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.

If EA had developed their own Programming Language:
Iteration DLC ~20€
Condition DLC ~15€
Connectivity DLC ~12,99€
Gold Edition ~120€

if (condition) {
//code
}

if you place your brackets like this, you're an awesome individual. Let's be friends

When you see a someone write this
if(condition){
return true;
} else {
return false;
}

If (condition)
return true
else
return false
😂😂😂

I really hate people who prefer this coding style:

if (condition)
{
// something shitty here
}

Instead of this:

if(condition){
// perfectly clean code
}

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

So a coworker wrote this -- a function that returns a view if a specific object exists in the database. Now what would happen said object doesn't exist in the database? Forget about returning false and handling it properly, he decides that the function should print (echo) a zero! Not to mention almost all his if-else blocks prints a fucking zero when the if condition is false (there are 8 of them, if you're asking). Error messages? The hell with those.

He is now the PM btw. I've had enough of this shithole.

In this case the person who quit was me.
Agency didn't pay the past 4 months, we asked at least the reimbursment of expences.
They told in a 2 hour arrogant speech that we must thanks them becouse they make us work even if they aren't paying. They said that "in this period these are the rules and we must accept this condition." So, I stand up, I went to shake the hand of the boss and others, I went to the door saying "good luck".
All the coworkers stand up and applauded.
Two months later the agency was closed declaring failure.

if( !condition ) vs. if(condition == false)

Pointless debate started with readability, turned into heated insults under 30 seconds 😂

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

Still haven't been paid for completed a retail shop project. But all is well, since the system will not start on Black Friday till I remove the if condition 😈

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

PRO LIFE SAVING TIPS FOR DEVS (long rant, not clickbait 😝)

I have a medical condition called DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). It clots blood in veins near lower body parts. Affected leg swells and become red and it is very painful. It happens when you very frequently sit for very long.

I used to play games, code and stuffs for hours and sometimes I used to stay at home without taking decent walk for weeks. I am only 18 and did not see it coming. But its really early stage and I might be fully recovered real soon.

This condition is not rare and happens to millions of people every year. And it can be avoided if you avoid sitting at computers for long hours and take 5 mins to walk or stretch. Even if you can avoid this condition, there are many others if you dont pay attention on your body. Please take some time to google how you can avoid anything such.

(Please don't comment sympathies, I really know you wish well for me. Instead you can throw tips what you do to relax after long hours of work).

My first poem for programmer girl 😘😘😘

My life is incomplete without you,
You are semicolon of my life

You are my increment operator,
you make my value increases

I am username and you are my password,
without you No one can access me

You are my initializer,
without you my life would point to nothing (NULL or “0”)

If I were a function you must be my parameter,
Because I will always need you

Can you be my private variable?
I want to be only one who can access you

You are my compiler,
My life wouldn’t start without you

You are my loop condition ,
I keep coming back to you

My love to you is like recursive function,
It will never ends & Will never enter into infinite loop

Forever and Ever

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

if (condition == true && condition != false)

I so hate the following statement
if (condition)
makeOperation()

I prefer
if (condition) {
makeOperation()
}

Who is with me?

Why the fuck do teachers take points off for coding style. Like really placing my open house brace on the same line as an if is what looks good TO ME. And breaking from a while loop with an inverted condition is nicer than a huge if TO ME. Fuck it I like the m_ for member variables too. And yes C++ usually names functions like someFunction, but I like how c# does SomeFunction. Like shit, it's personal I don't care that I lose 5points every test I do it just to say fuck you

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

So yesterday I deployed a build on our release environment and i had added a new rest api end-point which I needed to test.. A heads up though, its written in java spring and the entire flow consisted of too many calls/returns from various other java & python services.. Also to make things worse, the entire deployment is a really cumbersome process as you need to copy the build from one box to another..

After like almost 4-5 hours of debugging, adding logs left right & center, crazy upload speeds (yaa this is sarcastic) and frustation at its peak, I found the issue..

There was an if condition that was checking for equality between an enum constant & an enum in a request aaaannnnnddd

*Drum roll

THE CONSTANT ENUM BELONGED TO THE WRONG PACKAGE HENCE ALWAYS EVALUATING TO FALSE... ALSO, BOTH THE ENUMS IN THE DIFFERENT PACKAGES ARE IDENTICAL... FUCCKKKKKKK MY LIFE

😑🔫

Got this from boss (a few colleagues got it as well):
Sites have been down over the weekend and seems the only person cares is PM! There is a condition about working when required (i.e. unpaid OT) on your contract! It is essential that sites are properly managed even at weekends - we run a online business! If anyone has problems we'll discuss next week
*Note: site was partially down and there was no major impact on the business

When I explained why we need to rebuild the sites, you said not now - almost 2 years now, still nothing happens.
When I asked if we can get managed hosting or load balancer, fecking NO again
After asking for my opinion on the sites, you & the puppet think my honesty is me being negative and incorporate, and exclude me from meetings and major part of my work

Go fuck yourself! I've warned you about the status of the sites and you did not want to listen SO DON'T TELL ME I'M NOT DOING MY JOB WHEN YOU'RE THE ONE STOPPING ME FROM DOING IT PROPERLY!
I'm sure we'll have our meeting very soon, cheapskate.

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

no matter how big shot programmer you are, you 90% time you will only code
if(condition)
{
// do something
}
else
{
// do something else
}

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

I have previously seen this in a production code base. The same code base included nested if statements (20+ conditions)...

If (condition == false) {
return false;
} else if (condition == true) {
return true;
}

I write blocks of code like this:
If(condition){
code
}

I'm trying to fix a bug and the previous dev is doing it like this:
If(condition)
{
code
}

Does anyone know any good nerve calming pill ? 😜

TLDR: Skills and background or dedication for becoming a good programmer?

So I almost finished the bootcamp on my company, there is only 2 people. Me and another guy who is from math major. He wanted to learn programming so he applied for the job. He doen’t know sql, any backend language, and not even html or css when he joined. The only thing he knew is for looping and if condition logic. He survived 1 months or so by learning a lot here. C#, .net mvc, sql, decent css and html. I believe he worked hard by learning it by himself. But the company he can’t continue anymore. I doesn’t know the reason but probably because he is seen as not good enough. Sure he is kinda slow when adding some feature to our small project but we need to find how to do it by ourself mostly. Now I’m alone with another few weeks to continue

My Javascript professor explained Boolean to me using an allegory about pizza: "If I give you pizza, under what condition do you eat it? Your hunger must be true or false. Boolean does the same thing, but with things less exciting than pizza."
It didn't even begin to make sense to me until it became about pizza.
I vote for ALL future computer classes to be taught in terms of pizza.

Was forced to code like this:

if(condition)
{
//code
}

Instead of this

if(condition){
//code
}

Also I should mention that this happened 4 years ago and my mentor (27 years old economy major at the time) did not know how to use git, we stored projects on a shared networking folder.

Kids use "if(condition)"
Men use "if(condition == true)"
Legends use "if((condition == false) == false)"

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?

@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :

Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.

We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.

Thank You

here is her cheerful photo.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

Omg so I've been stuck on this function I'm writing that checks if a certain array value is so many characters long and well, it just wasnt returning false when outside the conditions..

