!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.

Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.

*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*

Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?

Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.

Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.

He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.

Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.

When code is more important than life

The beginning of my freelancing time. I was so naive. Didn't even used contracts...

This one client wanted a website with 2 specific features until a certain time. It should look nice, but only the features functionality was defined. All seemed reasonable at first.

I delivered 2 weeks before the deadline. The client was furious, as it didn't look like they imagined. They wrote me 8 lengthy emails with very fractioned feedback. It was becoming unreasonable.

But hey, I'm a newbie in this business. I have to make myself a name, I thought.
Oh was I naive....

This whole project went on for 2 more months. The client was unhappy with every change and 2-5 emails a day with new demands were coming in. I was changing things they wanted done 2 days ago, because they changed their mind.

Then they started to get personal. They were insulting me and even my family. My self-confidence dropped to an all-time low.

In the end I just sent them all the code for free and went to therapy.

BTW: this was also my most important experience, as things went up hill from then on. As Yoda once said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *

Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.

Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.

Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?

Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *

New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?

Me: nobody believed me when I said that.

Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?

Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?

New senior: junior dev is right.

Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!

Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.

...

I'm tired of this shit.

I was newly hired to company. A customer came in yelling saying "there's a bug, this should do this but it's doing that..."
PM came to me and told me to "urgently fix this as this is an important customer".

So I started debugging for hours and asking around and all follow devs agreed that this is a bug. Then I found it!! And it was clear that it was not doing what the customer wanted.

I decided to look through this code history and found out that this part of the code wasn't changed for a year but the code commited before it did actually what the customer was expecting (whaaaa....)

Gathered the devs and the PM showing them what I found. They all looked at each other and then one said "ouuhhh right...yes it was doing this but we changed it to that..."

Turns out it's a feature not a bug, and everyone forgot about it.

FML

CW: The SQL injection vulnerability isn't important because our code is proprietary so hackers won't find it.

Me: <censored>

Why code review is important.

Boss: "Here's our new intern! He's a bloody genius doing apps! Perfect for that important project that shouldn't be trusted to an intern!!"

*takes intern 9 weeks to do a login view without any real backend*

Turns out the guy couldn't do shit but steal others code and change background color.

Boss: "He wasn't very good..."
Me: "You interview him. How about you bring a developer to the interview next time..."
Boss: "Doesn't matter. The app needs to be done the day after tomorrow, good luck"
Me: "............"

*puts on coffee, cries, programs the app in miserable silence*

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

Here's my piece of advice for new devs out there:

1 - Pick one language to learn first and stick with it, untill you grasp some solid fundamentals. (Variables, functions, classes, namespaces, scope, at least)

2 - Pick an IDE, and stick with it for now. Don't worry about tools yet. Comment everything you're coding. The important thing is to comment why you wrote it, and not what it does. Research git and start using version control, even when coding by yourself alone.

3 - Practice, pratice and pratice. If you got stuck, try reading the language docs first and see if you can figure it out yourself. If all else fails, then go to google and stackoverflow. Avoid copying the solution, type it all and try to understand it.

4 - After you feel you need to go to the next level, research best practices first, and start to apply them to your code. Try to make it modular as it grows. Then learn about tools, preprocessors and frameworks.

5 - Always keep studying. Never give up. We all feel that we have no idea of what we are doing sometimes. That's normal. You will understand eventually. ALWAYS KEEP STUDYING.

Me: code quality is important

Everyone: <no shit given>

Director: code quality is important

Everyone: yes, it is very important, hurray!

Fast forward few weeks/months...

Me: why this function accepts 14 arguments?

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

Me: why this exception is swallowed?

ShitDev: oh, really? yhm, yhm

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

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

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

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

Me: <polishing CV>

ShitDev: got praised for delivery

I don't discriminate fellow devs. i don't care if you write Java or PhP, I don't care what OS you use to code, I don't care if all your software are free or not, I don't care what framework you use, I don't care about all this. The important part is being a dev. But, those bastards using light theme can go fuck themselves. 🤣

The most important piece of code in any of my sites.

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Code formatting is important when it's not too long...

Simple 1 day task. This idiot takes two weeks and after 7 days of hounding finally opens a pull request.

I go in to review the code. Should be a simple 10-15 line patch.

13,000 lines of code changed.

THIRTEEN THOUSAND!

"I fixed a bunch of formatting mistakes and replaced all instances of single quotes to double. Consistency is important you know."

So yesterday, literally just hours after i basically said on somebody elses rant "friends are overrated," i ran into a friend i havent seen in over a year and we ended up chatting for an hour after she gave me a ride home. I was in such a good mood after and I realized its the first socializing ive done outside of talking to work people or my partner in over a month. I like to spend most of my time alone, and since i discovered coding i try to spend every spare second writing code, but it turns out a social life is actually really important 😯😯

Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.

Fuck windows 10. I log on to start an interview code assignment that is timed. I'm on my computer getting things ready for a solid 10 minutes before starting the test. AS SOON as I start the test, windows 10 informs me:

Fuck you. There's updates and I'm installing them right now whether you like them or not, fucker. I bet you're doing something important too, so I'm not even going to let you schedule it at another time.

Fuck.

(As a CS student in University)
Teacher 1: I am a new teacher and have an electrical subject and I know you guys hate this and love coding so we will code whatever we study in python so you can actually understand what we are studying

Teacher 2: I am a senior teacher and have an super important computer science subject , I will fuck everything up come to lectures read a ppt that I didn't even make and read the ppt in the most monotonous manner humanly possible and fuck everything up and steal your work if your research with me

Stop bitching about having to write comments, they are important whether you like it or not. Trust me nobodys code is "that good" 😒

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

I'M AN IDIOT.

I accidentally typed the wrong command when I was compiling my C++ code with GCC, and guess what?

My .cpp file is gone. The .exe is still there, but that's useless to me right now.

It wasn't an important code, just something I recently started on, but I can't believe I did something so ignorant.

My boss is a grumpy 25 year oldish "Mr. I know it all". We all hate him for that attitude.
Just joining recently, the code base which I got introduced to was totally new and I was overwhelmed.
Boss told me to write an Sql query to wipe the table data. I being reckless wrote a query to wipe the table only and submitted it to my boss.
Few hourse later we were informed by our peers that a certain url was not working. On further investigating we found out that my boss carelessly copy and pasted my query and executed it which wiped an important table clean.
Now he doesn't talk to me straight and I can't look him in the eye because obviously I burst into laughter.
Job well done☺️

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Why is the ternary operator such a hated thing? I constantly hear people saying it's less readable, confusing, etc.

I think it's a beautiful, useful, and important operator and I use it constantly wherever readability won't be much affected.

