My boss typed up a GitLab ticket that looked like it took at least an hour to make. Screenshots, diagrams, how to reproduce the bug, dreams, hopes, desires, dinner recipes, marriage advice, how to diversify a portfolio. Honestly, the whole 9 yards.

The bug fix was changing a SQL Inner Join to a Left Join. 10 seconds.

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I was mad with thought working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI that were being built at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision in Computer Programming at all.

So keep things simple and use flow diagrams

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

I didn’t. I went for an interview and quizzed this multi-million £ business about their architecture: it sounded awful.
I made some diagrams on how I would’ve done it, how it would scale etc and why. They were blown away and wanted me to implement this structure including the job they wanted to hire me for.
They sent a contract over: had the wrong name on it
They corrected the name but I noticed the salary was incorrect
They sent a third and by this time I was offered an interview elsewhere so I went

The hirer then called me to say he was frustrated I hadn’t signed a contract yet making it sound like it was my fault for not wanting to sign an illegitimate contract. he then went on to say that the salary had been reduced, I asked why and they said they felt I wasn’t a senior developer.
So I took the other job and they kept their shitty architecture 💁🏼‍♀️

Lecturer :" Never ever create UML diagrams because it is a waste of time. Only people who can't code create these stupid things. Just sit down and start coding. "

Her: I'm already in lingerie, how do I turn you on?

Me: Do you know how to make UML diagrams?

Her: What are you doing over there?
Me: I'm working on cryptographic hash functions
Her: is that really homework?
Me: yes, come look with your two eyes.
Her: ...
Me: crazy stuff, no?
Her: I imagine computer science is really just a lot of boxes and arrows.
Me: *flashback to UML, ERD diagrams, and logic diagrams*
Me: you are not wrong.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

10am: meeting invite for 9:30pm my time.

*decline with comment: can’t attend*

9:40pm: email, “is anyone from engineering going to attend?”

*ignored*

10:05pm: email, ok the results of the call were X, Y and Z. But we’ve been asked to supply architecture diagrams (which don’t exist). Can we do this today?

*ignore*

10:45pm: email, guys this is urgent can we do this ASAP!

*ignore*

... welcome to the new world bitches, bite me

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I really couldn't stop thinking about my program and working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI progrmas that were being made at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision to enter into Computer Science at all.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

I wish all open source desktop applications had the same combination of expert features and polish as Blender.

The state of FOSS applications for creating diagrams, DB management & ERD, drawing SVGs, editing video, slideshow presentations, document processing, etc -- Yeah just all of it seems to be either stuck in some 90's UX paradigm, or it's a basic-as-fuck Electron app with 12 buttons for toddlers.

I know... I know... it's FOSS, can't be entitled.

But there's a part of me that really wants to be.

Fuck it, I'm just going to be entitled.

FUCK YOU LAZY FOSS DEVS, GET YOUR FUCKING SHIT TOGETHER AND MAKE SOME MODERN APPS. THROW YOUR GTK TOOLKIT BULLSHIT IN THE TRASH, GO CHOKE ON YOUR RETARDED WINDOWS-95 THEMED TOOLBARS, AND START MOTHERFUCKING COMPETING. YOU'RE BEING SURPASSED BY VENDOR LOCKED $50/MONTH CLOUD ABOMINATIONS MADE FOR COKE SNORTING DIMWITS. DON'T GIVE ME THAT "BUT PEOPLE WORK ON IT FOR FREE" CRAP, IF BLENDER CAN MAKE A GREAT COMPETING PRODUCT THEN SO CAN YOU.

Ah, completely unjustified and unfair.

But it still feels really, REALLY great to get it off my chest.

Now that I have descended from my soapbox, I'll go drag my useless developer ass over to the nearest FOSS project and see how I can contribute to a slightly less depressing future.

I draw things! I bet we all draw things, but I still think it counts as nerdy.

...unless you draw UML diagrams on whiteboards. Doesn't count.

... unless you draw stick figures battling ON those UML diagrams. Counts.

... unless those stick figures battling demonstrate dependencies or demographics. Doesn't count.