I tried taking it step by step, echoing out every line and it all made sense to me and there were no syntax errors.

Time goes by and inside the configuration file I was testing.. I was changing the value of a DIFFERENT array property than what I was using in my condition. They looked really similar.. fml xD

This is an example if statement:
if(bla.boolean()){
}

Bill does NOT put comments into the condition brackets.

Be like bill.

Please.

My friend, Gavin, an air steward (a job that he had done for decades), told me about an incident at work. He said that (shockingly to me) passengers occasionally die on a flight (particularly long-haul), just as a matter of course. This can be because people sometimes travel to visit loved ones BECAUSE they are dying, people sometimes find travelling itself stressful (so it can exacerbate an existing medical condition), or simply that, if you took a large number of people and shut them up in a space together for some considerable time, some of them would pop off through sheer statistical probability. Cabin crew are, apparently, fully trained to deal within this eventually in a calm, almost routine manner.

This particular flight, Gavin was working with another gay man: Peter, who was actually a VERY funny personality. Camp, extravagant and loud, Peter really lit up the place. But naturally, when the very elderly male passenger in seat 38b died peacefully in his sleep halfway across the Atlantic, Peter acted (like the entire crew), with decorum and dignity. As per the protocol, all the lights in the cabin were dimmed. A hush fell over the passengers (Gavin told me that, although no announcement is ever made, the other passengers nearly always instinctively know what's happened, with the news spreading via the media of hushed whispers and nudges). Then, as per standing instructions, two of the crew carefully lifted the deceased out of his seat and gently carried him to the crew station where he was laid down on a bed for the remainder of the flight.

After the late gentleman disappeared behind the discreetly drawn curtain, you could have heard a pin drop. There was a demure pause during which, slowly, the lights went back up.

Suddenly Peter's cheery face appeared, poking through the gap in the drapes. He looked around, blinking brightly with curiosity at the seated passengers, and said, in a voice that echoed around the whole cabin:

"SO! Anyone else have the fish?"

He narrowly avoided getting sacked.

When you spend 3 hours looking at your project's code and debugging it to find out you forgot to add a '!' to your if condition.... Brilliant

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Got an email from a stakeholder about a $0 transaction for an item that was not meant to be $0. Found someone put a condition in the code to set the price to $0 if it couldn’t be queried from the database. Wut…that is…not logical 😵‍💫😵

I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.

Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.

I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)

And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.

But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.

You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.

Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.

The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.

This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.

If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.

No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.

But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.

Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.

As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.

When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.

I fucking hate esoteric code.

Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.

This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.

As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.

Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.

Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.

That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".

I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.

It's just the community.

Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.

You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.

Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.

You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!

On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.

And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.

Wow i must have been brain dead when i wrote this code. Needed to exclude certain elements from response for the the list of objects.

for (obj : objects) {
If (obj.skipFromResponse()) {
break
}
add obj to response
}

I used break instead of continue at the if condition which meant it would break out of the loop at the first instance of condition being met.

This went through qa and has been in production for 4 weeks so how did this not break before. Well little did i know the list of objects was sorted and all the test data, qa data and everything so far in production coincidentally only had the last element with matching condition. This meant it returned everything correctly so far.

Today was the first time there was a situation where this caused incorrect output. Luckily as soon as I heard the description of the issue I remembered to check the merged PR and hung my head in shame for making such trivial error. I must have written way more complicated code without any problem but this made me embarrassed to even admit. 🤦‍♂️

Who's got time to be an imposter. 🤷‍♂️

I am out of my depth 90% of the time, always diving into areas that are foreign to me, you just need to enjoy the buzz of knowing you are coming out the other side more knowledgeable then you did going in.

But if you do get overwhelmed with this condition, step back, take a breather, and use that moment to think things through at the big picture level before moving forward again, sometimes the right solution is hard to think off when you're to focused and drowning your way through a bad one.

15 minutes

if ( very long condition here );
{ Stuff here was correct }

Error!

Shit!...

Testing all the 'stuff here'...

oh. !!

That's where the missing ones go to have fun.

When someone writes this
if(condition == true) {
//...
}

While getting a pro in Kotlin, I started using

when(condition) {
true -> doOneThing()
false -> {
xyz = whatEver()
blaBla()
}
}

instead of simple if-else.
It looks nice but also distracting.

What is your opinion on that?
I guess most will be like:

if
(condition)
{
statements ;
}

COBOL is something I use at work. Typically, you see IF blocks like this

IF condition
Stuff
END-IF.

But the END-IF part if actually optional. You can just use a period and it does the same thing.

IF condition
Stuff.

Many headaches if not caught when reading.

Oh don't know why my "if" condition never execute.

Happens very very often.

Small things are hard to find.

I spent two weeks writing a WordPress plugin to take some form data, process it through another website, and take the result to Salesforce. the client had a "Salesforce specialist" doing everything on the Salesforce side and refused to give me access to see if the data was properly pushed through.

Finally I got it in working condition when suddenly it stopped working, I hadn't changed anything since it worked so I asked if he could have possibly changed something. We argued for over 4 hours about who changed something, the whole time I was looking for the error in my code. At 6pm I finally told him I would need to take a look at it tomorrow.

Overnight he sent me an email:
"Hey, sorry about the confusion yesterday, I set Salesforce to deny duplicate email entries, looks like once I removed that everything is working."

!rant
Neighbouring nursing student asked me to recommend her a good laptop. I take a look at her existing one and it's an ultra book in pretty much decent condition. I ask her what her issue with this one is and turns out there's not enough space on the hard disk (30 GB SSD). I advice her to consider upgrading instead of buying a new laptop and she agrees. She also asks me if I can fix the track par of the laptop as it's not working. I take a look at the system tray and then work my computer science magic (press the fn+F9 to activate the trackpad) and boom! It's a miracle and she's squealing with delight. I even ran a disk cleanup and wiped 3Gigs of space so that she could continue downloading the episode from Netflix.
I hear a lot of you people complain about being asked to do outrageous tech shit because you're a computer person but man, I sure love being the "tech guy". :D

La me working on a new chrome extension:

- ok, this page has some hidden divs, I need to tell the extension to make windows scroll to the bottom while there are still elements with a hidden class
- creates a while(1) loop with a condition inside it to break if no elements with hidden class are longer there.
- happy with the code
- uploads the extension
- goes to page
- brings out developer tools
- goes to console
- clicks on extension on chrome
- right clicks the extension and then inspect
- ok here we go: la me click on button inside extension popup
- console shows some logs
- nice it's still looking.
.
.
.
- wait! Why is the page not scrolling ???
- looks at logs, WTF nothing changes in logs .....
- OMMMMG a infinite loop .... infinite loop inside chrome ....
- OMMMMMG my pc's gonna crash .
-stop please stop stop.
- wait! how do I stop this?
- tries CTRL+C ... nothing
- tries CTRL+Z ... nothing ...
.
.
.
.
Abort abort Aboooooort.
.
.
.
- Deletes extension from chrome.
-..... loop still running
- clicks on X to close Chrome.....
- not closing O_o
- Oh God, i need to do something before Chrome sucks all the RAM left.
- remembers the savior...
.
.
.
- Task Manager heeeelp me.
- opens Task manager
- chrome is consuming ~ 2 GB of RAM.
- WTF! Kills chrome.

