It finally happened. Upper management is demanding a historical (7+ years) of lines-of-code analysis of our entire code base. They want to justify our positions by validating that the lines-of-code has increased in accordance with the economy. I am not kidding. For every year, they expect some percent increase in our lines of code.

Just sold my first piece of software. All solo development

That moment when your boss is introducing the new guy and you are silently making a list of all the git repos you need to back up before he makes it to his desk.

I love gulp
Gulp loves me, but it looks like in 50 shades of gray

Friend: you really should give Windows another chance, it's really not that bad.

Me: are you in possession of the only Windows computer that doesn't blue screen whenever there's a strong breeze outside?

Friend: No ... That does happen every now and then.

Me: So what's great about it then?

Friend: Look at this cool wallpaper, it's a slideshow of pictures of my kids.

Me: ... stop talking to me immediately ... and sit over there.

"I just started learning this Javascript framework aaaannnddd it's irrelevant. Okay then"

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

My reaction when I use someone's pc, "How the hel* you use this piece of junk?"

The server for an internal application was acting up, but everything was working fine locally. After an 18 hour day, I just rerouted the traffic to my dev machine and left it on overnight so I could go home.

A piece of me hates myself and also loves myself for that one.

Today I had to work on a server running SunOS.
For those that don't know, SunOS was last released in the mid 90's. To top it off the only available editor was vi.

@tahnik get to 10,000 you bloody bastard!

Big congrats to @tahnik - the first devRant member to break 10,000 points!

When the legacy code has a misspelled CSS class selector but it'd break more than it'd fix... And forced to use the mispelled word. Omfg people.

That's basically the current state of my project...

Me encountering one of the many skype bots... but something was different this time, at first.

:o didn't know it

When they decided to deprecate the old app that went back to early DOS, they decided to use VB.NET because they'd used some VBA and were familiar with it. Except they had a vague idea that C# was faster and decided to write the OpenGL code in that. Also they had some C++ code and decided to write more of it, accessed by the main program via COM.

I come in and the decision is made to integrate some third-party libs via a C++/CLI layer. On one hand screw COM, but on the other we're now using two non-standard MS C++ extensions. Then we decide we need scripting, so throw in some IronPython.

I'm the build engineer for all this, by the way. No fancy package managers since almost all the third-party dependencies are C++; a few of them are open source with our own hacks layered on top of the regular code, a few are proprietary. When I first started here you couldn't build on a fresh SVN checkout (ugh) without repeatedly building the program, copying DLLs manually, building again, ad nauseum. I finally got sick of being called in to do this process and announced that I was fixing it, which took a solid week of staring at failed compiler output.

Every so often someone wants to update that damn COM library and has to sacrifice a goat to figure out how the hell you get it to accept a new method. Maybe one day I'll do a whole rant just based on COM.

The devRant Podcast is finally here!! We're happy to announce the release of episode #0 - featuring Andy Hunt (known for The Pragmatic Programmer, rubber duck debugging, DRY, and much more). We can't thank Andy enough for agreeing to be on our first podcast episode and it was so enjoyable to interview him.

We also want to give a huge thanks to our two devRant users who helped us out and came on to talk about their rants - @silhoutte and @sway. We also greatly appreciate all of the questions that were submitted by community members. We really wanted to ask all of them since there were a lot of good ones, but we had to narrow it down a little as Andy was already kind enough to go over the 20 minutes we had originally asked for. This episode features questions from @casanovanoir, @fatlard1993, and @3K-Vengeance.

You can get all the links to the podcast here: https://devrant.io/podcasts/... (available on iTunes, Google Play, and we've provided the raw mp3).

If you'd like to see it on any other platforms in the future, please let us know. And like always, feedback is appreciated since we're new to this and still learning our way when it comes to podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please rate it to help us out :)

Thanks everyone!

Any advice for a young dev? (14😄)

First day of a group project and one of your group members utters the immortal phrase: "what's a get hub?"

There was a project I took over that was supposed to be at 90% when the previous developer quit. The project was in QA with some "minor" bugs that needed to be fixed. When I looked at the minor bugs I realized that the project had major underlying data issues. So after working 80 hour weeks I managed to hobble it together and make the release date.

That was a little over three years ago. Since then another developer has taken over maintenance and enhancements on the product and overall the application works pretty well for what it is.

So his analogy is, that the application is a tank that was made out of aluminum foil that has been hit many times in battle. Whenever it has been hit we have patched the tank with random things like bricks, soda bottles, and old car doors yet somehow it keeps going. The tank is still surviving the war but we really don't know how.

🐜

I wrote a web crawler to find a few problems on my company's blog. I accidentally DOS'd the peice of shit with a single thread. Fuck WordPress.

MOTHERFUCK. FUCKING WINDOWS DID IT AGAIN TABARNAK!

Today, I was hoping to study some DB optimization for an exam tomorrow. How foolish of me to think that MOTHERFUCKING FUCKTARD WINDOWS WOULD NOT CHOOSE THIS EXACT MOMENT TO INSTALL THE FUCKING ANNIVERSARY UPDATE. Because it di. It took 2 hours to insert it's fucking update in my ass. FUCK.

I don't know why devs would choose to work for the devil, but for those who did create this update system, I HOPE YOU STEP ON LEGO BRICKS AND THAT YOUR AUDIO IS ALWAYS OUT OF SYNC WITH YOU VIDEO ON NETFLIX.

Had a MacBook try to commit suicide sometime this weekend... just glad it didn't explode in the office ...

The battery swole large enough to push the trackpad out of the frame about a centimeter cracking it in half.

Took the battery out. Still works fine even with a cracked trackpad.

Just for fun, a home made comic.

Day of the interview sr. Architect says: "We have near 100% unit test coverage in our code."

One month later when I tell him there are 0 unit tests written against 300 projects: "Yeah, I knew that was a problem."

What can you do when the people who want to hire you lie outright to your face?

Oh yeah, and not a god damned one was written using any sense of object oriented programming at all. Every single damned project is written like its on a motherfucking punchcard put together by a cs 101 student with a 2 hour fucking deadline.

I can understand if it needs some work, just tell me. Don't fucking lie to me just to get me in the door to fix a problem you know you have. JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING RESPECT FOR YOUR CANDIDATES AND DON'T FUCKING LIE TO THEM!

Off to drink some scotch and think about what it would be like to shove a finger deep enough into my nostril to hear a pop and smell popcorn before going off into that good night.

I said good day.

I recently decided that I was going to broaden my palette and learn a bit of Java. I've had painful experiences in the past, but it's been a few major versions since I last did anything in it. Then I go to update the OS Java, and IT STILL FREAKING PROMPTS ME TO ADD YAHOO TOOLS TO MY BROWSER!!! ARE WE STILL IN THE 90s? DO YAHOO AND ORACLE STILL HAVE A DEAL? OR WAS SOME JAVA INSTALLER DEVELOPER TOO FREAKING LAZY TO REMOVE IT FROM TUE INSTALLER PROMPTS?!

And that's why I have a problem with Java.

The build breaks due to a failing unit tests, and what does the dev do?

Comment them out.
Commit.

Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

At work we have a lawyer lady who we pay a LOT of money and she suppose to handle our tech related legal stuff. We ask her to look at some stuff we shared with her via shared google docs. After being visibly uncomfortable for a while she called her tech guy at her firm and asked to get Google Docs installed.