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I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
So I moved from being the TL of a small team to a member of another team a month ago.
A dev from the old team sent me this today morning. He also sent some examples of what he found "cool", and tbh I'm pretty proud of those modules. I tried being very modest there, but I'm very happy 😅
8 -
I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.
They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.
A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.
And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.
They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.
This is what happens when you have business people develop code.
6 -
Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.
What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.
5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.
And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒
Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.
Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?
Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑
7 -
Well... I had in over 15 years of programming a lot of PHP / HTML projects where I asked myself: What psychopath could have written this?
(PHP haters: Just go trolling somewhere else...)
In my current project I've "inherited" a project which was running around ~ 15 years. Code Base looked solid to me... (Article system for ERP, huge company / branches system, lot of other modules for internal use... All in all: Not small.)
The original goal was to port to PHP 7 and to give it a fresh layout. Seemed doable...
The first days passed by - porting to an asset system, cleaning up the base system (login / logout / session & cookies... you know the drill).
And that was where it all went haywire.
I really have no clue how someone could have been so ignorant to not even think twice before setting cookies or doing other "header related" stuff without at least checking the result codes...
Basically the authentication / permission system was fully fucked up. It relied on redirecting the user via header modification to the login page with an error set in a GET variable...
Uh boy. That ain't funny.
Ported to session flash messages, checked if headers were sent, hard exit otherwise - redirect.
But then I got to the first layers of the whole "OOP class" related shit...
It's basically "whack a mole".
Whoever wrote this, was as dumb and as ignorant to build up a daisy chain of commands for fixing corner cases of corner cases of the regular command... If you don't understand what I mean, take the following example:
Permissions are based on group (accumulation of single permissions) and single permissions - to get all permissions from a user, you need to fetch both and build a unique array.
Well... The "names" for permissions are not unique. I'd never expected to be someone to be so stupid. Yes. You could have two permissions name "article_search" - while relying on uniqueness.
All in all all permissions are fetched once for lifetime of script and stored to a cache...
To fix this corner case… There is another function that fetches the results from the cache and returns simply "one" of the rights (getting permission array).
In case you need to get the ID of the other (yes... two identifiers used in the project for permissions - name and ID (auto increment key))...
Let's write another function on top of the function on top of the function.
My brain is seriously in deep fried mode.
Untangling this mess is basically like getting pumped up with pain killers and trying to solve logic riddles - it just doesn't work....
So... From redesigning and porting from PHP 7 I'm basically rewriting the whole base system to MVC, porting and touching every script, untangling this dumb shit of "functions" / "OOP" [or whatever you call this garbage] and then hoping everything works...
A huge thanks to AURA. http://auraphp.com/
It's incredibily useful in this case, as it has no dependencies and makes it very easy to get a solid ground without writing a whole framework by myself.
Amen.2 -
I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.
Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.
I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)
To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"
I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....
No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net
I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.
Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#
This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.
Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.
Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.9 -
When you are working on a small project that is ~500 lines of code, but you have 27mb of node modules
7 -
Today was the first time I was able to develop a full stack by my self!!!!
(I mean not by myself, StackOverflow was my Bible)
It's a small project with three modules , and while I've worked front end, back end and machine learning separately, I used to develop on a single component.
Today I built all the components on my own.
The hardest part was linking the nodejs file with the python script. Which seemed easy at first but then I needed to go through the documentation to understand the working behind the scenes.
Just looking how to deploy it now
This is a victory rant.
While it is not something big I feel so proud of myself 🥰1 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
I started a side project: a small app for my gf and me.
In the end it should consist of different features I call modules. Right now there is only one module that suggests a movie to watch from our watchlist.
7 -
My worst team experience finished only a week ago:
- Be me
- be averaging 80% in completed modules and on track for a 1st
- have to take a team project worth double credits
- get stuck in random team with 40%ers
- lose 1 artist at the start (team of 12: 6 artists, 6 programmers)
- 2 artists contribute nothing and disappear for a few weeks
- I'm forced to do level design to have something to show (looked good tbh)
- weeks go by and too many contribute very little.