Thanks for reading my lil adventure 😅

It was the first time I worked on a big project with a big team, I looked at the given code and copied their code style.

I finished very fast and everything was working fine, was really proud of myself. I'd like to add some logging though.

Programm failed it was heavily async and parallel so 2 days of debugging had past the whole team was on board nobody knew what went wrong there.

As I stared into the darkness of my code I suddenly saw what went wrong 😂

As I adopted no curly braces style of the Team for

If (condition)
Justine();

And I added logging above without braces everything broke 😂 it was indented properly so as a heavily python user everything looked fine

if ( condition ) {
callback(data)
}
callback(error)

--is a lot different than--

if ( condition ) {
callback(data)
} else {
callback(error)
}

callbacks are not return statements 🤦‍♂️

Writing an if condition instead of properly handling it.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Fucking incompetence

Senior level developer with 15 years of software development experience ...

ends up writing brute force search on a sorted data - when questioned he's like yeah well dataset is not that large so performance degradation will be marginal

He literally evades any particularly toil heavy task like fixing the unit test cases , or managing the builder node versions to latest ( python 2 to 3 ) because it's beneath him and would rather work on something flashy like microservice microfrontend etc. -- which he cannot implement anyway

Or will pick up something very straightforward like adding a if condition to a particular method just to stay relevant

And the management doesn't really care who does what so he ends up getting away with this

The junior guys end up taking up the butt load of crappy tasks which are beneath the senior guy

And sometimes those tasks are not really junioresque - so we end up missing deadlines and getting questioned as to why we are are not able to deliver.

Fuck this shit ... My cortisol shoots up whenever I think of him

" What's the big deal ?
It's just an if condition right ? " - Every manager / product owner ever.

And all the devs be like #facepalm !

Tech Lead: We need to exclude logged in user from our all users API as we don't want to show user's self card on the frontend with other users.

Me (Backend dev): This should be handled by the frontend and they should exclude it by a condition in their loop:

If (user.id != loggedUser.id)
{
// Add card
}

We also need self user at several other places.

Tech Lead: Create a query param filter for that.

Me: We should keep our APIs as generic as possible.

(Real thing starts)

Tech Lead: Which has more processing power frontend or backend?

Me (confused): Backend

Tech Lead: This will add a break to our loop and Do you know how much processing power it will take because of this condition?

Me (dead): WHAAAA....?

if (condition){
return true;
} else {
return false;
}

What kind do you belong to?

When you think the code from companies like Google and Facebook is flawless, but then you look at the source code of Parse 1.5.0 and find an if statement with the condition 'browser' === 'browser'

spent half an hour debugging an if statement that won't return anything but false. Apparently, the condition was:
if (check === true). and the check var was a string! so yeah, spent half an hour to realise I was checking if 'true' is true..

This customer's dev is going to be the end of me. I had to explain to him why it doesn't make any sense to return a value after throwing an exception.

In a function that was supposed to insert a record amd return its id, in the error handling code:

catch(Exception ex) {
//logs the exception
throw ex;
return - 999; //this code will NEVER be reached, and why the f.... - 999?
}
The customer wants us to develop the project together, but he won't listen and always write whatever he wants. Some might be differences in taste. Like me preferring
if(condition) {
return a;
}
return b;

And him preferring :

Foo result = null;
if(condition) {
result = a;
} else {
result = b;
}
return result;

Ok, that I can accept. But things like the one I'm ranting about... I wont.

I'm starting to wonder what was he doing during his "9 years of coding experience"

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

I need a way to explain to a coworker that nesting if statements beyond 3-4 is too much and needs to be re thought out. The dude is the biggest arrow head programmer I’ve ever seen. And he claims nothing is wrong with it, it works.. so what’s the problem.

Since we follow the rule of only one return per function he claims it’s the only way to accomplish the stuff he’s doing.. like if blah function passes... if blah function passss if blah functions passes do this then if blah functions

The if statements arnt just checking some variable conditions.. the conditions are checking returns of functions at each nested level the condition, executes a different function and thus checked for success.

Uggh I just don’t know how to explain to him it’s shit and needs to be re designed

Any ideas??

I was working as an intern at small company, and after a month we signed contract
But each month they had some excuse for not paying me, or any of the employees
So I quit after 3 months without any payment
But I would not have been where I am, if I was not in that difficult condition, it made me work harder, and thought me to always keep my options open :-)

When you find this in the PHP code:

if(condition) {
// code
} else {
die('horrible death');
}

Cheers to the fellow devRanter who added it and also to whoever is going to get to "else" part :D

Fucking hate Qt.

Spent all morning trying to figure out how their bullshit QThreadPool works with their bullshit QRunnable but after a bunch of bullshit asynchronous testing I figured that my thread object was being collected and deleted before I was done with it, for no reason. Now if the race condition was documented... This wouldn't be an issue. But every google search brought up nada. Eventually I resorted to turning off autoDelete on the runnable, but then I just have a memory leak, obviously.

I couldn't find a way to manually clean up a QRunnable in Python. What the fuck.

I just went back to good old fashioned QThreads... This is why I quit Qt in the first place.

Guys seriously why would you buy a macbook if apple will support it for like 7 years then you won't be able to upgrade to newer OSX versions? whereas a good laptop machine could run Linux for a lifetime, you could even change distros if you got bored.

Let me dive into it, If I buy a brand new macbook and use it rarely, its condition will barely change however one day I will get the message you need a greater version to install X app, seriously apple?

Real life scenario: I have an ipod touch 5 i rarely use it, one day i decided to install an application and boom no you can't buddy you need to upgrade the iOS however the currently version of iOS is the latest version i could get for that ipod touch model, so the thing is, I have a perfect condition product that is unusable unless for some music playing and what i already installed as apps, does it look fair to you? I have the same issue with an ipad mini, its condition is perfect, battery life is decent, I can't receive anymore updates, the youtube app stopped working, im stuck again with a product that i can use only to read some ebooks or use youtube through the browser, apple wants me to buy a new ipad which is absurd.

I will never buy an apple product again

Fuck you Apple

procrastinating by getting drunk since 11:00 AM, and writing specs for my (hypothetical) language/os/platform.

feeling righteous retribution because the client made me be stressed for 3 hours due to an issue that THEY caused but for 3 hours the only info I had was "there's a critical blocker issue and we're convinced YOU caused it"

well... no... i did NOT cause the fact that you UPGRADED PHP DURING THE WEEKEND BEFORE MONDAY'S PRESENTATION TO CLIENT (while waiting for an urgent commit from me).

seriously.

also, germans. i've heard many times from other people that they're... basically racist towards us (slavic nations), thinking of us as untermensch, coal-miner peons, but I didn't realize their passive-aggressive covertly smug demanding attitude is due to this, I just assumed it's a reaction to me being incompetent.

so yesterday when we finished the call (in preparation for which I tried to switch to their "client demonstration" branch since that's where the error was, and I wanted a headstart on fixing it, ended up in a place that my today's whole-day task should be "rebuilding the DB into working condition", because there's about 10 "core" sql scripts in two different folders, which need to be run (in a very specific order, of course, which readme tells you, but what it tells you has been outdated at least for 3 months, of course), and

...THE MAIN CORE SCRIPT THAT IS THE FIRST TO RUN, THAT CREATES THE DB schema, HAS THREE SYNTAX-LEVEL typos which fail it mid-way...