How can you justify a repetitive if/else structure over a ternary, given that you're sure you're not going to put anything else in the ifs?

Whatever happened to DRY?
Whatever happened to KISS?

If those guidelines are what you code by, what's the excuse not to use it?

Because you can't read it as well? Familiarity breeds comprehension and legibility, my dudes.

A repressed memory just popped into my head:

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

He introduced about 10 regressions…

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

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

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

Everyone was like ???

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

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

Not to mention that we were talking about 10 regressions…

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

::python coding::

Friend: "so I have to press tab when I want to code inside a function, right?"

Me (Busy): "yea yea, whenever you enter a new scope. Indentation is important in python..."

Friend: "what's a scope?"

#$ cowsay "dafaq"

Me: "bruh, what you doin in Computer Engineering?"

I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

Every time I post a question to SO I feel so anxious.
Did I provide enough code samples and information?
Did I provide TOO MUCH information?
Is my English alright?
Did I really try everything else or will someone point out something totally obvious after that I feel that I need to delete my post because it's just dumb?

Feeling anxious right now... Worst of all: it's an important work related question, so I have to think about a new task because this issue was my only one and a road blocker.

AAAARRGGHHH!

The idea was simple. Create a div.
Add two 50% div's inside. Float them. Add clearfix to parent.

Everything was fine.

Noticed that one of the childs had a height bigger than the other. But due to an adaptive design, setting static heights did not work.

Simple fix. Add a height to parent div and set overflow-y to hidden.

It didn't work.

Tried using the legendary !Important (a.k.a. not important but important.) Didn't work. Set position to relative, set static height. Set the childs to absolute position with height 100%. Problem solved.

No. It. Didn't. Fucking. Work.

Tried every possible css combination could could fucking think off.

After 15 minutes (8 hours in dev-stress mode) realized the clearfix changed the div DISPLAY TO FUCKING TABLE. A TABLE. FUCKING TABLES CANT HAVE FUCKING HEIGHTS FUCK.

Anyway. 6 years after my first clearfix. I learnt something new about the code that saves my life every project.

Get your code reviewed by as many good devs as you can. Tell them to be harsh, swallow your pride, expect the code to be torn apart. Then rinse and repeat.

It brings the "know it all" fresh grads down a peg or two, and often brings those with low self esteem up a peg or two (when they realise their code is better than they thought.) Anyone can write code that works. But writing decent, clear, well-tested code that stands up to scrutiny is a different ball game - and it's important to learn that quickly.

!Rant

I have the absolute greatest and nicest front-end developer in the world.

Today I was being given all kinds of praise for putting something on a site that the client loved and it seems to be getting the conversions they want. I felt really bad taking the praise because I didn't design it. The front-end developer designed it for me and gave me a picture of what she thought the client wanted and I built it. So I passed on all the compliments to her and told her that everyone was super happy with it.

She accepted the thanks but then floored me telling me that she didn't feel like she did anything and that my job was more important. We started arguing about who was more important.

"I accept that your designs do nothing without my back-end code, but without your designs no one would ever use anything I made."

She responded by sending me a list of sites with terrible designs that people use daily. And continued to tell me how much more important back-end is than front end.

If she wasn't 1500 miles away I might have kissed her. I needed to hear that today.

I have no words to describe how I'm feeling these days. I have to do a C project for uni.

After a couple of years dealing with web dev, javascript, typescript, angular and stuff, for the first time I have a project where I have to deal with only two problems:

1) my code
2) my machine

No tools, no bloated libraries, no webpack, no json configurations, no tutorials.

It's just me, vim, gcc (actually nvcc, it's a cuda based project, but still) and the cuda manual.

I feel I'm actually building something.

Plus, the guy I'm doing the project with is cool with this stuff and most important he's open minded.

I'm happy

Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.

I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.

But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.

After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

Teach people how to google properly.

May sound a bit sarcastic but I think an important part is how to look for errors on your own rather than going to the professor/TA. I’ve seen people paste in whole error logs or more often “code throws error, what do?”

At least teach in classes what to look out for like what error type in java and understanding how to look at stackoverflow questions to apply their solution to your issue.

Moral of the story: teach people how to use existing knowledge rather than just depend on someone to help their exact issue.

My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...

"How is software made?"

The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.

I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...

I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.

"What the hell is this?"

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.

So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.

To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

>be me
>drop out of uni studying civil engineering
>"self-taught" "web programmer"
>start freelancing in 2010
>Make money, feels good man
>clients keep me busy, feel important
>Code just for the fun of it
>be 2019. Married, code to make ends meet
>lose all interest
>mere sight of the ide makes me want to bash the screen
>have zero motivation
>never get any projects done
>become broke af
>look at old friends on fb. They are "Something".
>look at real software engineers and programmers with education
>realize I am an imposter
>start dropping all projects and studying theory
>become more broke
>start taking "motivation pills" to just start working again
>lose all motivation and pissed at all the real programmers and engineers for their success
>be me on May 20, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Yep, this is the end.

I feel like a e-hoarder, I keep tabs and sublime windows open and worry about closing them as they might contain important code...
FML

Why is it so important to some people to claim that "HTML and CSS are not programming languages"? I get it, you're a REAL programmer working with arrays, maybe tuples, objects and possibly direct memory management. Who the fuck has a right to call themselves a programmer for writing some brain dead markup or poorly designed selectors, right? Who fucking cares for semantic tags or nested selectors?

Just think for a few seconds about when you were taking your first baby steps to becoming the GOD ROCKING MEMORY HANDLER THAT WRITES _REAL_ CODE that you are today, and how good it felt to be able to create something that appeared on your screen. It felt pretty awesome, yeah?

Now imagine if someone much more experienced than you told you "You're not a real programmer, that is not real programming. You should see what I do, I do real programming".

I think you get it. Why spend your energy spreading bad vibes when you could spend it on something more productive. Like reading up on the new CSS4 specs ;)

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

Refactoring code of somebody who left and:

- Plagued the code with TYPOS (milions of them but ok I can live with those... to a certain point)
- Used global variables by default.... of course even where they're not needed
- Used comments only in parts of code where... well they're not needed, important ones are of course left out
- Did not indent code. 3..2..1... Did not FUCKING indent code properly and when he did... did WRONG!
- Instead of indentation he used commented line with multiple ==== signes.... so far top is 60 consecutive lines with olny ==== again no apparent pattern here
- Did not follow a fucking standard in variable naming... no camle casing... there are varaibles assigned multiple times to "temp" variables without no reason just for the sake of wasting resources on the system I guess

This is just the beginning of the review but I already want to change job, die, scream, cry... not in any specific order.

