Everyone's saying "oh my, I'm so ashamed of my code I wrote 4 days ago, it's so horrible"

Well... At least you can relate to someone. When I look at my project's code I wrote half a year ago (or sometime before that) I'm genuinely surprised to see I'm not browsing some library's codebase - the abstraction layers, the generics, the structure... it's brilliant! It's as SOLID as it gets.

Oi, good lads! Here's a question

Do you meditate at work? If you do, would you mind sharing:

- what does it look like? i.e. half an hour of your lunchtime or a task in Jira for that or smth..? are you doing it individually or in groups?
- is it a part of your company culture or just smth you do on your own?
- how often? How long?
- which technique?
- would you recommend?
- which country is this in?

I'm thinking to suggest mindful meditation in my company as I've noticed it's significantly improved my critical thinking and judgement - something others could benefit from as well. And I need some examples, pros/cons, possible ways of implementation, etc.

- The phone has 32GB total storage space
- Kita means Others

idk folks, smth looks fishy to me...

When android is short on storage it produces a whole lot of long-presses.

Ffs android, I still have 500mb free!

It feels oh so good to push to my own project's repo after 4 months of silence :)

I guess I'm back.
Although I do wish someone else was doing frontend for my BE :)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/...

I would post it as a joke if it were one :) Turns out It's a very real bug!

LightDM is allergic to cats

I wonder..

With all this master/slave/blacklist/whatever.. do people realize this is in a way increasing racism? In a sense that we are again focusing on races, differences, historical mistakes, etc. That we are turning all this and similar fuss into a social joke instead of moving on and living our lives normally. That companies are using the difference of races as a way to spread their names. Sometimes as political measures

Are you folks really okay with all of this? Don't you feel being used/abused again? Do you ever consider that racism is just a mean of getting more attention and more $$ for the companies?

I am not pro-racism, but I find it difficult to accept those who suffer/have suffered from it are okay with all this show.

- All the 6 cores at 100ºC ~25% of the time
- Trying to figure out wtf
- aahhh, it's my self-service automation script launching ~300 curls in parallel every few seconds to monitor the environment! I guess the temps are alright then...

Moral: even the devil is not that bad when you know the whole context.

home-made cloud computer

src: https://kaijuno.tumblr.com/post/...

Oh my... Downloading dependencies on the hospital's network is a sloooowwww draaaagg. It's almost like hospitals aren't suitable for developers!

Joke aside, I'm enjoying my orange while waiting for that download to finish and it occurred to me - an orange - a food that very strongly associates with a hospital in our country! And a mandarine is a fruit that means "Christmas!!!" I believe that's a legacy in post-soviet countries :)

And here's my question. Do you, folks in other countries, also have any foods (preferably something rather ordinary) that have strong similar associations? Not necessarily Christmas or hospitals though :)

(I can guess rutee's association :) )

Even if you are denied after all your job interviews, don't be sad.
1. you looked promising enough to call you to the interview in the first place
2. you need to work on some gaps in your knowledge/xp. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, now you do! Not even that - you also know what the gaps are!
3. you hear of new technologies, net tricks that are there. Dig in!
4. you become more aware of what positions are there and what requirements could be applied to them in different companies. Makes you build a company profile and make better choices for applications later on.

Now imagine the pressure on your shoulders if they would have hired you while you have so many gaps in your knowledge... It's overtimes every day! It's possibly missed deadlines. It's mishandled tasks. It's bugs all over the place and other devs judging you!

Brush your tears dry, grab candy or a chocolate bar and go improve yourself!

I do like my current employer very much :D

This is a snip from an official job ad in their portal :)

DB
DB
DB is on fire
We don't need water
Let that database burn
BURN
Let it BURN.

I've just started writing tech blog posts this weekend. Two posts baked by today, another one should be completed by tomorow eod :)

oh man... Apparently I like blogging :)

Oh my, our frontend (FE) dev is amazing! He never ceases surprising me :D
[FTR: I'm building backend (BE).]