...the joys of continuous deployment via scripts, I guess? I would love to challenge any person from them to screenshare to me, manual deployment of the current version from zero, and I would be willing to give the person 20% of my monthly salary if they would be able to do it within 20 minutes.

but... well...
the point is, i should be doing not entirely bullshit stuff.
but yesterday's 6 hours of being in "at full attention because it seems we fucked up" totally convinced me, that today I'm taking a break.

So I'm gonna go buy another 3 beers and continue writing the specs of my dream language/os/platform.

By:Miss. Lucia Wright
Punchline : VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE MY DEAR

 

 

 

Dearest Friend,

My greetings to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am sister Lucia Wright I am married to Archdeacon. Collins Wright whom until his death served as an archdeacon in the St. Micheal's archdeacon in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2005. We were married for eleven years without a child. My Husband died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

Before his death we were both born again Christian. After the death of my Husband I decided not to re-marry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $22. Million in a security and finance company in London for safe keeping.

Presently, my Doctor confirmed to me that I have serious sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Haven known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a church or individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want a church that will use this fund for orphanages,helping the widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavor that the house of God is maintained. The Bible made us to understand that? Blessed  is the hand that giveth'. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don't  want my husband's efforts to be used by unbelievers. I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way,

this is why I am taking this decision.

I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says That? the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace'. I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband's relatives around me always. I don't want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible.

As soon as I receive your reply I will give you the contact of the security and finance  were the amount sum is deposited for you to contact them, I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that Wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply. Due to present condition of my health,I was warned by my doctor to avoid receiving or making any call. For that,I have submitted the information of  the deposit to  my lawyer, As soon as I hear from you I will forward to you the lawyer's contact.

Remain blessed in the Lord,

Miss. Lucia Wright.

Well ok... If you want me to, I can surely help you out 😈😈😈😈😈

People often rant about a missing semicolon,
I added an extra after if condition

if(...);{
}

Compiler can't take this as error.
Debugged the logic for hours,
Wasted a lot of time, lol

Just my opinion, but Code reviews are a shit practice. In my previous company, we used to have one every Saturday. I presented my code and when everyone couldn't find anything to bitch/moan about, they said my code isn't "aesthetic" to look at. It's because I wrote this

if(condition)
do_thing;

instead of

if(condition) {
do_thing;
}

I cringe everytime I remember that incident.

X is typeof(bool)
Then my coworker made this condition
If(x==true)
else if(x!=true)

I keep seeing the word “privileged” thrown around, and this one, I actually understand to be right.

But if you have a mental disease or another serious incurable condition, kick like 5000 points off your privilege scale.

Money and medication don’t always help. I’m ready to give a very, very thick stack of money to anyone who can actually cure what I have. I wish I could do it.

When you have to made a little game with javascript, and because it's your first game you made a beautiful maze with lot of wall.

Ahahah... i'm shit.
I forgot wall have collision.

I'm here now, with 40 different fuckin' walls and much if and else if conditions.

I hate me.

Yeah i know, I can just change my maze but no... I'm lazy. Cry against the collisions is better.

Have good day.

if (condition)
{
one instruction;
}

////////// OR ///////////

if (condition)
one instruction;

One of my coworker change the code from

```
void foo() {
if (condition)
{
}
else
{
}
}
```

to

```
condition ? ifTrue : ifFalse;
```

and add it to changelog

```
- fix bugs // yes with an "s"
- feature added
- some list of the bug fixed.
```

I refer back to the commit, only one Fucking commit and on changes. Bro, what the fuck?

so apparently Windows 10 Pro build... 1803? 1806? (somewhere in there) refuses to allow over 1TB of pagefile if there's more than one volume with pagefiles. The system just hangs when pagefile is used if this condition isn't met.

I know because *i'm batshit fucking insane and am trying to cram 64GB of data into a PNG in PYTHON*.

(this might also only apply to me. your mileage may or may not vary.)

If PyTorch > Tensorflow:
print("True")

Output:
True
True
True
True
......
......
.....
True

Wait a minute? Is this a While True loop?
Doesn't look like an if condition xD

Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit

Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.

I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.

I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:

- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10

uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.

So here's where the story becomes a rant.

In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.

And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.

So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.

The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?

gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3

(:

So my boss has problem with
if(condition){

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

if (condition)
Action();

Curly braces are not that expensive God dammit!

You guys upvoted a lot my previous rant and this makes me partially sorry, because it means you either witnessed or lived a situation like mine!

So to all the devs out there dealing with an awful work condition, an awful manager, awful teammates or awful wathever: stay strong and remember: you are not married to your company nor you are forced to stay there! Search for a better place, because you deserve it! (And also because happy devs make better code, if you don't believe on yourself and want one more excuse!)

Checking out a project on GitHub:

> Using advanced condition-based AI logic, Compactor can skip over files that have been previously found to be incompressible, making re-running Compactor on a previously compressed folder much quicker.
> (Yes, it's an if statement and a trivial hash database, hush)

Some people of devRant are astonishingly stupid.

I post a rant of Ryan Dahl where he says he don't like the unnecessary complexity of modern software. It's an obvious UX rant, but @Crost says that it's about rushing releases and writing sloppy code to "tick the item off my list and solve the problem". @Crost and other boubas, if Ryan's vision was more widespread, macOS, the OS you all hate so much, wouldn't have existed because Linux would have the best UX ever.

I post a rant about Google algo being nasty and throwing triggering shit at me. I previously posted stuff like this, Root confirmed that it works just the way I think it works, it's a manipulative piece of crap. But @Oktokolo says that "The algorithm literally just gives you same of the stuff you just saw", well, I don't know, nice view of the problem for a guy with no computer and no smartphone, @Oktokolo! All that "youtube recommendations gathered us together on some obscure video" comments, and you still don't get it.

I post a rant about how I redesigned a fucking color wheel icon. It shows a "before-after" pic and the colors are obviously the same, but fucking @Oktokolo be popping up again, telling me that I have eye condition (!) that makes me see more blues than yellows.

No wonder you guys don't know how to use CSS, the simplest programming language (yes, it's a programming language).

No wonder smart people like SortOfTested just leave.

I still refuse to believe that devRant user base consists of stupid people exclusively. Perhaps they are just average, and I'm the genius with my Aspergers just getting way more information out of my environment like I always do.

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

This will definetly be an unpopular rant but god damn it I hate to work with untreated depressed people. It's fucking nearly impossible to convince them to try out something new. They are always pessimistic or think that they know everything. They don't care about new things happening around them. Every time in work when we encounter some obstacle it looks like the world has ended for them and every god damn time I need to give pep talks to them like we are in some war and I feel like I need to inspire soldiers to fight even though they are 100% convinced that they will die.