... unless you put little pirate hats on them. Counts.

... unless you're contracting for a Somali counter-piracy recon project. Doesn't count.

... unless you also include dank memes. Counts.

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

i'm feeling so sick right now.

PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!

at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.

i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.

it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.

ASCII art diagrams as "documentation". Don't be this guy.

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

So you want full stack engineers to: design, do UX, create front end, build backend and deploy it in your mono repo stupid manual deployment "kubernetes cluster", add monitoring alerting manually, review others PR, QA our own apps and features, manually sync to Production, use VPN otherwise we cannot connect to anything, 2factor auth, do SRE, architecture diagrams, demo, run agile ceremonies, and learn a legacy coding language which was never mentioned in the job description. Did I miss anything?

Manager: I want you to make an architecture diagram for this system
Me, not sure what diagram but ok asking my senior then
Senior: You know those diagrams you learned in uni? Yeah, do whichever you think is suitable
Me, left to my own devices, makes a shitty use case and sequence diagram
Manager: We don't actually do diagrams like yours here. But I like it so lets stick with it.

😱 Ok. Cool.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

I am Front End dev at a medium size company and I had to teach my PM how to create use case diagrams... Things are getting better and better at this dream job.

Team lead wants me to document a 7000 line code in 2 days. Tell me about it

!rant

TLDR; Lost passion after a few years, wasted a year, went on vacation without really any technology, found my passion and am excited as hell for 2019.

After programming for nearly 5 years, I’ve hit the point of not wanting to program anymore. I’ve burnt myself out, and haven’t had a vacation in 8+ years so we’ve finally decided to take one. I’m not going to say it’s a full blown vacation, but a semi-vacation since it’s with my parents also so I do have to do a few things I’d prefer not to such as meeting relatives.

I didn’t have the motivation to work on any new projects, finish any projects I actually enjoyed, I just did a few side projects for friends that took me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes every few weeks. In general this year has been garbage in development terms, I’ve lost passion. It felt like a chore, I didn’t find the entertainment I once did.

I’ve been away from technology for about 2 weeks now, and have less than a week left before I fly back and I’m excited as hell. During this break away from technology (with the exception of browsing devRant once in a while), has me excited to work on many projects and actually start learning and improving my skills. I’ve actually gained the motivation to work on 2 projects that have been planned for nearly 2 years now, I’ve noted down ideas for them, made diagrams, etc, just never had the passion to develop them. 2019 is going to be one hell of a year, since I get back almost at the end of November, and December I have a few business meetings and University exams that I have to prepare for. Excited to see these projects through, one is going to be for the hell of it, just been a passion project I’ve wanted to do for years now. The other project is actually a project for one of my sub-companies that hasn’t officially released since I didn’t have the passion to work on it. (Not going to go into full detail yet about the companies/projects, going to save that for the future)

Alongside that, I’m excited since my main company that is totally unrelated to technology, is set to do some massive moves during 2019 also. Looking forward to that, and being able to launch my dream company (the sub-company I mentioned before).

Time for sleep now, goodnight! (Wrote this after a few drinks and in the middle of the night, hopefully it’s not full blown garbage)

Random fact #1

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) was producing Intel 8080 clones (AMD Am9080) before developing own CPUs. Originally they were produced without Intel license. This clone was developed basing on pictures of Intel 8080 itself and pictures of logic diagrams. These processors were much cheaper than the original model. Later AMD and Intel came up with agreement and the Am9080 was fully licensed making AMD official second party vendor.

And yeah, few years later and we got a war between two of those giants. Remember when in mid 2000s AMD almost beat the Intel marketshare?

Bonus Fact: there is AMD logo on Ferrari Formula 1 cars since 2002 (look at the front wing)

Hi Lead Architect,

Oh? You want me to explain how database clustering works? I guess you're just testing me because I'm new and junior.

Oh, and also explain how load balancing works? And what a bastion host is?

What's the architectural intent of this project? Let's have a look at the documentation and diagrams you have been creating of your designs.

You don't have any? That's okay, you've only been leading the architect team on this project for a year now.