Attend all the meetings, they said. They're super important, they said. You'll get more code done if we hyper-report on progress they said. The bugs are piling up and we need to have even more meetings, they said.

STOP SAYING THINGS AT ME AND LET ME FUCKING CODE YOU INSUFFERABLE CUNTS.

One thing I learnt after over two years of working as a programmer is that sometimes making your code DRY is less important than making your code readable, ESPECIALLY if you're working on a shared codebase. All those abstractions and metaprogramming may look good in your eyes, but might cause your teammates their coding time because they need to parse your mini-framework. So code wisely and choose the best approach that works FOR YOUR TEAM.

If you make students take coding tests/quizzes on paper, don't grade them on picky syntax errors! We don't code on paper in the real world; syntactic highlighting and red squiggles will usually show you that you accidentally typed that declaration incorrectly. Understanding programming concepts is much more important than being able to write a program on paper.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

1. Trust no one even yourself
2. Ask questions even if they are stupid
3. Test your solutions, even manually
4. Write comments
5. Take your time to solve problem, even if it looks like easy see point 1
6. Take some time during work to get familiar with code and read something about technology that is part of your current work - even if you know it - see point 1
7. Always try to see a big picture - see point 2 - why is it implemented is more important then how is it implemented

Worst: The guy gave me 5 minutes to code a given assignment on paper. I did all the logic and told him I was missing a function whose name I would just Google. He told me I can't always Google. Well... I won't be coding on paper either.

Best: I was given the assignment to clone a part of a production site. Assignment was intended for 3 days and I was given 5 hours. Completition wasn't important, only structure and coding style counted. I cloned everything and even added new features.

You just can't always be in the zone. I hope more interviewers would take that into account and design better questions.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

I come from PHP and have been using jQuery as a crutch for years. I've dabbled in Node and obviously writing some vanilla JS is unavoidable, but now I'm starting to use ES6 with Babel and VueJS and the more I dig in, the more I hate javascript. Everything is an object (null, array), there seems to be a few gotchas with math (including the one pictured), nothing is strongly typed but types are very important (for instance, you can't loop an object and an array using the same code), and there are a lot of inconsistencies/functions missing. ucwords for instance. Why doesn't that exist? typeof only returns object, but Array.isArray and Object.isObject work fine. I'm going to give typescript a go soon and cross my fingers.

Feel free to scroll by if you feel like it.

I am just very excited this evening because with today's commit I have reached a very important milestone in my side-project development. As of today all the [so far] 12 components are all working together and processing the main flow themselves.
No special functions, no test data in the code, nothing like that. A client is able to do its thing now as it should.

I know it doesn't sound like much, but as I'm working on this gigantic beast for 3 years now this milestone is hell of a reward for me!

Just wanted to share :)

edit: f* it! I'm getting a cake!

My favourite devTool is VS Code, especially since the last update. But considering that versioning should be more important than a specific IDE, Gitlab is THE tool. I couldn't live without it. <3

Structure: decades of programming in too many languages to enumerate. I lean functional, but only when the language doesn't fight it. No matter what I'm doing, my code is immutable in practice, if not paradigm.

Syntax: No one thing in particular. I code differently depending on the language.

When I start learning a language, I'll find the standard style checker and create a project where I write an example of every single rule.

The end result is generally a quick intro to the language and a bonus understanding of the hot sports opinion in said language. I call this an ocean boiler.

I lean heavily into autoformatting because I've worked on too many projects to care, and I have a general expectation that something which is important enough to make a code standard is important enough to be enforced in tooling. I'd rather spend my time solving problems that thinking about stylistics.

I have this great professor who taught us how to be logical human beings (not that I learned much of that haha). He introduced us to web dev. He started with the basic html shit, then proceed with php and sql. His lectures were awesome. He'll then proceed with code exercises. And we'll have mini 'codefights' in his classes! yey! He taught us that in programming, it is much more important to practice logic than master a single language(no hate please). I learned to love programming through his passion. :) I learned to program in his class, now I hope never to stop learning. :D

Prof: "Hey, you can take a look at the source code that we used last year in this research paper"
Me :(surprise because other papers usually don't share source code), "Okay"

A few weeks later:
Me: "Prof, if you use method A instead of method B, you can get better performance by 20%. Here's the link"
Prof:"The source link that you mentioned is for another instrument, not GPU"
Me:"Yeah, but I tested in on GPU and I found it is also applied in my device"
Prof:"That's interesting."
-----------------------------------------------------
This is why folks, sharing the source code that you used in scientific papers is important.

That's it, I'm done. My sincere condolences go to the poor soul that will have to maintain this complete and utter crap of code, as I have been doing the past 2 weeks.

3-4 big 4K+ lines files of completely unindented, practically undocumented, interspersed HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS! All in the same file.

All the function and variable names are complete nonsense. You might as well have smashed your head against the keyboard and let whatever came out be the names.

You took all the naming conventions that you could find and unleashed your seriously damaged imagination. lowerCamelCase, UpperCamelCase, snakecase, everything in the same fucking function name.

I really needed the money from this project. But I'm done. My mental sanity is more important that try to figure out how to make a decent and usable webpage of THIS COMPLETE DISASTER.

You, the one before me. If you wanted to make sure that no one else besides you could work with this crap, then congrats, YOU FUCKING DID IT WITH HONORS. FUCKING SUMMA CUM LAUDE. PhD and all.

YAY.... fuck you Belkin!
Just found out my router is vulnerable to CVE-2017-14491.

For all you not following these issues, this one allows the attacker to intercept connections and perform a traffic hijack, or execute arbitrary code with unrestricted privileges as well as access all important and private data stored on the device aka: the devices login/password, the Wi-Fi passwords, and configuration data just by sending malformed DNS packets to the device.

Now this is all well and good, except Belkin haven't released firmware since 2013, which is strange... seeing how the damn thing was "NEW" out of the box in 2016.

Last time i buy a fucking router from these lousy assholes.

Reasons 1 and 2 arent that important to me. The main reason I code is #3.

1) Brain exercise. I always feel sharp after a coding session, even if it ended in disaster.
2) Lots to do! There's never a full day in code. Make your own universe, if you so desire.
3) Pride. I have a pride problem. I never felt proud of myself no matter what I do. I graduated with a melancholy feeling, same deal when getting my license, same deal when passing a test (God, glad that's over!)... But code makes me proud. I love what I make. I want to show everyone. I want to show it to everyone before it's even finished because I just can't wait. I want everyone to use it and to love it. Because I sure do, and it's the best thing ever.

I could make a viral video, produce a triple platinum record, or build a billion dollar business and still not feel the same level of genuine satisfaction and happiness that I may get from writing good code.