Im done with being a therapist for them. I don't have unlimited amounts of tolerance and energy, I am a human also. I can't keep sugarcoating what I see and I can't continue walking like on eggshels just because somebody is too weak to even take a constructive criticism without becoming passive agressive for days or weeks. I realized that their negative pessimism has started to rub off on me and I think it's time to put an end to this.

Please if you have depression get some help, don't expect that new workplace or employer will motivate you enough to turn your life around. Don't expect that putting on a mask will actually hide who you are and that your condition will not impact others around you in work. Just stop pretending and get some actual help. Start from yourself.

Ffs

var filteredList = HugeList. Where(Condition);
if(filteredList.Count() > 0)
DoSomething(filteredList.First());

Just no. Please.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?

---

Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?

Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.

Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?

Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine

Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.

Dev2:
Where is that logic called?

Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000

This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.

Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.

Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.

Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change

Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.

Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:

Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine

Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.

Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.

Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.

Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.

Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.

Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.

Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.

Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.

Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:

I drank too much last night. I was scared shitless since I really can't deal with hungovers and I am not supposed to drink a lot because of my stomach condition.

Mind you, for me, 8 beers is a lot(drank them in about 2 hours) and went to sleep. I was not all fucked up or anything, i was very lucid and scared of what i was going to deal with.

As i was trying to relax, my psychosis kicked in and I can swear that a little voice told me to calm down, i have been working out like if I was about to fight McGregor and my metabolism is through the roof(which is sometimes alarming) and that I will be good by morning.

Woke up at 11 feeling like a million bucks.

I'm working as an intern in a company and i have another intern that i must supervise (it like internception) .here is my daily nightmare :
- To start this intern never google something she copy paste from my code and if she got an error she send me a screenshot . Once the error message clearly said "cannot call function from array" and even that she didn't know what's the problem (she was supposed to it on array items)
-Before we started working together she spent a week complaining that a sending email function didn't work for her so the manager called me to check what's her problem. She had an antivirus that blocked request via ssl port.all i had done is open the log file and read the errors.
- She had a function should iterate over an array and for each item check a condition this is a part of what she wrote :
For ($i=0;count($categories);$i++){
if ($getrelativepath=null)
{
....etc other​ stuff she copy pasted.
Ps: the name of the function that she must call on array items is getRelativePath

- she wrote once
$response=array();
for (...){
array_push($response,$data[$i]);
return $response;}
She thought the function can iterate and return response at the same time.
- we are working on a website and she told me she doesn't know how to code Javascript and jquery (she think it's a language) and she never knew what ajax is.
- without mentioning the hundreds of empty spaces and multiple empty divs in html .
This year she'll become a computer science engineer .

My biggest influence on coding style is working with other people's code. I know the temptation to write "clever" code and I've been (and probably still occasionally am) guilty of it myself, but it's not until you have to debug someones oneliner iterator which has !(i-j) as the stop condition that you start to appreciate dumb, boring, obvious code.

If having a series of if checks in a long list makes it readable, keep it that way. If it makes it more readable to rewrite it into a nested switchcase with a couple of ternary bits, go ahead. Just don't spend half a day wrapping it up into two layers of abstraction that will require an onboarding process for the rest of the team.

there are two types of people...

if(condition){
//code
}

and

if(condition)
{
//code
}

Guess what below if condition evaluates to true in javascript
-- and they say Javascript is beautiful 🙃🙃

if(test == 7 && test == 9 && test == 11) {
console.log('Hello World!');
}

One time someone decided to make a "Condition Checking Framework" so you could check conditions at runtime using pre-configured XML files.

...yeah, someone made XML based if statements.

...they were very proud.

...

I struggled with weather to post this but I feel like I have to. I didnt want to feed into the fear or give 'them' any more reason to argue against common sense but I guess it cant be helped.

The reason I was gone for a while was because I went and got my vaccination.

In less than half hour after getting the vaccine, I was in the ICU. The staff told me I had a stroke possibly from clotting and inflamation. I couldnt feel my arm or anything below my shoulders. Yes really.

Apparently I "died" for a little while and when they brought me back I was in a coma for almost a week.

I'm back home now and I still dont fully understand what happened. Still have numbness, and horrible headaches, and can barely think straight sometimes, but the doctors told me that I didnt suffer any permanent brain damage according to my scans.

Also they told me I had old damage to my left and right temporal lobe, which makes sense because I have always suffered problems with short term memory and other issues.

And I'm just at a loss how this could happen. I have no serious injuries. We were told this is safe.

And this is the exact reason I didnt want to post it, because now tards will come in and be "lololol serves you right vaxxer!"

If I knew the side effects were this bad maybe I would have changed my mind but no one told me! I mean I think I still would have got it because we have to protect vulnerable people, but still.

The hospital assured me it wasnt the vaccine and must have been an underlaying condition, but I'm not so sure. I just happen to have a pre-existing problem that I dont know about that causes a stroke and paralysis only half an hour after the shot?

And now I dont know if I'll ever be ok. And doctors warned me I may suffer more strokes and to avoid physically demanding tasks for a while. My primary job is construction (not by chooce). Now I face the prospect of not even being able to work my existing job or do the things I love, like hiking, anymore. So much of the world doesnt make any sense right now and I just dont know what to believe anymore.

Tards will probably be in shortly to suggest I check for microchips or test fucking magnets on myself.

No, just stop.

My TL always calls if block as *IF LOOP*...😐

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

Probably one of the sweetest bugfixes is when you can solve random application freezes by rearranging the operands in the if() condition :)

if (isCondition1() && isCondition2()) {...} // freezes the app

if (isCondition2() && isCondition1()) {...} // works just fine

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

After a few months of working in an actually well coded project, I'm back in the one where I find abominations like this every day:
boolean result=false;
<do stuff>
if(<condition>){
<do stuff>
return true;
}
<do stuff>
return result;

Do they even read their code before submitting?

Someone tell me should I just give up because I'm stupid and simple shit escapes me or tell me bro calm the fuck down the guy is full of shit...

Dude says he can't verify 3rd statement in a nested IF - elseif logic because the third check for a false condition is the True condition in the first 2 statements.

So

If (mode) = manual and then
Data(g) /= Status1
Or else Data(g) = Invalid
Then
Do this thing that sounds cool
Elsif
Data(g) = Status1
And then Data(g) /= Invalid
Then
Do something else equally cool
Elsif (mode) /= manual
and then Data(g) /= Invalid
and then Data(g) /= Status1
Then
Do some less cool stuff
end if

TL;DR: There was a Steam bug and I fixed it locally.

Some months ago, Steam had the problem, that if you tried to add anything from the Steam Workshop to a collection, you would get an error like "Process failed: 2", while it was loading the collection list.
I realized, that it would work, but there was a bug in the JS (Watched the network tab in chrome while trying to add to collection). I searched after "Process failed" in each js file and after 30 seconds I found the buggy if. It said something like
if (json.success != 2) {
//do error
} else {
//show list
}

After I changed that if condition to
if (false)...
it worked perfectly, although it would make problems if there would be a server side error.