Why don't you just keeping asking the most junior dev on the team about how the fuck you are supposed to do your job. As if I know how to do your job when I have zero training and am just expected to know everything.

Oh, its 3pm and you're heading to the pub. That's cool, I'll just guess what I need to build.

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

So, giving a talk soon and marketing wanted to see the slides.

Comments come back. On every slide that is purely visual they've suggested I add a title and a para or two of text.

Fuck you and your fucking slideuments. If you want them to read the material send them a memo and save me the fucking trip.

Or even better, turn up yourselves and read lists of bulletpoints off the screen for 30 mins while I sit in hotel hot-tub with a cocktail.

I hate the inanity of corporate life.

Next time I'm going to send you a blank slide and live draw my diagrams. See how you like that, arseholes.

Last week's Android development time breakdown:

21.9% Managing state
17.7% Referring to lifecycle diagrams
15.1% Waiting for Gradle
8.5% Reading the official docs on how to use component x
8.4% Reordering auto-generated ConstraintLayout XML
7.5% Swearing
4.2% Googling “Stack overflow component x is deprecated”
3.9% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 24 or lower”
3.7% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 21 or lower”
3.2% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 19 or lower”
2.9% Googling “Stack overflow callback y called twice”, realising its a feature and not a bug, swearing a lot
2.0% Checking if Flutter is mature yet
1.0% Implementing business logic

Ahhhhhh anyone here use yED? I don't know how i even worked out diagrams before this. For the past couple years this has been my choice diagramming tool <3

Top image is before, bottom is after a single click. I just join boxes and let it work it out at the end. Then obviously do some adjustments to read how I like but seriously makes it easier to trial various layouts. I even make stuff in yED before recreating in something like Visio, if need be.

If anyone got another diagramming tool they like to use, post below (trying to add new stuff to my toolbox lol)

EDIT: Ahh, tried but you can't see the lines after the image gets compressed after upload (and DarkReader on chrome isn't exactly helping :p).

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

Does this actually explain anything to anyone?

There's nothing that I hate more than UML diagrams. Shit is so out dated and I have yet to talk to a company thats even heard of it let alone use it. Biggest waste of time and money in the world

Keeping Excel sheets with diagrams of my progress through different series (TV shows, comics, etc.)

(short story)

happened a couple of months ago. I was drawing some diagrams on the board -- planning new infra for the app. While explaining all this to the analyst I needed some random number. It was smth like 1470285206. Half an hour later I need another random number. And I again come up with the same exact sequence....

It was both funny and spooky at the same time. Apparently my biological RNG is utterly broken.. Either that or my subconsciousness wants to tell me something about an early morning of 2016 Aug 4.

Office prank of the day, bunch of arrogant computer scientists that I have to work with was supposed give a presentation about their algorithm; since I despise them I changed their entire printed materials (diagrams and so on) to comic sans. Our boss is an obsessive designer. Watching him cringe was the happiest I have been in weeks.

Pet Peeve... If you are a creator, you are largely doing technical content, and the channel is not about your personality. Then I don't want to see your stupid face. I want to see technical info like text, graphics and block diagrams. I don't exactly know why this bothers me, but it does.

I need this, a dry erase desk for when I don't want to find paper...

Taking a 4 month Software Engineering course in University. Spent the last 2 months making Traceability Matrix, Component Diagrams, Deployment Diagrams, Sequence Diagram and not a single line of code was written.

Is this how it works in Industry as well? Lol.

I beg the open-source community to draw more diagrams

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

Are there more people here who prefer codual over visual?

UML diagrams are fun and all, but I personally prefer to have a code example over an uml diagram when it comes to a few classes that work together. Not exactly sure why I prefer it that way, in my head I translate uml to code in order to understand it better and if you show me a piece of code I don't have to do that translation.

I wonder what you guys' thoughts are 🤔

As I am now in a leading position in the middle of a agile transition:

has anyone got a source for a project done completely with user stories?

I am searching a real life example with already finished stories an active backlog and a documentation.

I just can't wrap my head around it. When and what do you document? In which Form do you document? How are you writing user stories with more content like diagrams and such?