- by the end the team was basically 4 programmers and 2 artists contributing.
All other teams basically get an easy 2:1/1st just because their team turns up and contributes.
I could lose a 1st because of this module bringing down everything else, it also had a huge effect on what I could achieve for my dissertation due to time.
- did get an award at the end for managing to not kill someone and showing restraint 😂😂
Basically don't choose a degree where more than 25% of your mark is almost entirely out of your hands.
The small individual component I averaged over 90%! -
I'm the lead dev on this team. The project is split into multiple separate modules to comply with separation of concerns, and so new devs don't need the whole fucking codebase (risking them running away with everything) to contribute to the project as a whole.
So we don't need a fucking config file to enable and disable features.
So we don't need to upload a 500mb monolith every time we want to test a change.
So we can test old fucking versions of modules without merging it back into the entire codebase.
What did this fucking dev do? He was having one small issue with Maven. One. It wasn't updating his local snapshots to the correct Artifactory version.
He decided, instead of trying to fucking fix it: HEY, LETS IGNORE THE LEAD DEV'S DEMAND TO KEEP THEM SEPARATE. IM GOING TO MERGE THEM INTO ONE MODULE FOR SOME FUCKING REASON.
I refuse to continue working with this dev if he's going to sidestep my demands and undermine my authority. He wants to go it alone? Be my fucking guest. I'm not touching his shitty single-codebase monolithic monstrosity.
If this is going to be a regular fucking occurrence, he can eat a dick and choke on it.2 -
Age 8 - Gets first computer and struggles with dial up Internet and my parents yelling at that they ended to use the phone
Ages 12 to 18 - Gets first laptop, starts messing around and interested in websites, gets involved with SMF, and open source message board system written in Php, and starts helping people out, eventually getting paid work for setting up websites etc.. which lead onto learning html/CSS and picking up bits and pieces of Php (and also Photoshop/Illustrator etc..)
Age 18 - Goes to college to study Multimedia, refreshes knowledge of HTML/CSS, learns a bit of Actionscript and some PHP
Age 20 - finishes Multimedia degree, ends up working as an IT consultant for a small business, which leads me to pick up a bit of bash scripting, small hit more PHP. Leaves this after 3months and decides to do a small Software Dev course. Get my first taste of Java and Visual Basic there
21 - Enter into a Software Dev degree. Dive deep into Java and a small bit of Javascript.
23 - After 2nd year of college get taken on an internship with a large multinational where I learn and get hands on experience with Angular, JS, Coffeescript and C#
Present Day - currently coming up to the end of my degree and can switch between Java, C#, Python, Coffeescript/Javascript (front-end or Node) , C and Golang, C and Python introductions from college modules which I kept playing with in my spare time, Golang I just heard of and decided to write a few things in it because why not, I've picked up various frameworks (spring, echo, express etc.) at some point. I basically learn by doing, if something interests me and I enjoy it, I seem to pick it up quickly by diving in and trying to use it.1 -
All this small node modules in the npm repository that is a fork of another with a name that sounds almost like the other. It's a jungle. Then things are abandoned or changing name. How much i like coding nodejs based projects I really feel bad of the total mess with that repo. Freedom and a lot of projects are good. But the mess is like the flat of a young student that hasn't been cleaned in a year.
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the more i learn about web dev, the more i realise the reason for its mess up . There are 2 major problems in it : the people who create various important concepts and tools for web dev were 1) working on it without any collaboration and agreements on the philosophy and 2) were too stubborn on their ideology i guess.
There is no limitation to anything's functionalities, and the limits that are "defined" are badshit crazy. for eg:
====================================
HTML creator : "I am gonna make a language that would provide a skeleton to web page. it will just have the text and basic markers to let the scripting and styling engines/languages know which text is supposed to be rendered and how.
It won't provide any click or loading functionality.
someone: "So i guess opening a page or loading an image would be handled by JS or other programming language? also, bold , italic or division would be added via CSS?"