I've seen some posts on remote work. I believe all companies should permanently implement remote work if they cannot arrange a proper office.
I have been working for a company where programmers and project managers work in the same room, and sometimes I was trying to understand some problem in code when managers were screaming next to me at other developers or on the phone, because they couldn't hear themselves.
This happend so often that I would literally go home burned out.
Also there were people coming in the room to talk to the managers or just passing next to my screen every couple of minutes which was extremely distracting.
I bought a pair of over ear noise cancelling headphones and on top of that used ear plugs, but eventually I developed a very strange stress condition over the course of a year. Also listening to music while trying to focus for 8 hours a day while at work is very tiresome.
Also couldn't quit because it was my first job.

So first rant, here goes weirdness, and also lengthy rant

So in my company we have the hr and accounting managed by the same person which also deals with all things employee related and she had a need for a way to extract a birthday from, what is in our country the personal identification number, things go great i get a formula that performs parts of the magic up to the point where the first digit of the number dictates the gender and century to be used when forming the full year, mind you only the last two digits of the year are in plain within the id number so i thy a number of ideas. After bashing around google sheets for a while ( i've got open office installed and formulas don't export well to the excel that person uses but google sheets does so i built it there).

First idea : make a few conditionals to check for the value so we have 1 and 2 for 19th century, 3 and 4 for 18th century , 5 and 6 for 20th so i go ahead and write my conditions and they fail, all evaluates to false, it cascades through the else variants up to the last one so i'm wondering if the "if" itself doesn't support the or operator, seems it does, next i think it's the bloody condition written wrong so i reevaluate my logic in php in a test script, it works as intended, then i think ok not the right function called, let's see the docs, docs confirm i'm doing it right but what was wrong was the way i was getting that first number, using left seems to produce a string although the base thing is a number, now i start searching how i can cast it, like you would normaly do when the data type is fried, value function appears to be the solution but it isn't working....now i'm thinking "ok so i have a value and different things to print out so let's look for a switch, maybe it can understand that" switch function found under the form of choice, i get it sorted but am stuck wondering why the heck was the if and value combination not working.

Simple answer to that : value doesn't work well with function results, a known bug listed by someone in a comment, a comment i have failed to read for about 45 minutes of trying to understand.

All in all it worked well for the person asking for it so it's nice.

The second you write `else { return false; }` you should lose the privilege of calling yourselves a dev, from then on. Period.

Example,
if(condition) {
// ...some code
return true;
} else {
return false;
}

people who writes 'if (!isActive){} '
I do not do like you.

" Under the hood... the program is using a mix of condition-based learning, procedural generation of sentences/questions, and relational queries based on weighted 'topic' identifiers. It can create its own original statements and questions. It is real-time, and it really does 'think' (an internal dialogue feedback loop)." = If Statement

I saw this in the description for an app aclled "Real AI"

F*ck software updates..

So while working today, one of the IT support guy came and asked to update my windows machine due to some stupid company 'security policy' they were following .. That update took more than 3hrs.. The reason it took so long because I somehow managed to avoid any updates for 6-8 months.

But that is not the end of the story... Windows update was followed by a bios update, some softwares, and at this point I just gave up and went for a cup of coffee, and left my machine locked in a drawer still updating and it will stay in this condition until tomorrow.. We'll see if something breaks after updating.

F*ck why are there so many updates and why each of them requires a f*cking reboot...

Productivity today was less than the number of side projects I completed. 😪

Someone just explain me why. I really can't figure other reason that beeing too lazy to think a condition while writing a "while loop".

At university, a colleague asked me what i think of his code. I see something like that:

while ( 1 ){
...
if (condition)
break;
...
}

Am I a fucking genius thinking that just moving condition into while will improve readability, or am i a fucking stupid ? Really not the first time seeing this, maybe i am missing something.

I'll reply to your long email if I'm going poop. This permutation of events is a necessary condition.

Do you prefer?

var foo = true;
if (some condition){
var foo = false;
}

Or

if (some condition){
var foo = false;
}
else{
var foo = true;
}

What do people like more?
if(condition){
return true;
} else{
return false;
}

Or just

if(condition){
return true;
}
return false;

The condition of software development in 2019: “Please don’t apply if you don’t have the core concepts of programming, and you depend upon copying and pasting the code from StackOverflow/saved file.”

I once sat hours over a bug I couldn't understand until I finally saw the '!' in the condition. I started to use triple '!!!' for a while to avoid overseeing them.

If (!!! enabled) {// like really really not enabled
enable() ;
}

So.. i have been doing internship with a good startup for last 2 months. It was supposed to be a 3 month internship and then maybe a job offer. I accepted this , but with a disclaimer that i will be taking leaves for exams.

They looked like they didn't liked this condition, saying "we won't be giving pay for those days" , "you will need your manager's approval", etc, but later i took 5-6 continuous leaves for my papers and my manager( aka the ceo) wouldn't even read my approval mail ( i did got deductions for those leaves tho, but i was fine with it )

Now the situation is that my final end term exams are coming up. They are supposed to go on for 15 days somewhere in December beginning, but i also need an extra 10-15 days to cover the syllabus for it. Apart from those, there are other college stuff like Second Sessionals, internal practicals ,minor project report submission , etc are also coming up, that are supposed to take anywhere from 1 to 5-6 continuous days in the first weeks of November.

So i asked my company for 2 months of leave to handle my college environment. The tasks assigned to me are incomplete , but i am well versed in those and might complete it if i had more time. I gave them an option that i will resume my work from January and complete my 3 months of internship ( i currently am about to complete 2 months , November would have been the 3rd) , but they said that they are "freeing me" in the October only ( i guess this means that my internship is being terminated and am off from company's payroll). They also asked me to contact company once all exam stuff is over, but yesterday i got suddenly removed from the company's slack group. I am not sure how to look at this.

They have also asked me to prepare a report on what i have done. Now i can send them a report like what i would have given to my college : containing more useless info and a few points on my work . Or i could provide them with a deep report on what i did each day, what are the bugs , what are the resources that i found , what are the things that need to be enhanced, links to important groups and people... Etc . I have so much of information that i fear they might hire someone else to complete all stuff that i have started and my material would give him a kickstart.
But on the other hand , it was their office that i worked in, their ideas that i built upon, so i feel a moral obligation to provide all assistance to my replacement.

What should i do?

(tldr : company asking for a report on work you did during internship that was supposed to be converted to job . wwyd?)

Bad coding style:

bool condition = false;

if(condition) { /* enough whitespace so that braces appear offscreen in editor*/ }{
std::cout << "hahahahaha" << std::endl;
}

Some time I just love comments that are brain twisters.
```
( [ helpers.must_not(helpers.prefix("response", "10")) ] if _type=="detractors" else [] ) )
# Above line prevents the condition 10 is 1 but 1 is not 10 making 10 is 10 and 1 is 1 and 1 is not 10
```

I see a lot of people ranting about programming exams on paper. I acknowledged that not having a texteditor is not ideal. But not having a compiler is essential in testing the students programming skills in the first few courses.To many students are completely dependent on the compiler.

Syntax:
Some students writing C++ code have to try to build their program as many times they have lines because of all the syntax errors they make. Why think about all the ; if your compiler will tell you where they are missing?