(we use jira and confluence but just started with stories)

I read some articles on the topic and watched some talks but sill don't get the picture.

Anyone draw out the logic of a process by hand before coding much?

I've been doing that more and more, and it's handy but ... it's also kinda tedious making them on paper or even just in the VS Code extensions I've tried.

I'd really like a way to bust out quick flow charts in VSCode and there's a Draw.io add on and it's ok but lotta fidgeting with flow chats and dragging stuff.

It doesn't have to be pretty and it doesn't have to be super feature rich.... just want to quick bust out a series of steps flow chart style or ... hell any way fast and visual like.

Anyone use anything they really like?

Own before you do it.

Create user stories, fill tickets, draw diagrams, send approval mails, fill docs, write in the company blog and then some, before you even think about writing a line of code.

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

There is a commercially sold ERP solution that has it's DB schema in excel and Other documentations in MS Word. And its not even properly structured, no schema diagrams, last updated for a 4 year old major release 😒😫.
I have to develop a custom module for it and that requires building an ActivexDLL Project in VB fucking 6 😭😭 .

VB6
Unstructured Documentation
Legacy code
Incomplete documentation
FML

Tell me if you want ss in comments.

A PM who suck-up to a creative technologist. He comes up with ideas while me, the programmer, have to figure how to get it done.

PM expects me to explain how things can or cannot be done. I spent whole day drawing diagrams explaining things, while the creative technologist makes demand after demand.

For me, the worst project manager is one who doesn't take care of their people.

N The worst creative technologist, is one who won't go do their own fucking research and expect the developers to do it.

Both fuckers are management roles. Go figure..

How long do you recommend 'sticking it out' in a new role? I moved 2,500km for a new job and so far I have been training on the worst development platform I have ever seen, produced diagrams, printed documents and taken meeting notes 😡. #IJustWantToProgram

Does anyone of you know a good tool for creating UML-Diagrams ?
Preferably free and with a linux-version.

I've been working for 6 months now, and the boss tells me he's not satisfied with my work compared to someone that has 15+ years experience. He clearly states that for him - it's more important lines of code, than planning and defining the architecture which he don't like because that doesn't provide anything...

Of course, I can just jump into the code if that is whats important. I've seen the code produced by the other guy, and its shit.

The guy is a talker, and knows how to talk. I'm more like, hey lets create a simple design prototype or do some UML diagrams to get a better visualization of what we need.

Anyway, its just annoying to be compared to someone with many years of experience, its not that I can achieve it overnight...

I feel like a lot of us write code without thinking it through beforehand. I spend more than half my day working everything out via diagrams on paper or lucidchart or with a coworker/previous maintainer (if applicable) before line #1 of code is written. Ideas are to code as source code is to build products - the latter is made (essentially by rote) from the former.

I'm glad I work from home thanks to 'rona, but before that, gah. Everyone else was visibly grinding away, and here I am staring into space thinking about the problem/project I'm working on. I'm not gonna sit there all day debugging code I once rushed. There's a reason the sites I maintain stay up and untouched by hackers (I think, you can never be sure...).

Anyone find sequence diagrams useful? I’m working with a BA who loves creating these things—he has a tool he knows and clearly wants to get his money’s worth.

Just seems like busy work to me. Takes more time to understand them than if he just explained the concept in text.

When I rented my server I uploaded my webpage (including resources like videos, images etc) which is about 150GB as .tar and extracted and setup all that stuff and deleted the backup from my PC. The uploading process took me about 4 days. I opened the site of my server provider and reloaded it.. Aaaaannddd whoops. All data gone.

On my server hosters webpage when you click the reinstall button for installing a Linux image you get returned to the main page of that server after it finished installing. If you then reload that page which basically only shows some monitoring diagrams and shit the server gets reset again.

Damn. I lost so much good porn on that day...

Just finished making an ER diagram for the 5th time now.
It was less painful this time. (Thanks draw.io)

(About the 4th ER diagram - le professor says "It looks like a flow chart, that's not right", but it's clearly not?)

I'll have to submit the draft tomorrow to the professor, I just hope that he green lights it so I could finalize the project report.