Here's a message at Trello I found today:

-----------
Hey @netikras
responseBody e --> Whoops! Lost connection to http://test.application.com/chat/...**************
Do you return this error to FE as a string when FE loses connection to BE?
-----------

I mean.. come on buddy :D Use that gray mass of yours

Heh.. Came across my first PC last week :) oh the nostalgy... Entity, Mach3, wolfeinstein 3d, Dangerous Dave in a haunted mansion and a guy pushing boxes in a 2d maze.

DOS, nc and windows 3.1 [in that pile of 5" floppies bottom left].

oh the times!

1. a client asks you to create an API for their system
2. you do what's requested
3. a year later you are curious how's that API doing. Client's devs decided to

[
"com.client.app.some.Datamodel$Subclass",
{
"someField": [
"java.util.ArrayList",
["SMTH","SMTH_ELSE"]
]}
]

sure, why not, right.....?

This is getting annoying.

For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:

- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.

Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home

Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.

And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.

We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.

It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!

[just needed to vent ]

IMO it depends to what one means by "made it".

switch(made_id) {
case "is a developer" -> "when one develops a software product, regardless of whether for work or personal purposes";

case "got a dev job" -> "when one gets a dev job";

case "can be called a dev" -> "when job title has .*developer.* in it";

case "is a good dev" -> "when job title has .*senior developer.* in it";
}

For me personally it means getting a SW development job that pays my bills and keeps growing my savings account. Pretty much like @AlmondSauce said it.

I for one iterated through all the cases above and each time I achieved the goal I felt like I "made it".

Appetite comes with eating

I think the dev missed a nullcheck before `handlebars.compile(name)`, don't you think?

// this snippet is from our product's repo ;)

When you walk to the yard with a lappy to code some stuff in the nature, smth comes up and you leave your lappy running on a chair for 6+ hours, then finally remember it and it still has >75% juice w/o being suspended.

Sweet!

I wonder how much more profitable is this year for Corona brewers :)

just sitting in a car next to a shop. I've never seen this many folks buying sixpacks of Corona.

when you're in an online job interview and after it your laptop only has 3% of juice left :)

Today I had plans to refresh my knowledge about transactions' internals in dbms and in general.

Then the rainy weather hit the town. The whole sleepy day wasted on Netflix.

Well.. I guess it was time for a break :) haven't had one in weeks

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

I've seen far worse people doing what I'm doing, applying terrible practices and still being valued af.

Even if I do smth wrong after doing all the research and alternatives' analysis I know I'll do a proper post-mortem RCA, document it and learn from it, as a result I'll make a better choice to fix the problem and I'll know better next time.

I think I'm alright compared to them. So I don't wory about being an impostor.

Learning by good examples is a good approach. Learning by bad ones might be even better. The "good ones" are yet to fail and be replaced by better (or worse) ones. The "bad ones" are already failing and you can learn WHY you should not be doing it like that and HOW should you do instead to solve the problem.

Learning from good examples only works well if you know the back-story, all the WHYs and HOWs. People usually don't :)

Come back home after 2 months of absence (during quarantine I was away) just to find that tomorrow I'll be WFH w/o internet.

Sounds like it's gonna be a productive day!

Http 500 OK

Thank you HP!

Inspired by @Billgates

everyone around is hyped about new tech they get to use, new toys to tinker with, I can see their eyes shining when they hear "let's try and introduce kafka" - they would wiggle their tails all day long if they had ones!

And me? Well, a new potential employer got me so excited I couldn't wash a smile off my face for a few days! You know what they said? "we don't use any frameworks, we focus on clean code, solid, kiss and we write with tdd". Bare java - that's the best position I've heard of in years!

I guess I'm oldschool. But I truly believe their approach is the right one. Not trashing the code with spring [which is turning into smth what systemd is for linux/unix], hibernate and what not.

Just good old java code. Db, multithreading, request-mapping -- all plain, manual and simple.

Amazing!

An application requiring lots of servers to handle the workload is not the problem.

The problem is an application that cannot handle workload no matter how many servers you throw at it.