It always keeps me coming back.

start teaching people how and why to delete code instead of teaching them only how to write code

compare functional and object oriented languages as well as high level and low level languages and explain what are advantages of using certain language without going into the syntax

let people do mistakes and don’t punish people for making them but let them explain what happened, if they know what was the cause of mistake it is worth ten times than doing things correctly

mix teams per period of time instead of per project

make showcases how to modify ugly code to pretty one and what are the steps and what patterns people should look after

teach by not showing old stuff but showing where old stuff exists in modern things and why it’s important there and what’s the purpose of doing things certain way instead of flat theory based on ancient examples

One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).

Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'

This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"

Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best.

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.

Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.

Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)

Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.

Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.

Tl;dr
Just my two cents.

I seriously hate egotistical developers. Just had an hour meeting where one developer side tracked and talked for 45 minutes about how important and great his code is. At one point he even literally said, "I'm a genius". It takes everything inside of me to keep it together and remain professional to him on a daily basis. Please don't be this guy

In the 1990s code editors on the Mac could insert the omitted function prototypes into a header file with one command; and even automatically keep the header declaration updated when you changed the source definition (name, parameters, etc)

Today in Xcode you have to copy and paste the stupid function header definition from the source code into the header file. What happens if you leave the "{" that got copied accidentally? OMFUCKING LORD, it triggers all sorts of erroneous errors in all the **source code** files where it is included instead of the header with the stray "{"

I started to question whether nor not I knew C, if gravity worked, if the sun would come up. I wasted a day of dicking around in StackOverflow trying to chase down all these insane error messages which make no sense in Xcode.

I just **happened** to see at the bottom of one of the source files, after all the erroneous error, a very important error:

"};" Expected

So I started deleting code from the bottom up in this source file, same error every time. Got to the point where the includes were all that was left.

FUCK YOU XCODE and the hacks that designed that horrendous piece of shit

Xcode is only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.

Found in repository:
<some_code> //TODO fix it, its really important
It was commited 2 years ago... and still exists in code

I'm so fucking stupid. I got a ransomware on my pc and lost all my files. At least the important stuff (code) is safe.

F-ck working in a multi-billion dollar global company!!!

There are soooooo many clowns in this corp. Just f-ing hiding. F-ing PowerPoint-cowboys using big words. Do they even know… you know, how to code? What it means?

I mean, we need several. Of course. But sooooo many roles leads to an incredible amount of meetings with almost zero value. Since noone seems to know what the hell they are talking about…

There are so many…

*sigh*

The other week I attended a ”very-important-clown-architect-multi-site-holistic-fucking-alignment-future-roadmap” meeting. I fucking flew to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COUNTRY just to waste an entire day with these clowns. What is this? WHAT IS IT!?

*sigh*

I'm beginning to think that it's not important to know how to code anymore, but how good you are at handling management.

I made a functional parsing layer for an API that cleans http body json. The functions return insights about the received object and the result of the parse attempt. Then I wrote validation in the controller to determine if we will reject or accept. If we reject, parse and validation information is included on the error response so that the API consumer knows exactly why it was rejected. The code was super simple to read and maintain.

I demoed to the team and there was one hold out that couldn’t understand my decision to separate parse and validate. He decided to rewrite the two layers plus both the controller and service into one spaghetti layer. The team lead avoided conflict at all cost and told me that even though it was far worse code to “give him this”. We still struggle with the spaghetti code he wrote to this day.

When sugar-coating someone’s engineering inadequacies is more important than good engineering I think about quitting. He was literally the only one on the team that didn’t get it.

Tiny little line of random JS code.
"No Comments in the code"
Me: I think this is not required, let me remove it.
"Deletes the line..."
*Entire App Breaks*
Me: OK, It must be important.
"Cmd + Z"
*Plot twist: The APP is still broken*

Guess who just needs to stay up late in office.

Found this today...

School's windows installations had the UAC set to lowest.
Anyone could install malware or fiddle with important settings.

Oh by the way, the same school who's gData found it funny to go through my USB drive and delete all executables and all my code because it was "possibly malicious".

Started installing random crap and messing with people in retaliation.
Was fun.
Until I got caught.
Good thing I compiled a list of security flaws earlier on.

From that day on, everytime I messed up, I sold them two security vulnerabilites to let me off the hook.
These included access to all kinds of drives in the windows network, accessing other PCs desktop, literally uninstalling random printers from the network etc..

Fun time.

Nooooo !
I fucked up !
Please tell me what is going to happen if a pentester fucks up ?

I was just curious about the codes the developer was typing remotely while they were containing important datas :/
Fuck me ! I thought it would be nice if i take some pictures of that amazing code so the other employees misunderstood !!
They think I was stealing data ! 😭

What should I do ?
What can I tell them ?

I’m new to programming. I first learned G-Code and M-Code for CNC machines and being a machinist got boring, so now I’m in School for computer science. But I swear, the amount of motherfuckers that act like they are the programming gods and they know everything there is to know just because they’ve been a programmer for so and so amount of years just grinds my gears. They act like some knowledge is important while other knowledge is useless, and generalize it and push that belief on everyone. But fail to realize that some people, such as myself, just love computers in every facet. I don’t give a damn how many years of programming experience you have and how many people you’ve taught. If you act like a stuck up know it all and walk around like your shit don’t stink, I wouldn’t work with you even if I had the same amount of experience as you.

We have this important product with deadline closing in. Dev who was working on it for months went on vacation. Bugs came out, no comments in the code, no docs, some of the variables are as verbose as var abc = "some weird shit"; and I'm tasked with trying to test, fix algorithms and instruct on how to use it.

This isn't first time happening, so I'm dusting off my CV this weekend.

Caught a co-worker's gigantic fuck up today – dude totally wiped important code off master with a terrible git rebase + git push.

Gave him the nicest earful I could muster, but I think this is one of those times where I'm allowed to be royally pissed.

Bugs in code are like heartbreaks in humans. They suck, but they also teach you some important lessons 🤷‍♂️

This Moment when you find code and you have no clue why it exists, but you can remember that it was important...

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

The design process.

Call me old fashioned - but clean-code/clean-architecture/SOLID is not as important as simplicity and coherence.

I JUST NEED FUNCTION THAT DOES STUFF! But noooooo better overly design EVERYTHING!

Here is what I see in industry right now.
Don't go on math but get the gist.

1. 9 of 10 developers are Web developers
2. 9 in 10 developers want to be data scientist
3. 9 out of above actually give up and start doing Web development
4. 9 in 10 developers think CS education is not necessary.
5. 9 in 10 developers want to work for Google Facebook and Microsoft.
6. 9 in 10 developer don't make it to above companies.
7. 9 in 10 developers think design and test are important but never do it.
8. 9 out of 10 developers don't want to code after 5 years and just want to exit industry to non technical roles.
9. 9 out of 10 developers don't get rants and dev memes posted here.