I hate making ER diagrams now.

Client complains constantly over image quality.
Then continues to upload diagrams as jpg not as png and then is bothered about compression artifacts...
It also doesnt help he works on a retina screen and we had to migrate his tiny thumbnail images from his old website.

Maybe I should buy a microscope... Or maybe send him the imagemagick documentation and he can choose the parameters to his liking?

I love developing JavaScript for Node.js applications until i have to create sequence diagrams with a lot of async calls :/

I asked at an interview if they documented their code with class diagrams.
One of the interviewers told me: "Good code doesn't need a class diagram"

...

*TRIGGERED*

The only relationships that exist in my life, are the ones in my projects' ER diagrams. And they too are infected with foreign keys..!

I found programming really out my focus. Initially when i was exposed to it, My friend showed me a code of C and C++ and i was like it looks so untidy and annoying like colons and semicolons in between of random text sentences. In my first semester i had this Programming course of C and C++ and i had to deal with it. The lab sessions were totally bouncers for me, i cant understand any anything. During writeup submissions i used to copy someone else’s code (Yeah, i wrote down the whole code with a pen on a paper including every syntax). Writing down codes gave an idea about the flow of code, i didnt knew what was really happening in the alogorithm but atleast i can understand which is used for what. I also used to copy Flow diagrams of code so i used check both of them side by side and try to link. This helped me atleast to begin with and deal with that course. As semesters incremented coding was more of a need in every course. And i started liking it.☺️☺️

Initially i didn’t had wifi at home so i was totally unaware about youtube tutorials and courses. The only typing of code was done in the lab sessions.
This was my first experience regarding coding.

What was yours?

I was around 12. My mother just took a new position as Algorithmic and programming teacher (Mathematics before) for high school seniors. (Around 16-17 in Russia back in a day).

So sometimes, I waited for her after school, listening (just a bit) what she was teaching.

Then one day I was waiting while she was giving an exam of 2 hours to seniors (End of year exam). In 20 minutes, I doodled a thing on a piece of paper and showed my mother. I was correct on all questions and all flow diagrams (Was not called like this back in a day).

From this moment, I knew, programming and logic are for me.

At the end of high school (So I was 17), I received the collective message from most girls in my class saying : “ You felt in love with computers and ignored us”. They were right ☹, I realised it way later.

!rant

Buy some colored pens. The more colors the better.

I did it out of curiosity. Ended up being a life saver when taking notes and planning work on paper. It probably cut my work in half. I spend more time writing stuff on paper and planning stuff, but when I do write 10 lines of code, they turn out to be pure gems fitting perfectly in the entire structure. I write them with tons of confidence, knowing that I had thought of everything and I didn't forget anything, because everything is right there, in color, on the diagrams that I drew.

Finished a validation library and knowing the common excuse for not using code already written (devs come down with 'not invented here' syndrome) is "I would have used it, if there was documentation". Spent this week documenting each class/method, diagrams, scenario based code examples, sent to my boss for review ...

Boss: "Wow...this is fantastic. All our libraries should have this level of documentation. You even updated the project's Nuget package to include a link to the documentation. Devs won't have an excuse now. I'll clear your plate for the rest of the year so you can get started."

What the hell did I just do to myself? FML.

Best: Public docs, especially quick start guides... That actually work.

Worst: my team's. It's basically non-existent... I'm the only one that writes docs and design diagrams and well that's mostly for myself to remember/understand stuff and use when ppl ask....

My first response is usually like: "Here RTFM... (Now go away because I have other things to do)"

I want to read a good Software Engineering book. A modern one, which contains new agile approaches, useful diagrams, etc. Not the classical, not so useful, class diagram.

What do you recommend? I'm currently more into web and mobile apps, and I want to be able to describe my backend and frontend with useful diagrams which describe better to users and other developers my desired design.

Who the fick asks for BPMN diagrams, Disaster Recovery diagrams and Business Continuity Plan for a SaaS product that is deployed in cloud (Azure) ??

This is a simple app/dashboard that just showcases some data in fancy charts. It shows the data YOU feed. Why do you need BPMN diagram? What am I supposed to put? "Client loads data" and "user sees data"?