HTMLguy : Nah, my html engine would ALSO do that.
someone : what , why? won't that just be stupid and against your philosophy?
HTMLguy : WHAT? am too awesome, can't hear you
w3c , 50 yrs later : sorry can't change this, gotta support the 50 yrs of web dev and billion sites
=================================
CSS guy: I am gonna make the world's best beautifying stylesheet language to provide colors, styling, fonts and backgrounds to a page. every loadings and clicks would be handled somewhere else
Some1: cool, then clicks, hover and running of animation would be handled by JS only
CSSguy :Umm, i guess i could handle those.
Some1 wha-?
CSSguy : Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for the nobel price!
====================================
JS guy : I am gonna make a god web programming language! It can do everything: add/remove html tags, add styling, control animations, control browser, handle clicks , perform operations, everything!
some1: cool! you must be making very large programming language with lots of modules.
JS guy: No! i am gonna keep it small. no built in classes and file imports! just use the functions directly. if someone wants the additional lib functionality, install them on your server
some1 : innovative! what's typeof NaN ?
JSguy :shut up.6 -
Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).
My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.
5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.
Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.
Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.
On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb4 -
I am working in a cool company where during our coding principles conversation , I was giving a walkthrough of my code. I accepted some valid criticism. Shit hit the fan, when my I tried to explain it to them why I have written modules and the necessity of them in this application. So instead of writing several functions , I have created a common module for handling these tasks . After a lengthy argument , I am told that I should write understandable and lengthy code instead of complex and small one. This is what I think so too, that code should be readable by human but at some point , one also has to look decide if this practice is suitable for every carse or not. Man this is fucking killin me. Then I am also told that to rewrite the code and write it in such a way that's naive and easy to understand
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Can you spot the difference?
So after getting the 37 sensor arduino module kit, i decided to label each of them. The 2 modules below are the last 2 in need of labeling...
One is a magnetic hall and the other is an analogue hall but I can't tell which is which. Googling just makes it worse since they are so similar the same image is often used for both modules. The only visible difference is one has a small resistor and what appears to be a tiny led.
Please help me identify them... asking for a friend.
15 -
The fog of war over all that happened with my change of team is starting to dissipate.
3 people were involved and there were 4 different versions of the whole situtations, but from what I've been able to collect it looks like the company is expanding and one of the mail KPI for the current team leaders is how good they are at creating a NEW generation of team leaders, to take care of the new entries.
My previous team leader told me about all these new growth perspectives and the junior entries I could manage, knowing very well of the desire I have previously expressed of being a senior dev with my small group of juniors to teach.
I declined the offer, stating that this whole year has been exhausting. Every single time I've tried anything (using modules for new components on our old web client, tsdoc to document our types, suggesting technologies like ANYTHING BUT ANGULAR AND MONGO, telling how removing down migrations was a retarded move) my suggestions were either shrugged off or flat out refused. Let alone how every time I was proven right, except for angular but give it time and that will bite their tail as well.
Don't get me wrong: they are well withing their right when they take all those decisions, and more. But I DO NOT PLAN on selling a plethora of bad decisions to a new stack of devs as if they were the gold standard.
"I understand your reasons; you, as a company, need a well coordinated team all running towards a goal; loose cannons are harmful.
But now I need you to understand me: I do not agree with your technical direction. I never lied before and I will not start now. Promotions don't matter nearly as much as my integrity, and integrity in my world means speaking up about problems. Your position is perfectly valid, but mine is as well and they can't be reconciled. If I were you I'd make myself a favor and make sure IHateForALiving doesn't become a team leader; given your direction, I'm not the man you want right now".
As mentioned, one of the KPI for team leaders is how succesfull they are in finding new team leaders, and trying to turn me into one didn't end well; I love sharing knowledge, but being honest to myself is far more important to me. So this meant my previous team leader failed in a very big task, and thus was demoted? At the same time, I've been there for 2 years now so they're not really eager to replace me, but I'm under strict examination too as of now.5 -
Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.