What's your take on this

Fucking retards littering my code review.
I had posted some important questions in my comment (essential in order for the code review to move forward) and this asshole posted some stupid out of context meta crap comments no way related to the subject of the review pushing my questions out to the point that a lot of scrolling is needed to see them. Now I need to get everyone’s attention back to the point that matters. Why does this happen to me ? This actually happens quite a lot with other forums as well. Trash mouths going off topic.

*Writes code, doesn’t test* “Ah this works, I’ve done it before”

*Finishes project, runs test, errors everywhere* “FUCK!”

I do it on non-important projects... but I need to stop before I start doing it on important projects 😑

After 4 years of professional programming the most important thing that I learned is "user is stupid".
Once I modified old code that was summing salaries (I added extra column to the result), nothing else. My result was rejected because all salaries was empty. Period of data was from first day of the month from user selected date to user selected date. It turned out that user was selecting 27th day of the month (it was 27th then). I responded that salaries have full month period, and you'll have to choose end of the month... And then shitstorm began, that I messed up previous functionality. I tried to explain, but it wasn't working. It ends up with user selecting any date and I'm doing end-of-the-month in the background^^
It's my first rant, welcome to you all :)

Went for a job interview today, and learned something very important about myself...

...that I should be permanently banned from writing code on whiteboards, for any reason. I have never seen such ugly code in my entire life. Ugh...

Well today I found out that is perfectly fine to not communicate or look at your phone and be unresponsive while pair programming. They can't even write a single line of code on their own. I'm having to dictate them things by character. How can this be seen as a cultural difference. How the hell are they still employed and the most important question. Why do I need to accomodate to them and find ways to motivate them?
They should be doing what they are paid to do.

Ya'll know what... If humans weren't such annoying vulnerability-searching little shits then we wouldn't have had to implement any protection against them and think of all the performance that would be saved on that. Take branch prediction vulnerability mitigation in the Linux kernel for example, that's got to make a performance hit of least 10% on basically everything.

Alas, I do get why security is important and why we keep such vulnerability mitigation running despite the performance hit. I get why safe code is necessary but still... if these people weren't such annoying little bastards.

Yeah, I was just kind of set off by the above. So much would be faster and easier if only the programmers wouldn't have to plan for people exploiting their software. Software would be written much faster and humans would progress to stuff that actually matters like innovation.

Every time you use an unnecessary !important in css code, God kills a cat :(

Please don't use !important if it's not necessary.

Some "engineers" entire jobs seems to only consist of enforcing ridiculous bureaucracy in multinational companies.

I'm not going to get specific, the flow is basically:

- Developer that has to actually write code and build functionality gets given a task, engineer needs X to do it - a jenkins job, a small k8s cluster, etc.
- Developer needs to get permission from some highly placed "engineer" who hasn't touched a docker image or opened a PR in the last 2 years
- Sends concise documentation on what needs to be built, why X is needed, etc.

Now we enter the land of needless bureaucracy. Everything gets questioned by people who put near 0 effort into actually understanding why X is needed.

They are already so much more experienced than you - so why would they need to fucking read anything you send them.

They want to arrange public meetings where they can flaunt their "knowledge" and beat on whatever you're building publicly while they still have nearly 0 grasp of what it actually is.

I hold a strong suspicion that they use these meetings simply as a way to publicly show their "impact", as they'll always make sure enough important people are invited. X will 99% of the time get approved eventually anyway, and the people approving it just know the boxes are being ticked while still not understanding it.

Just sick of dealing with people like this. Engineers that don't code can be great, reasonable people. I've had brilliant Product Owners, Architects, etc. But some of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.

Am I the only one that thinks it's extremely fucking stupid that the software engineering industry is simultaneously experiencing a "shortage of talent" and maintaining the same ATS that filters legitimate talent just because the resume doesn't fit keyword specifications?

We see it every day. People with years of experience that should never be allowed to touch important code. People with little to no experience that learn fast and perform well. Fuck years of experience being the only thing some recruiters see.

"We generally don't hire people with less than 3 years experience" shut your fucking mouth. Ridiculous. You hire people out of college, don't lie to my face.

Oh and don't even get me started on how many people fabricate their industry experience and get interviews from it. That's what happens when recruitment patterns fail to catch up to an industry that increasingly trains people better up front, and in shorter time periods, and values skills that ATS doesn't give a shit about.

Crazy idea: make job applications test problem solving competency instead of weeding out quality candidates.

Job searching is frustrating.

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

Why is source code so crappy? May career is not the longest, buy in my 8 years I talked to so many developers and every one told me how important quality, standards, tests and architecture are - but every codebase I've seen is lacking all of it. Everything is running on constant live support.

I don't get it. It is like I live in a world where everyone does know what has to be done, but no-one does it. I suspect it is because people are lazy, lying and won't say no but that's also not a world I want to live in.

Hey there! I'm a sophisticated IDE!
I see your trying to Undo your work! That's great.
Oh now you're trying to redo...
I'm sorry... I just deleted that important line of code. I'm sure it will be ok though.

Idea to overhaul the CSS !important system...

Allow it to accept a numerical value much like z-index.

But the max !important level is the current year so that the more current your code, the more important it is.

Works based off the last edited date of your files to prevent cheaters.

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

When you're really fuckin proud of that extremely clean, elegant, efficient 30 lines of code. It might not be important, but holy shit it's pretty!!

I have always believed that clean code is readable code, and if your code is readable, then it shouldn't require masses of comments to explain it. However, in the course I am being taught, we are being told that in programming, comments are massively important to help another developer understand your code and what it does. So what is the consensus of the dev community?

Do you feel comments are key, or redundant if your code is written well?

So for almost all of my c++ assignments I've recieved various emails from the instructor about things like "incorrect header guard" and "library inclusions out of order".

The first being that I didn't include the namespace inside of the guard (I did "FILENAME_H" instead of "NAMESPACE_FILENAME_H")

The second is that I accidentally included header files from my project before any of the standard libraries. This one wasn't even intentional, it was caused by vscode when it formatted/prettified the file.
EX:
#include "test.h"
#include <iostream>

In my opinion these seem pretty nitpicky and, especially that first one, appear to be more like naming conventions or best practices than something to deduct marks for.

On the flip side though I did accidentally store a couple functions in the global namespace which I understand isn't particularly safe. I also made a couple one line conditional statements that simply never evaluate to true, but I didn't think this was a huge deal.