I already linked Azure's page on DR. Do yiu want me to copy-paste the contents from that link?

Clients are too much PITA!!!

What free tools do you use for creating uml diagrams #askingforafriend

How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:

Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.

Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....

Drinking the first beer.

Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...

First beer poof.

Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...

Opening next beer...

Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...

Oh. Another half bottle gone...

Filling in the columns...

Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...

*burping*
*cracking finger joints*

Now let's get to the sad part...

Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...

Cost and description as columns.

Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.

Another beer...

Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.

Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...

SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.

Now we can add another sheet.

Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.

Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...

Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.

Why do I want to get even more drunk.

Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.

Let's add some colored highlighting ...

Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.

Too much red.

More beer.

Don't give a fuck.

Hm.

Time for some whiskey.

What else is there to do....

Oh yeah.

Diagrams.

The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.

Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*

Hm. More whiskey...

Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.

Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....

"Copy paste the last mail from last month"

Hm.

Ah.

*sipping whiskey*

Spell check extension - to the rescue.

Thesaurus *burps*.

Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.

Uh....

Trying to attach file...

*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*

Done.

Damn.

Need to press send button.

*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*

Done.

*Pressing computers power button*

Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.

*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*

Couch ... Where Couch...

After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.

(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey)

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Can someone recommend me good alternatives to draw.io to create class diagrams (UML) for programming online?

These days I've been noticing how important is to know how to create a good diagram to convey an idea. Also, working in a big company I noticed that we use UML diagrams for a lot of things, which is very useful to understand the architecture of the system or the design of the code. Does anyone here know some book or article that can help me to learn how to better convey ideas using diagrams, how to make one, and what diagram to use? I am not thinking about something very specific to UML, because I see that sometimes we just do a diagram that makes sense without following any standard.

Do you plan the application, on which you will be working, before you actually begin to write code?

I do web development and usually begin with something rough or look at designs of other developers. Like an dashboard example, when I see an image on google search that I like, I try to make something simmilar and when I have the surface I can add the functionality and improve the design.

Sometimes I have to make changes in half of the development because at the beginning there was no assumption that there will be a need for a certain functionality or I change a implemented feature to work properly, so I have to refactor something I made as a ground on which other parts will rely, although if I had planed the application in detail, maybe it wouldn't come to such refactoring.

In school we did prototypes, used to draw flowcharts and hold on a precedence diagrams that we made, but now at work when I receive an projekt I just begin to code :-D maybe this should change, how do you do it? If you plan your project, how do you do it?

As a student, I really do understand the need for the diagrams made for a system, diagrams such as
ER Diagram
Use case Diagram
Class Diagram
etc

Like it's literally pointless...

My manager put "Architecture Diagram" onto my list of tasks. "Do you have a diagram"? came up in our last call.

No, I don't have a diagram like your useless block diagram that shows nothing of what we've done. Instead I have a ton of wiki pages, real documentation, READMEs in each git repo that are detailed and complete, unless you're repos of empty directories, `.keep` files, empty READMEs and blank "TODO" wiki pages!

ERM Diagrams.

Fuck companies that want you to build new systems that are a superset of what they already have when they can't even tell you what they have now. Fuck you with your bullshit, nonsensical, self-contradicting, third-assed diagrams--some half-UML, half-clip-art, half-pie-chart drivel. If you're the CTO of a company and you want me to think long and hard about rebuilding your distributed systems, you can think long and hard about expressing what you already have. And NO: a verbal explanation pow-pow WebEx over your DSL connection with your protege that mumbles worse than an Atlantan rapper doesn't count as fucking "knowledge transfer" of your fucking architecture, FOR FUCKS SAKE.

<rant>
So we've been doing the final project for college which has 2 parts

1. preparation of a project
2. creating an application

The first part wasn't a problem, making UML diagrams(ERD, Class Diagram, Use case) and SCRUM related documents.

But BLOODY FUCKING HELL was the second part bad.

You get a premade preparation for the second part of the exams... it was the most disturbing thing ever! The ERD which you have to follow is entirely made out of varchars, terribly built for the system you're creating by the way.