Computational thinking:
As a programmer you should be able to look at (your own) code and be able to tell what the result should be. Of course this has its limits, but in the small exam questions they get in the first few courses they should be able to do that. To many first year students write a for loop without thinking about the starting value and the end condition. With the repeated process of running the program, changing the starting value or the end condition randomly they eventually get to the loop they need.

I think people underestimate the value of an exam without being able to compile or run your program. But I like to hear your reactions.

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

Not a rant but a question/style.

What do you prefer and why?:

if(condition)

vs

if (condition == true)

and

if (!condition)

vs

if (condition == false)

vs

if (condition != true)

I give up. I am having trouble understanding Go lang *, & stuff.
attached code does print what fmt.Println has, but the function calling: FindByID is throwing invalid memory address or nil pointer when it attempts to use the result of the code.

Can someone please explain where I'm wrong?
Error log blames the line of "if" condition even though fmt does print its output to console

Stack overflow is full of useless assholes, like I asked a specific question about a problem I am having that is similar to another problem that exists but it is not the same at all in terms of how to fix and instead of helping I’ve got 2 downvotes on it and a comment linking me to a completely unrelated stylistic based question based on something I SAID I HAD ALREADY TRIED CHANGING IN MY QUESTION!!! Here’s my question btw in case anyone can help here before I smash up my laptop 😑:
I have a piece of code in which I am trying to read in words which have been categorised using a number and then placed in a text file in the following format "word-number-" with a new line for each word. However, despite not mixing cin>> and getline and having tried a number of methods I still cannot get it working.
So far I have attempted using a cin.ignore() call to clear any '\n' char's from the buffer, as well as checking if the file is opening in the first place (it is), and using the >> operator instead throughout my code however I could not get that working either. When I place the get line call inside the condition of the while loop, the while loop doesn't run, however when I make the while loop condition a .eof() call it will run once however when I try to print the text that has been read from the getline call it just prints a blank line.
if(file.is_open()){
while(!file.eof()){
getline(file, text, '-');
count++;
cout<<count<<endl;
cout<<text<<endl;
if(count%2 == 1){
wordBuff = text;
}else if(count%2 == 0){
if(stoi(text) == wordClass){
wordList.push_back(wordBuff);
}
}
}
file.close();
}
While I recognise there are a lot of other questions on this out there I cannot seem to get any of their solutions to work and the vast number being related to people mixing the >> operator and getline doesn't help, so any tips or solutions will be of great help

DevRant might not be a perfect place for that question but what the hell.
This is a question for people that do side projects, not only programming but electronic and mechanical as well. If you are a student even better.
(I dont wanna discourage non students but i have limited resources here...)

So the question:
While making a project have you ever had a problem where a limited access to tools was the problem?
(maybe tools was here but nobody wanted to borrow you because of paperwork or some bs.)

I mean that you had a idea or was in middle of a project and you didnt finished/(finished but in crappy condition) because lack of proper tools didnt allow you to?

I realy need your opinion on that subject, i have a nice idea i just have to test the waters.
And please tell me if you are a student or not.

When you test your code, it passes all 100 tests & still shits in the rehersals of a competition 😌 Only because I wrote a wrong if condition🔥

#define someError ( -1)

int func(params *param)
{
//some code
if(condition)
{
someError ;
}
}

Spent like half and hour on debugger thinking why the fuck does it skip my statement. My manager who was passing by saw me puzzled and asked if he could help, so we spent another 10 minutes without success(tho my manager is technical guy but he had an unlucky moment I guess). Eventually senior manager saw our wtf faces and asked what is going on, it took one question for me to light the bulb "someError is a macro right?"

I guess you can imagine my embarrassment at that moment..

PS: Forgot return keyword before the error code.

Been debugging a sp in oracle from 2 days a fucking sp of 2000 lines to see why it was not not giving desirable result. Turns out a fucking variable had a null value which was always satisfying the greater than condition an fucking up the flow. The fucking sp is being used since ages and nobody fucking noticed i mean what the actual fuck. And also the fucking indentation of the code how the fuck are u supposed to know which if ends where i mean come on put some fucking comments to your fucking code if u are gonna make it like it is gonna be the ultimate fucking sp which is being used god only know how many places.

According to project manager :
You will just write an 'if' and two 'for' condition in the code. That's it. 😉

According to developer :
Should I code that generically. 🙄

According to software architect :
Change those variable names. And also that code was written huge unexpectedly, you must move this another service.🤔

According to DB Admin :
Put on an index this table. 🤬😠

I’ve abandoned the classic for loop from my tool belt for quite a long time now. The vast majority of the code is functional.

But today I’ve encountered a problem where I’m considering to use the imperative for loop again because I can’t come up with a good functional approach.

Maybe you guys have an idea.

I have a list of items and I want to make a new list which is like the original list, but it has extra items in between of some other items.

The tricky part is that there is a condition that needs to be checked for each pair of items to determine if the new item should be inserted in between. Otherwise nothing should be inserted.

In my last company, there was a method with so much nesting and if conditions that just putting my condition on top increased the efficiency by 500%.

One of the worst practices in programming is misusing exceptions to send messages.

This from the node manual for example:

> fsPromises.access(path[, mode])

> fsPromises.access('/etc/passwd', fs.constants.R_OK | fs.constants.W_OK)
> .then(() => console.log('can access'))
> .catch(() => console.error('cannot access'));

I keep seeing people doing this and it's exceptionally bad API design, excusing the pun.

This spec makes assumptions that not being able to access something is an error condition.

This is a mistaken assumption. It should return either true or false unless a genuine IO exception occurred.

It's using an exception to return a result. This is commonly seen with booleans and things that may or may not exist (using an exception instead of null or undefined).

If it returned a boolean then it would be up to me whether or not to throw an exception. They could also add a wrapper such as requireAccess for consistent error exceptions.

If I want to check that a file isn't accessible, for example for security then I need to wrap what would be a simple if statement with try catch all over the place. If I turn on my debugger and try to track any throw exception then they are false positives everywhere.

If I want to check ten files and only fail if none of them are accessible then again this function isn't suited.

I see this everywhere although it coming from a major library is a bit sad.

This may be because the underlying libraries are C which is a bit funky with error handling, there's at least a reason to sometimes squash errors and results together (IE, optimisation). I suspect the exception is being used because under the hood error codes are also used and it's trying to use throwing an exception to give the different codes but doesn't exist and bad permissions might not be an error condition or one requiring an exception.

Yet this is still the bane of my existence. Bad error handling everywhere including the other way around (things that should always be errors being warnings), in legacy code it's horrendous.

If you have a blog, How do you decide what to write and publish on it? And, How do I motivate myself to write posts?

Context: I created my blog/website on 29 September 2017. I had a few ideas on writing blog posts(Condition variables in Go, Serverless related stuff and a whole bunch of posts related to wireguard) but every time I have tried write a post, I learn there is someone else who has already written a post on it and probably better than what I could have done, So what is really the point of writing it? And, I feel very insecure about writing posts, I feel like, If I do write a post, every one will know, I don't know anything about **anything**. :( I know about imposter syndrome, But I don't think I have that. I work with a lot of realllly smart people and I don't know as much as them. So, I am actually an imposter.

edit: I am usually active on Telegram, IRC and I try to help out people. It's easier for me to help people in communities like that but doing the same thing with a blog makes me very uncomfortable.

