/gif frames, image EXIF data, user names, location data, etc to cross reference everything there is to know about someone. It builds weighted graphs in a database over time, trying to verify information through multiple pathways — although most searches are completed in seconds.
I originally built it for two reasons: Manager walks into the office for a meeting, and during the meeting I could ask him how his ski holiday with his wife and kids was, or casually mention how much I would like to learn his favorite hobby.
The other reason was porn of course.
I put further development in the freezer because it's already too creepy. I'd run it on some porn gif, and after a long search it had built a graph pointing to a residence in rural Russia with pictures of a local volleyball club.
To imagine that intelligence agencies probably have much better gathering tools is so insane to think about.53 -
Story.
Did you know logging into chrome will auto sync all your fucking bookmarks to that other person's account??
I DIDN'T!!
(I use Firefox mainly and chromium for testing.)
I use chrome only for porn. Got shit tons of bookmarks. I login to my friend's sister Gmail on my chrome(for remote desktop - to help fix her computer. Somehow,remote desktop doesn't work on chromium)
Was browsing her pc via remote session and suddenly all of my porn bookmarks appear at the top bar.)
Had to manually select each bookmark in the bookmark manager and delete since CTRL+A won't work during the remote session. Don't know why.
FML.27 -
I literally cringed today when my neighbor wanted help installing an app, she didn't tell me it was her banking app... And the thing I needed to help with was logging in... So she told me her bank details...
Even though I said (multiple times) it was dangerous to do so, and that she can't just trust people with this kind of information...
WHY ARE PEOPLE SO GOD DAMN STUPID WHEN IT COMES TO SECURITY!7 -
So yesterday i went to this live theatre drama and i had an extra ticket. I asked this random guy the way to that theatre and apparently he was looking to get ticket for the same show. I offered him my other ticket for free.
We introduce ourself to each other and i came to know he worked as salesman or something. As i talked about my job, I told about me leaving job in hopes of self employment.
*Cue the sales pitch*
He started talking about some scheme kind of thing to have financial freedom. He talks about how we can get products at upto 15% discount and we have to sell them to others.
I was skeptical about it and he talked they have website as if that will pimpress me or something.
I visited the site and i was not surprised at all. It was nothing but an halfassed e-commerce store. I knew it was halfassed and probably setup by the "CEO" himself.
And the products in that site are nothing but stupid cosmetic products!
And to top it off, you have to spend around $200 to join this scheme. This poor guy doesn't realise he is just being a talking puppet to that halfassed e-commerce business BY PAYING THEM!!!
He even said one of his friend in London took leave to join this scheme or whatever... What a stupid friend.
Anyway, i just regret giving away a ticket to some stupid people like him. I'd have been much more happier if i had just thrown the extra ticket in the trash.
People suck!5 -
Good god. In an entry level CIS course, the teacher is literally explaining binary as slowly as possible and then spouting misinformation about sound waves and telephone stuff. Ugh.2
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Client: How's our B2B data lookup platform coming along?
Me: All done, your clients can now search by first/last name as well.
Client: I just search "fuck" as first name and 5 results came up, our data is not cleaned up properly.
Me: Fuck
Client: Fuck2 -
A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.
"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."
The man below replies, "You must work in management."
"I do," replies the balloonist, *"But how'd you know?"**
"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."2 -
The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.
That sounds like a simple query, yeah?
Well.
Here's some background:
We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.
All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.
Here's how signups happen:
Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.
And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:
Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.
Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.
Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!
After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.
It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.
So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!
I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...
just...
errrrgghh9