We ended up being able to use our own preparation instead after going back and forth... but damn. A company makes these things and the government pays millions for it! What the fuck are they doing? Hiring third graders to play around with lines??

No wonder IT is looked down upon in the Netherlands.. the government is entirely at fault due to their terribly outdated exams, projects, etc.

I thought i had seen it all... but holy fucking shit

</rant>

Question to all those who have worked with software architecture: What is your approach when implementing architecture and design into actual software?

I find it very hard to translate UML diagrams and architectural requirements into working code and I feel like there is quite a big "gap" between the two. How to you breach that gap and manage to maintain a clean and comprehensive architecture in your project folders?

What could've been an interesting Software Design course turned into a frustrating buggy, uselessly time-consuming experience because of the shitty software we had to work with (ironically). Creating diagrams in fucking Papyrus for a Java 3D engine simulator that stopped being supported 8 years ago was definitely a stupid educational choice. Instead of focussing on understanding how to effectively draw and design such systems, we spent hours and hours trying to figure out the bugs in these pieces of software and finding workarounds, because we are of course not allowed to use other tools. What a waste of time.

Hi, first post here, I'm wondering, does anyone actually use uml diagrams? I completed a course in first year, apparently "system analysis and design" means draw uml diagrams all class, then draw more later, without ever actually touching a text editor.

It's weird how you can't solve a problem in front of elaborate diagrams, 15 fucking tabs on your web browser and a shell/compiler but the moment you drop your pants to poop, all the answers to every questions ever asked in the history of human civilization flow into your mind and you feel like that lady in Indiana Jones and the Cristal skull.

"Cover it! Covert it!"

It should be possible to prove the collatz conjecture by mapping the unit digit transitions between numbers, namely into a finite state machine. From there we could use predicates and quanitifiers to prove, by process of exclusion, that for any given combination of 10s digit and 1s digit, no number can transition to anything but whats specified in the state machine assuming that number equals x in x3+1 or x/2

Ipso facto, a series of equations proving by process of elimination, that state machines transitions are the only allowable ones, would prove the collatz conjecture by proving the fsm is a valid representation for any given integer N.

I'm actually working on it now but I don't know enough about modular arithmetic and predicate logic to write a proof. I just have the state diagrams on some dot matrix paper at the moment.

If anyone wants to beat me to it, feel free.

So for example any number ending in 13, will, after x3+1, end in 40.

Any number ending in 40 will end in 20. Any number ending in 20 will end in 10, which will end in 5 as the unit digit.

It's easier to prove in the single digit case, and the finite state machine for that is already written, at least on paper.

I'll post pictures when I get a chance.

When tackling a solo project, which one of these approach do you usually use (and prefer):

A) Mash up something that works ASAP while ironing out bugs and cleaning up code later on - a.k.a. "duct tape programming".
B) Have everything planned before you even start coding. Strive to get everything right from the get go. UML diagrams galore.

p.s., If none suits you, feel free to tell us about your preferred approach anyway. Those 2 are the only thing that came on the top of my head at the moment.

p.s.s., I'm all for A. Should you care about it.

Any good data modeling software? I want to be able to draw ER diagrams and the program to generate me entire SQL code.

The Java lead thinks only his team has the secret knowledge of UML, and the authority to use diagrams.

(sigh) we work on JavaScript.

any one else use plantuml for sequence diagrams flowcharts er uml etc? if so which editor?
I use brackets because of its live preview

Im a student, and im learning coding, but analisys too( diagrams, use cases, documentation).

I really love code, but not feel the same about the other part.

Do you feel the same ?

That horrible moment when your 'documentation is something that happens to someone else' approach (due to lack of time) catches up with you and you have to go back and generate data dictionaries and diagrams on a deadline.

Gah

Client complains not enough documentation. Wants an arbitrary number of pages in a document on our modules. Wants more uml diagrams. They are going to get so many uml diagrams!
So complex they must be right, because nobody can read them. Sick of doing this draft after draft after draft...

I was wondering how I can go about with the development of an Android app.
I've made a few small apps, but I want to make something a little more complex.