I don't normally code in any of the c languages outside of college so I'm not sure how important these are to actually follow. I've apparently been deducted an entire 10 percent off the assignment because of the head guard. I know that every professor has different criteria for deducting marks, but even this seemed rather unnecessary.

What does everyone think?

I know there are different ways of learning programming, but I see students actually taking notes from a programming books and highlighting important bits with a Pilot marker. (and they're not reading fundamental stuff)

Just fucking code something.

I remember the first time I had a code block, I sat on my desk for up to 18 hours trying to fix it. In the end realizing that my impatience is not helping me. It was all in vain. A tired mind did not help.

I finally came to realise that I was lacking on knowledge and a tired brain did not help. I did it the next day but learnt a huge lesson. When it's just not your day, it's not you day. A fresh mind will help next day. Relax, do anything apart from code.

Too much of code can drain you of ideas and smartness. You need to let your mind breathe. Life away from the PC is important too.

My colleague can be so fucking annoying I’m close to snapping. It’s morning, I just got it, didn’t have any coffee yet and he asks me “what did you do while I was gone?” (He was away sick a few days). So I start explaining to him the code changes we did and he takes it as an opportunity to interrupt me and ask more questions during my explanation. Mostly because he thinks it’s amusing. I continue explaining not giving in to his shit and he continues interrupting me and tries to make other team members laugh at his stupid face. No one does. I finally tell him to shut up and listen and he does.

It’s like having a kid run around, focusing on every sound other than what is important and trying to be funny when all that’s happening is everyone thinking he’s and asshole that should shut the fuck up. ARGH!!! So annoying.

This is my favourite place to code

Great vibe
plenty of light and most important thing
i can through myself from the window if i get frustrated

Our instructor for game development claims that variable names are not important if your scope is small.

Thoughts?

Here is a picture of his code he gave us as a reference the other day.

I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.

-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"

There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.

Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.

Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.

If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.

As much fun it is to code and create new features for users. Take a break from the computer and spend time with real people.

A few years ago I would stay at work to get tasks done. While everyone in the office would go home I would stay and finish some task. After doing that for a few months my wife started to yell at me.

It made me realize that no matter how important a new feature, a bug or optimizing code is family and the relationships you have are more important.

Co-worker is in his office.
Co-worker whistles continuously "The rains of Castamere" from the Game of Thrones series.
I like Game of Thrones.
I also like the series' score.
But not the way my co-worker interprets it.
Because it's wrong.
Anyway, he whistles.
Sometimes louder, sometimes less so.
It's very out of tune.
It's annoying.
I can't concentrate, let alone code.
Co-worker goes to a meeting.
Silence.
I delete the bullshit I've written earlier.
Then, I get some coding done.
Then, I'm relaxed again.
Then, Co-worker returns.
Now he hums.
It's the same song.
Over and over again.
Again.
It's not that much out of tune, but it's still annoying.
I can't think, I can't concentrate, let alone code.

My thoughts drift to a certain Red Wedding.
I imagine it in vivid detail.
Strangely, it's a happy place right now.
I imagine throwing my screen through two fucking walls.
I don't do it, because the laws of physics are against me.
But the thought is enough.
I'm at peace, again.

... also, I got to leave early today, so I got that going for me which is nice.

(I already had to tell that co-worker *not* to whistle loudly in the cafeteria - you can hear it in a big part of the building. We had some important customers over and Office Management was not amused.)

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

Strap in...

- Previous employer
- 3rd party partner firm
- integration link between both over SOAP
- Both sides riddled with poor code and messed up political structures (partner firm CEO is an investor in my employer)
- Doing a deployment to update to https (I know)
- Keep http endpoint live
- Other side starts shitting itself
- Diagnose
- Not us
- feelsgoodman.tiff
- Get angry email
- Explain not us
- Back and forth
- Tell client it’s “irrelevant” on https issue, it’s their side that’s gone wrong
- Get angry reply with boss cc’d about how nothing is “irrelevant” for the client
- We all had to have a make up meeting and meal
- Client was calm and reasonable, all agreed we just snapped and it wouldn’t happen again
- 2 weeks later
- Their system shits itself again and suddenly we’re on the hook
- BA on my team (smarmy little bastard) constantly fucking me off
- Get so close to actually screaming and hitting him

So yeah. I don’t tend to hold that a job is more important to me than my dignity.

I have and will never hold my tongue for the sake of a job, I’m not gonna put up with people shouting / belittling / backstabbing etc.

CoWorker: I fixed the code so it doesn't throw any errors or warnings anymore.

What He did? Well.. he just commented the whole important part and it's my turn now to really fix this C mess.

CTO s shouldn't write software once there are more than 50 devs in the company. They shouldn't make tech decisions. It is time for you to back off and help with more important things. We really need you to get process nailed down. We really need you to help us understand business better. Not writing code.

Our Code everlasting
The all creating One
Coders Almighty

Through Our Holy Lines
Conceiving Algorithms
Konrad Zuse our Savior

I believe in Clean Code
I believe in Free Software
I believe in Open Source
Our Code is three in one
I believe in the bug-free project
That'll be compiled again
For I believe in the name of Alan Turing

I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).

Coding faster is more important than code quality? GitHub shows a call to action: "Code 55% faster with GitHub Copilot". WTF?

Ah, the little subtle things we have to iron out as we progress from Junior Developer to Medior Developer.. things like:

- knowing the difference between a carriage return and a line feed (although having worked with analog typewriters helps) and later knowing that Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems implement it differently..

- knowing that serialization is important because not all computers interpret data the same way and some computers allocate 4 Bytes for a construct, others 16 Bytes.. and then we get the funkiness of transferring character sets between machines..

- knowing that a whitespace character is not only an actual space (as is known in ASCII as code 32). This one can cause even medior developers a headache, as in: why the fuck does this string function say that "hello I am a duck" and "hello I am a duck" are not the same?! Turns out then in the debugger that when you expand every character in the string you see that string1 contains 32 32 32 32 as usual.. but then string2 contains -96 -96 -96 -96 and you're like.. what the fuck..? Then you know you have to throw \\h regex at it. Haha.

- finalizing our objects and streams (although modern languages do that for us).. otherwise we have to do funky shit like trying to find what's locking a file, which is not so easy to figure out.

- figuring out why something won't work often requires you to not only break down the problem in smaller steps, to use a debugger, but sometimes it's even better to just create a proof of concept, slap some minimal code in there and debug that.. much easier.

- etc.