Wanted to add alerting for systemd services in Prometheus today, which spontaneously turned out to be a huge pain in the lower human backend.

For some reason, on Ubuntu 16.04 systemd adds services without unit files for software, that isn't even installed on the damn server (in this case for mysql-server / mysql-common and mysql-client are installed) and lists them as "not-found" and "inactive". The prometheus node exporter that we use, has a little bug in the systemd collector that makes sure that the states of *all* services are collected - even those without a unit file.

so those metrics are pulled by prometheus and now I have to take with those faulty metrics in the condition logic of the alert, because I'm trying to trigger that one on a service which is listed with state "active" = 0 or "failed" = 1.

now guess. right! If the unit file doesn't exist, the regarded systemd service is marked as "inactive", which is another possible state of the metrics in the node exporter. the problem is that the value 1 for state "inactive" means, that "active" has the value 0 (not even wrong) and the alert is triggered.

so systemd fucks up somehow, the node exporter collector fucks up because systemd fucked up and I have to unfuck this with some crazy horse shit logic. w.t.f. to that.

the only good news is, that it works like a charm on Ubuntu 18.04, as far, as I can tell.

while writing this little rant, I thought of a solution.
I could try to change the alert condition to state "active" = 0 AND "failed" = 1.. but that will wait till tomorrow.

one does not simply patch monitoring conditions at midnight..

Yay, nothing better than good ol' change request... Right?

Let's see...
Limit user's ability to do sth, if this condition is met, allow editing global parameter of this condtion, than add per action overrides, on top of that add per-user override, on top of that add per-user overrides to ignore certain overrides.

Shiit man, reading this took me 3-4 times and still Im not sure if I 100% understand

Okay, I think I got this.
setting
per-user ignore flag to setting
override to setting
per-user ignore flag to override to setting
override to override to setting
per-user ignore flag to override to override to setting

design assumption: automatic system that can make life easier
me: designed system to be fully automatic
every single change request: be less automatic, require more user manual and more attention to work

I have a biorhythm thing. Every day at around 5pm I get so drowsy I fall asleep in my chair while working. If I happen to be driving at that time then my drowsiness becomes a potentially lethal condition.

It lasts for ~30minutes to an hour. Every day, no matter what. Coffee won't help at all - if anything, it makes it a lot worse.

It's been like that for well over 10 years. Anyone else has smth similar? How do you fight it? Powernaps help, but if I'm in a meeting I can't have them.

Freaking coding conventions...
Just chose something and stick to it.
How hard can it be?
Apparently this hard:
if(condition){
//SomeCode
}
else
//SomeCode

Recently I've purchased a new laptop and so far it's working smoothly as I expected.

And yesterday I had a dream in which, laptop was got broken in the middle where the screen gets attached. And there was a last day for replacement as per return policy (idk really whether they allows if laptop got physical damage). But I was trying very hard to get the internet to submit a request for replacement and suddenly I woke up and very first I checked the laptop condition.

Anyway today I'll goto sleep and again will try to place replacement request for my laptop before date get expired.

ITS VBA again!

I made two misstakes today.

The first one was touching vba, the second one was assuming things.

The two statements are almost the same except the braces. VBA uses IF [condition] THEN..i soo foulhardly assumed that, when you just chain conditions together with an AND its taken as one statement. While in reality it apparently ignores some conditions and not some others.

I really dont bother with VBA a lot and try to avoid it, but upon occassion the need arises. I still dont know why the brace variant does the expected behaviour while the without does not. It seemingly does not ignore thew first two conditions but the third which makes it even more confusing. But as i dont know enough about VBA to say with confidence its on Excel and not on me i squelch my rage and tend the happiness that it now works..somehow.

I once declared and initialized a variable with a default value all together. (var a= "default";)
And in a certain IF condition the variable value has to be changed, so i was changing the value of the variable inside IF condition. If (x==y) { a=" newVal" ;}
During a code review i was asked why i am not assigning the default value in ELSE condition. And i was like whut 😑.
So........ Some Programmers be like IF shouldn't exist without ELSE.

if(condition gt ""){
...
}

why...
why not?

if(len(condition)){
...
}

Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.

It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.

The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.

The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.

And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible.

PAGE BREAK AFTER IS FUCKED UP. FML

ok guys, if you have any recommendation or alternative to page-break-after, please let me know. im desperately in need of a goddamn solution.

heres my problem, ive got a table, inside the table is the tbody, now i only want two rows to be displayed in each page (im doing html for pdf docs). so what ive been trying to do is adding <tr class="display:block;page-break-after: always !important"> whenever it meets the condition (rowCount%2!=0).

Ive been trying to figure this out for the last 12 fucking hours. cheesus fucking crust. ik this isnt stackoverflow but stack hasnt really been helpful as well :( FML

So, I have a problem I'm working with mongoose in nodejs and I want to make a dynamic query like I have 2 fields gender and type of room and these are optionals so what I did I wrote an if condition that if gender is not undefined a variable which is q += "gender:" + " ' " + gender + " ' " + ","; and when I pass this variable in find() it doesn't work but if i write the same query directly there in find() it works what seems to be the problem?

So pissed off at aws. My goal is to deny the creation of any taggable resource without having a specific tag on the organizational level. (tag policies, service control policies, etc)
Tag policies do not have any effect if the resource is created without any tag. WTF.
I managed to put together a service control policy, that makes it impossible, but since not all resources are taggable, I had to list every taggable resource in the policy and put every read action on a condition. Surprise: the policy exceeda the max size limit. FML.

Can someone please explain me why the fuck the following doesn't work in C#?

Dictionary<string,object> mex=Json.Deserialize(data.ToString())as Dictionary<string,object>;
if(mex.ContainsKey("sessionId") && mex["sessionId"].ToString()!=tkn.GetSessionID())

the previous condition is NEVER true, but the following:

Dictionary<string,object> mex=Json.Deserialize(data.ToString())as Dictionary<string,object>;
if(mex.ContainsKey("sessionId") && mex["sessionId"]!=tkn.GetSessionID())

will actually work as expected.

tkn.GetSessionID() returns a string, of course
and mex["sessionId"] is always an object that contains a string in form of a number, like 152, 552, 6246 and so on and no, it won't ever contain any blank or other character

Fuck this fucking shit from C#

[`script(x) ` for x in iterable if condition else command] [#:#]
Complex code in one line
#python

PS. That can be more complex, but I am lazy to continue with this

ENOSPC = random things go wrong.

There are many synonyms for ENOSPC, like "disk full", "space storage full", "space storage exhausted", "no more space left on device", and those other repulsive errors. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to refer to it as ENOSPC.

If you are in this condition on the operating system partition, get out of it quickly or random things will go wrong. Text editors which write directly to a text file rather than creating a temporary file and then replacing the text file could end up blanking the text file, softwares' configuration files might fail saving which causes a reset, and web browsers might spontaneously reset cookies and lose history.

For example, Firefox has created a gap in the web browsing history, as shown here. The history that is now memory-holed initially appeared to have been recorded successfully. Apparently, a failed write to the places.sqlite database when closing the browser created this gap.