I've made the use case diagrams, high-fidelity prototypes and the database schema is almost ready.

I'm just stuck with how to model the app. Which architecture to use? How to actually implement a complex project?

Is it just me or are graphical software verification libraries useless? I have had to take courses in several is them at uni. Usually, the diagrams end up being externally complex and more prone to errors than the software they are supposed to verify.

The fact that the "final project"of one course was to verify 100 lines of java in 2 weeks. Any beginning programmer could read the java code and confirm it was correct. The diagram my group produced could only be verified by a team of experts over the course of a year. How is it valuable to spend time "verifying"software if the verification needs even more verification than the original software.

Maybe I'm missing the point but I just don't get why there is a market for expensive propratary software in this area.

Computer science in high school...
Creating algorythm block diagrams using a beta version of app that is 15 years old
and is FULL of bugs.
You do not even have conjunction or disjunction
operators, so you have to create more blocks in order to check more complex conditions, for example.
So I asked the teacher if I can solve those tasks
in C++ and the answer was NO ...
:(

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

had a uni exam in databases (just closely didn't make it😒)
it didn't even have sql in it!?

questions about ER diagrams and draw a diagram, functional dependencies with given dependencies, find candidate key and what not, work on a b-tree (miserably failed😣), datalog (who the fuck cares about datalog? the least expected topic) and transaction management/serializability

whose idea was it to not include sql?? isn't it one the fundamental parts of relational databases?

What Software do you guys use for drawing (beautiful!) architecture diagrams (Layer Diagrams) for complex software?
I know the standard tools for UML Modelling (starUML, UMLet, even Visio/ppt etc.), but drawing components is not really sexy with them (especially, when it comes ro including logos,...)😃
Are there any good tutorials for using gimp/inkscape or even own tools for this?

Another student rant..
So I have a midterm exam tomorrow. It's a software engineering course. We're being forced to basically memorize a ton of shit about stuff like requirements engineering, activity diagrams and interaction models...
I have never been this bored in my life. Especially while studying something computer science related.
We are also developing a project for the course and that is a ton a fun and I'm learning a lot. But still, this isn't how I want to spend my weekend.
How did you go through the times where you had to learn a lot of bullshit that you didn't excited about? You did go through this shit right?

You know what I think they should extend chatgpt to do ? Output some of it's results in math latex or circuit diagrams in jpg or some popular xml format

I cant wrap my head around designing a database system from scratch. Period.

I use ER diagrams to do it. But still i can't figure this piece of shit out.

It usually goes in these steps:

1) i design a very simple minimal system, turns out it works but HELL NO how unsalable it is. Literally its so statically built that i have to redesign the whole infrastructure and models from scratch

2) i redesign from scratch but this time i overengineer it. Overcomplex as fuck. So complex i get lost easily and have to redesign the whole shit all over again this time copying others similar infrastructure with help of chatgpt

3) chatgpt of course fucks everything up even more to the point that my shit can't compile anymore. Fuck this shit

I think i lack the correct way of thinking and approaching this. College has taught me bullshit and confused me even more which is why im so fucking lost. Can someone explain me How to think in the correct mentality when designing an ER database system from scratch.

How do i properly design a scalable database infrastructure as ER diagram for a subscription and chatting models, similar to onlyfans infrastructure?

Drawing pictures in your mind. This is something I have always struggled with.

Is there a set of exercises a person can do to develop imagery in your mind?

I have had times when I closed my eyes that I experienced what I would call imagery that rivaled or was more detailed than what my eyes fed me. But I only experienced this and did not create what was in the imagery. It has only been once or twice. I know that when I start to dream I can start seeing things with imagery, but I still cannot control this directly. I had one lucid dream where I woke in my dream and was able to construct things for a short period.

What I would like to be able to do is construct shapes and diagrams in my head. Perhaps visualize how an algorithm might function.

Is there a way to learn this?

If a swat team comes now, I won't be surprised. I was reading the Zodiac's letter when I came across the bus bombing one. And the site included his diagrams! As I mentioned before I am on serval watchlists but I think I crossed the line with bomb diagrams.

It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.