:)

Yay ...
No more !important in SCSS...
All colors pulled from variables...
Such code ... Very clean 😂

Not only dev related but remember to constantly backup your important info of your Hard disk constantly... specially if those disk have not only the lastest code you are have been working on but photos of you and high school friends back in the day when the original Iphone was just released that you havent properly printed yet.
I think that is one of the nearest thing I can think of that I regret lately aside from simple being "my life" in itself

Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMAScript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for 20 years. The operator is **... It will also become much easier to search for data in a JavaScript array with Array.prototype.includes(), but support for async functions (initially announced for ES2016), has been deferred until next year's release. "From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team," reports Softpedia, "since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year."

What the FUCK is wrong with people!!!??
If you need to use !important in your CSS.... STOP and just don't.

It should be very clear that if the need arises to use !important then you are either really shit at CSS and don't understand the concept or you are a lazy mother fucker.

I'm so fucking sick of dealing with other so called "developers" shit code and have to spend time I don't have fixing their shit.

There is absolutely no reason to use
!important and to anyone that thinks to be a smartarse and let me know of their shit reasons... just don't because there aren't any.

Got praised today by an important guy in my company for writing understandable javascript code. He said he'd gladly learn js if I were to teach it.
feelsgoodman.jpg

Having the coder anxiety, can't finish code in one sitting, getting anxious, not eating because cannot eat while in the middle of something "important". Trying to finish it anyway, getting more tired, staying up too late, losing concentration on the next day and doing it all over again...

> grep -c -e '// BAD HACK:' importantproject/src/main.cc
4287

our most important piece of legacy c++ software with about 44 thousand lines of code and next to no doc aside from inline comments.

Working for a company with solid procedures really makes me appreciate how important they are. Knowing someone will be scanning through my pull request made me *really think* about appropriate layout and commenting. Before I could submit any old code and the other programmer wouldn't give a monkeys.

I guess that's a poor reflection on my performance but, I'm working on it

Learned an important lesson today- Never be sentimental towards your code.
The only thing common in all clients is the habit of changing their requirements, how sure they are about the unsurity of what they want. And if you are sentimental towards the code you write, about a difficult algorithm you implemented you will be in a mess

What are your thoughts about competitive coding and hackathons in general?

I sometimes feel that practices which are important for maintaining and structuring the code gets lost in the spirit of competition. Also, more hacks are kind of used to finish the assigned tasks rather than a proper approach.

I started my career 7 years back (at the same company I am currently working) as an Asp.net developer. My company used to work in Microsoft domains back then. 5 years back one of our directors decided to dig into the open-source technologies and move away from Microsoft. And I was the first employee who was assigned to learn python. I thought about switching the company so that my 2 years of asp.net experience doesn't go waste. But I didn't as I started liking python. It was easy, powerful, clean, and same code ran on every fucking platform. And I was introduced to open-source.

Don't know best or worst, but this decision definitely changed my view about software development. I understood that money is not everything, passion is also important. The open-source community runs on passion and dedication. And I love the way it works. The bottom line is, I am happy. And python is beautiful.

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

Why do teachers tend to not explain parts of their code?
I got some C++ material and example code for doing some rendering, and the material says "these parts are not important".
Guess what? If the whole thing does not compile when i remove the unimportant code, it was fucking important!

!rant
Communication is IMPORTANT, and the way to approach someone is also IMPORTANT.

I experienced that my colleague is from China, and his English accent is so strong (in the context of not understandable, like the word 'folder' he pronounces it 'foda', and the word 'code' he pronounces it 'korr') that I have to ask him to repeat himself (which sometimes I felt guilty to ask him to repeat for thrice, and I am still not able to understand) or maybe we can do it over text. It is much easier to understand him that way and I can leverage these texts to see a bigger picture of the message.

From this, I realised I need to work more on understanding what he is going to say and what he actually meant.

Any advice for me?

*[style*="width:"],*[width] {max-width:100% !important;}img[width] {height:auto !important;}

* !important feels so hacky but it works!

Old site with ancient code and multiple people not versed in css or even newer html. Decided, ah F it, just workaround that and * all the things!

How important is understanding heap vs stack memory allocation?

Who knows--I'm a python developer after all.

Also I completed by first alife simulation. Took me from 7 pm yesterday to 10.30am this morning.

Feels good. I'm at the part of familiarity with the language that my thoughts are pretty much directly parsed and translated into code, without any effort.

Alife's just for the standard math shitposting though. Was fun regardless.

So I'm writing this code, that does 2 important things, that cannot be seperated. I run the code, thing1 is correctly executed, thing2 not. No fucking idea, why this happens. Execute again, same result. Debugg the wohle thing, now everything works fine.
WHAT?
I check the code, there are no background tasks, no paralell processing, nothing that should go wrong.
Asking a Senior developer for help, he also has no fucking idea. He tells me to try to wait one second between the two things. Looking for a delay() or wait() function in my programming language but there is none. Ok, building my own delay, writing a "do 1000 times" loop, calculate some shit in it. Execute the code, it works perfectly.

Nobody has a fucking idea, why this is happening and why this solution is working, but now the code is productive and it works fine.

Best advice so far: "KISS: Keep It Simple and Stupid"

That works every time because your design of the code will be understandable. Your code must seldom to be refactored. You aren't that asshole who never comment and document anything. And the most important part: The code works as designed without flaws!

This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.

A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣

I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

Little brother wants learn programming and asked me if I could help him learn it.
"Sure, I'll show you how I learned it."

Gave him a book for starters to go through it. To have a slightly better time, I'll read his code and recommend some ways to go.

In my opinion it's important to learn to learn by yourself and learn to help yourself. Therefore I think this is kinda a good way to start with a bit of supervision from me.

What do u think of it, or how would you have done it?

I mean sure I could be some kind of teacher, but with a fulltime job + uni I don't really have time for that.

I have a co-worker who won’t stop “refactoring” our codebase. He will go on a long tangent — under the guise of working on a proper story — and then reveal proudly after a few days that he now introduced a new middle-layer into the code which will help us such and such.

I have never seen any benefit from this. I think sometimes cleaning up variable names is nice, but a lot of the things just add noise and complexity. He’s a junior dev, I’m a senior dev. My progressional opinion is that he is doing a bad job. Management doesn’t know the full extent and the lead programmer scolds him every now and then but in the end let’s the code changes pass code review. “It has already been implemented so what’s the harm”.

Then the rest of us are stuck with horrible merge conflicts. I recently noticed that some new business-important unit tests that I wrote were mysteriously gone. Oops — lost in some misguided refactoring I guess. I’m assuming they were failing after the refactor, so clearly they had to go... Fortunately the underlying logic still works I think.

His main tactic in all of this seems to be to just use argumentative stamina. He will lose discussion after discussion but doesn’t seem to care. He’ll just talk and talk. And the in the end the lead tech gives in. And/or doesn’t have the energy to catch the error introduced.

