My little brother (still in school , learning security and pen testing): i found a bug in a website , it returns an xml file instead of the web page , i reported it to them and i think i'm gonna get rewarded like 2k $ for it .
Me : cool ! Show me .
Him : shows me his phone ...
Me : wait , gotta rant this .

this books may change your life.

PS: first rant, you guys are great

I work at a small company that uses very outdated coding approaches for their solutions.

About a year ago I went through our main application to improve performance and found quite a few areas that I could tackle such as using a dictionary data structure in place of (many) foreach loops that required to pull out a single object.

That specific change yielded a lot of improvement (you can only imagine) and the other developers wanted to learn the ways of dictionaries (because it was so revolutionary and new to them). I showed them many examples so that they could better understand this data structure.

Fast forward to a few months later, saw one of my coworker's code and noticed that they were using a dictionary... And iterating through each kvp similar to a foreach..... Wtf?!

P.S. that person's salary is much higher than mine :(

First time rant. Thanks for listening!

2010: PHP, CSS, Vanilla JS, and a LAMP Server.

Ah, the simple life.

2016: Node.js, React, Vue, Angular, AngularJS, Polymer, Sass, Less, Gulp, Bower, Grunt.

I can't handle this, I'm shifting domains to Machine Learning.

2017: Numpy, Scipy, TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, Torch, CNNs, RNNs, GANs and LOTS AND LOTS OF MATH!

Okay, okay. Calm down there fella.
JavaScript doesn't seem that complicated now, does it? 🙈

My first rant...! Saw this on twitter. So, true.

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Here we go my first rant...

Welcome to 2017:

Facebook = Blue Snapchat
Whatsapp = Green Snapchat
Instagram = AllPossibleColors Snapchat

Ps: First rant **yayy**

30 year old starting to learn to code. Wish me luck!

The rant starts here

Me: code quality is important

Everyone: <no shit given>

Director: code quality is important

Everyone: yes, it is very important, hurray!

Fast forward few weeks/months...

Me: why this function accepts 14 arguments?

ShitDev: yhm, you know, we need to fix it... maybe

Me: why this exception is swallowed?

ShitDev: oh, really? yhm, yhm

Me: why this function is copy-pasted and repeated (20 LoCs)?

ShitDev: yeah, true, but we wanted to make it fast.

Me: Dear director, this project sux and its quality is shit.

Director: you're exaggerating, it can't be that bad, it works, right?

Me: <polishing CV>

ShitDev: got praised for delivery

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

Thanks for the dog
🐕

Guys, I have all symptoms of wasting time in bad work (can't stop thinking about it, anxious, can't relax, can't focus on a hobby, etc.)

But - how the hell you can know if next company won't be even worse? How can you be at least basically sure that today's "bad" isn't that bad in comparison to your next employer?

Why is it that the internet is full of fucking "getting started" and "crashcourse" and "essentails" bullshit, but when you're looking for some truly deep stuff like all the ins & outs of MacOS native app devevlopment using SwiftUI, there's NOTHING!

For fuck's sake. People really only demand superficial fake knowledge and don't require depth at all?!!