Read a dev blog and do it on company time, you’re never going to catch up when you’re drowning in your own code. Take responsibility for your personal development, and take responsibility for setting your boundaries. If you do this you will benefit and so will the company. You are not helping by working after hours, you are simply establishing and reinforcing unrealistic expectations that will eventually result in failure.

The ascii DEL character 0x7F or b1111111 historically had a special relationship with punch tape programming, if the programmer made a mistake punching out a character then they could simply punch out all the holes and the computer would skip that character, effectively deleting it, and saving the programmer from starting over.

I want a screenplay for the matrix, but it’s just about how Neo writes a shitty web app that not even the machines can debug.

This is a lie

I just found out about the firmata protocol and I’m geeking out a bit. I’ve been looking for something like it without realizing.

If you like microcontrollers, imagine what you could do with gpio pins on any device, with all the resources of a PC or even a smartphone.

I mean I knew this could be achieved, but didn’t know that anyone designed a protocol.

Ok I finally took a peek at this thing, it is cool, but here’s an interesting caveat

Node developers are something else, you can work on a project that is 2 years old and find abandonware dependencies that were last updated 4 years ago.

We. want. stack traces!
When do we want them?
When we catch exceptions that we don’t know how to handle!

Code monkey see bad code.
Code monkey don’t say anything.
Nobody ask code monkey.
Linter see bad code too.
Nobody pay attention to linter.
Code monkey get more bananas on Thursday.
Code monkey grateful for bananas.
Maybe one day, code monkey make banana tree.

Ok might as well share my misadventure on a phone screen:

It started pretty normal, the guy talks about his background, the position, and asked me about my background.

Move on to the language trivia; I’m not good at memorizing language features, but I guess it’s what people want, so I’ll be working on that down the road… Anyways it didn’t go well, and the guy somehow made me feel like an idiot even on the questions I got right.

It’s really awkward at this point… but let me tell you I was not prepared for what I can only describe as the fucking coding portion of the phone screen…

No computer. No pencil or paper. No whiteboard. Over the phone I’m saying: “class Dog with a capital ‘D’ colon newline tab def space bark open parentheses close parentheses….”

what the actual fuck

Those interview questions that are just trivia of obscure language features.

I tend to be OS agnostic, but I hate the way that Microsoft treats yesterday’s hardware like garbage. I was an unfortunate owner of a surface rt. I also currently own 3 machines with older i7 processors that are not supported by Windows 11.

I think I want to start telling people that I don’t know how to build mobile apps.

A repressed memory just popped into my head:

At my former job I tried to explain a problem I was having to the tech lead. Then, without fully understanding the problem, he decided to rewrite my code that I had been working on for weeks. His code, that took him 2 days to write, went straight to master without peer review.

He introduced about 10 regressions…

Queue the client meeting where the client says “These bugs came back, and we thought they were fixed already…” (They demo the bugs)

So obviously I say “I’ll let Techlead address that one.”

He just mumbles some stuff, and goes quiet for the rest of the meeting. Finally, when the meeting was wrapping up we hear “It’s Fixed!”

Everyone was like ???

“That bug from earlier, it’s fixed, it should work now….”

Would you believe this guy decided to code during the entire meeting, clearly missing important feedback and information that would help him understand the problem. Again, pushing to master without review….

Not to mention that we were talking about 10 regressions…

Have you ever had to fire someone? or get someone fired?

I’m thinking about a time when I should have made sure a guy was fired.
He had no business leading a project, and I knew this early on when he suggested connecting a public frontend straight to a clients’ ERP.
I wasn’t on his project but I ended up cleaning up his mess when shit hit the fan.

It is not rejex, it it short for regular expression

I’m unnerved by the number of people printing money in their basements using graphics cards. We have a global inflation problem and a semiconductor shortage. The cherry on top is that our solution is to make more semiconductors…

It’s not funny when you don’t know how your code works.

TFW you see a job description that you know you could do with your hands tied, but you also know there’s no way you could convince the hiring manager.

People build apps and only use status 200 and 302

A developer is conducting a trolly and has to choose between killing 1 person or killing 5 people, what does he do?

He jumps out of the trolley and lets someone else deal with it.

Unpopular opinion:

It’s not that hard to figure out what a client wants... most ideas are built on things that already exist; there’s a reason people say “it’s like Uber but for X”... ok... build them Uber for X... they told you what they want. Even if they don’t straight up tell you that, there’s still some piece of existing software that is doing something comparable to what they’re asking. You just have to understand how to implement it or build on top of it.

However if you do actually find yourself in unexplored territory, glhf cowboy!

Is there a reason my team is using deprecated AngularJS? Surely there must be some >3 year old AngularJS code somewhere, but no. Git history says AngularJS usage started 1 year ago.

No worries though we’re “agile”, we should expect to be rewriting code

When the jig is up

My “seniors” have a limited understanding of exceptions and it’s driving me nuts, they try to tell me their half baked ideas about best practices when most of their code is just wrapped in a general exception with a log statement.

I am the unit test guy now, please send all of your untested and poorly thought out code my way to be tested