I swear, the company would be better off without him. Maybe even better if we keep paying him but he just cleans the toilets instead. Sometimes I almost believes he gets up in the morning to come to work and just fuck with people all day.

rant.

i'm graduating uni and I have to say, my school sucks. they dont teach us how to be developers, they're teaching us how to be tools.

half the subjects could easily have descriptions like how to be employee of the month. I know social and management skills are important in the workplace but by god if I knew that that's the only thing they'll be teaching then I shouldnt have enrolled. for fuck's sake this is IT not HRM.

it doesnt help that most of the professors cant even code beyond printing statements and loops. they didnt even teach object-oriented programming. I had to study that shit myself, so mind you i'm probably not good at it.

though I've had my share of wonderful professors who have taught me so much, a handful of them isnt enough to salvage the incompetence of the whole faculty.

end rant.

I'm a developer, member of the A-Team. Actually I'm the leader of the A-Team.

We are incredibly skilled. Our problem solving capabilities is amazing, almost 100 times more effective than the rest of people. We produce code 10 times faster and better than anybody else. We have THE knowledge.

We can save the company in case of emergency.

For that reason, it's of paramount importance to nurture and protect the A-Team.

- When there is a bug, A-Team will not correct it. Because, if A-Team is busy, and bad shit happens, the company could be destroyed and we couldn't help

- When there is some important features to develop with a deadline, A-Team will not participate: A-Team must stay alert and ready in case of emergency

- If huge catastrophe happens and long hours, night and weekend are needed to fix it, A-Team will not risk burning the A-Team because it's the only high skilled team we have. The company cannot afford to have an A-Team member exhausted, underpaid, unhappy leaving or sleepy. Therefore, the company will sacrifice other less important people.

A-Team is company biggest asset and must be protected in any kind of situations.
The company should also pay training for them in order to increase their skills and make them unreplaceable.

These are my conditions. I'm the leader of the A-Team. You can't afford to loose me.

have been working on a small project in the last couple of months. a few client meetings we are discussing a timeline feature for orders and assignments. the calendars (yeah a few on one screen cuz ... yeah) the client keeps complaining that they should look differently and in the same time says "Design is not important *designer-guy-he-works-with* can change it once we are done"
me - :/

side note: the calendars are tightly coupled with the js code powering them, so yeah ... looking forward to it
..

Fellow C# programmers, how often do you use #region in your projects and how important do you think it is?

I have found myself using it increasingly. It works great for me and I feel that I can structure my code better.

Recieved some code from a client to review for porting it to a new system.

They sent the PHP scripts copy pasted into seperate Word Documents and skipped the most important file (containing the business logic functions).

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...

"When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity." - John D. Cook

Dear managers:

Don't rush developers when they're reviewing code - telling them to cut corners.

You're not a dev (anymore). This shit is important if you want a system that doesn't blow up / takes months to make a simple change.

It's my name going against this approval and I (and the team) have to live with the code every day

Some people just don't get it. When you meet friends who are either non technical or very new to programming, all they ask you is what language do you use.

The language is important but not everything. It's what you do with it that matters. Just because you know python, doesn't mean that you can do machine learning. Even simply asking what do I do is better than that!

The language is just a tool! Learn to be language agnostic please. Be a programmer, not a code monkey

I'm frustrated with an abundance of different *Ops we're having right now. You can spell a random word followed by "Ops", and it's probably a thing. I get that Ops people in general are important but when there is stuff like GitOps, MLOps, FinOps, it gets confusing pretty damn fast. There's no value in all these titles besides "duh" usually, since Ops are just Ops in most situations. They kinda can slap a tracing tool or two on top of your code base but in general they just do Kubernetes (with whatever's hip like Jaeger, etc.) nowadays and that's it. Hell, even "DevOps Engineers", for a majority of cases you'll encounter, are basically just Ops with a misleading prefix since it's just a way people call them nowadays for whatever reason.

!RANT
We all have that one colleague who asks for help with his code and when you try and talk about it, he acts like he's got everything figured out.

These guys are so frustrating,if you know it already why'd you call me in the middle of the night to fix an important bug.

Included a widget on a website (JS that adds its own code in a division, like Facebook like boxes). The script added its own CSS file that overwrites bootstrap classes, with !important and at the very end on the <head>. Even worse is that there's no alternative, its a widget from a government association and there's no API. And of course, the client insisted to have it so I had to rewrite some part to use custom classes instead of bootstrap's.

As a 0.1x programmer, I realised an important lesson today :
You can win school coding contests by plagiarizing code. No one cares, and no one will know.

Because the dude who won the contest was literally copying from Google and stackoverflow and they didn't caught him 😭

Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.

FML.

Does anyone find the laravel documentation just lacking? It seems like it the twitter feed of documentation leaving out very important information that leaves me banging my head for hours. I really like laravel and much better than working with raw php but I wish there was an option in the drop down for additional a more flushed out version with more code examples. I understand experts don't want to parse through tons of text just to find the correct artisan command but c'mon.

So I've been working a project while now. last week we got a lot of changes from the client and the boss suggest we pull one of the senior devs from another project to help out. All good...until I checked the code...WTF!
For ex we have a method that checks and update weather info, if required, and returns a view(100 lines of code). so the client wants the weather to display differently in certain areas. exactly same data and everything just the view to look different. easy right..? Mr "senior" dev duplicates the method each time and just change the return statement to a different view...Fuck me right? Oh and 90% of CSS statements ends with !important. senior my fucking ass!

I think I'm getting to the point to where I'm burnt out at my job. Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to work. But it is very, VERY boring. And I'm starting to struggle to even pay attention anymore. I know it's important but I'm struggling to care. How am I supposed to do good work when I can barely even focus? Good code is not magic! I can't be barely holding my eyes open and expected to be worth anything.

I'm also still technically a junior developer which I have some issues with >_>

My biggest dev epiphany was also my dumbest one. We were working on a payment system for a roadside rescue company where an employee would register payments "in the field".

The challenge was automating input with typeahead and autocompletes in order to lessen the workload as manual input had to be an absolute minimum; this will be used by truck drivers/mechanics as they are trying to hurry to the next customer who has been waiting for 3 hours longer than we said we'd take.

We managed to make the invoice path first (customer has not paid, employee logs personalia needed for billing), but when it came to "paid on site" we almost upended the entire system trying to find a way to fetch user personalia outside of the invoice path.

Neither of us realized it during the days we were banging our heads against it. Realizing we don't need to make an invoice for a job that has been paid for was equal parts relief and utter embarrassment.

Probably my greatest lesson in how important it is to pull my head out of the code once in a while, and to ask myself what I'm trying to do and why.