So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.
Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.
Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]
One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.
I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.
The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.
"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"
I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.
The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.
This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.
Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.24 -
In the past, apps I've written have used a flat file backend. It's very fast, but obviously clunky to have a big structure of flat files for an app. It ran circles around framework-based RDBMS backends, as performance is concerned, but again, it was clunky. Managing backups and permissions on tens or hundreds of thousands of small files was no fun. Optimizing code for scaling was fun- generating indexes, making shortcuts -but something was still missing. Early in 2017 I discovered redis. A nosql backend that just stores variables and lives almost entirely in memory. Excellent modules and frameworks for every language. It was EXACTLY what I'd needed, even though I didn't know I did. I spent a good deal of time in 2017 converting apps from flat files to redis, and cackled with glee as they became the apps I wanted them to be. Earlier this week, I started building my first app that started with redis, instead of flat files, and I can't stop gushing to anyone who will listen. Redis for president!
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What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?
I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.
An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.
On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.
Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.1 -
Drupal 8 fractured the community, dead ended projects that had years of being built up and supported, started a downward trend in overall number of websites using Drupal when it was still increasing market share, homogenized Drupal with other less successful frameworks that had already attempted it and failed by using composer to replace drush, twig to replace PHPtemplate, and Symfony to butcher Drupal and hang parts of it on.
The mission statement was to "bring Drupal to the modern era" and "be more enterprise friendly". All I've seen them do is make it worse. I have stopped using Drupal now, I still maintain some Drupal 7 sites but now that they killed the Drupal 7 community it's basically dead. Some small attempt was made to salvage it with Backdrop but it will likely never be as big as Drupal was and is mostly dead itself, for one thing it's not directly compatible with the huge library of modules either.
Another thing I loved killed by those without vision and giving into the "industry standards" that make one question the intellect of everyone who subscribes to them being a good idea. But hey that evil procedural programming that worked so long for so many was finally defeated. It's surely better now right... right?
At least this movement was supported by people that can't even tell the difference between the use cases in real projects between Drupal and Wordpress. Software Development is in such a good place and has no hypocrisy. One would never suggest it has lost sight of its original purpose of solving real world problems with computing and become self absorbed with its own navel gazing.
If still in doubt check attached image, it tells a very clear story about how to ruin the life of a CMS. It honestly feels like a hitjob attempted to sabotage it rather than an earnest attempt to improve something that has been doing well since 2001.
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How do you plan before small software changes?
I have some extremely iterative approach where I change one function or one variable at a time, like a headless chicken. I am not planning beforehand which modules or functions I need to change but start from somewhere and like a linked list, I am moving on until the end.
But I feel like it is wasting my time. What is your approach when you want to have let's say -50 line of code changes?5 -
Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.
So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.
After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.
I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.
Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.
The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.
I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.
Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.2 -
We use MDD!! I coined this term one night after getting frustrated and having a lot of drinks. What's that, you ask?
MAGIC DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
It's when you're working on a not-so-recent code base and are afraid to make any changes in fear of breaking things up. You've touched some modules, and now you restrict yourself to work only on those treating all others as a blackbox. Even if something can be achieved by a small change in one of the blackboxes, you still go for multiple changes in the modules you're familiar with! Such is the horror. You start saying that those modules work by some dark magic that nobody understands! -
Arrify nodejs module. I always thought, that a modul is something bigger, not this function with 4 lines. Who thinks, that using a module to make an array of a value instead of copying a 4 line snippet to your code is actually a good idea?4
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I have a couple of small ones, but one that stands out is actually fairly recent.
It was an independent project, more for practice than anything, but it involved fetching daily horoscopes from an RSS feed and showing it to the user upon request. I first just made it as a command line program,using some new modules I hadn't used before, and seeing everything work smoothly and neatly printed out made me super excited.
Not too long ago I even made a proper GUI for it using Tkinter, which also works nicely. :) Nothing so far has beaten that first excitement upon finishing the command line one, though. -
Is there any stable Node.js framework that is convention based? My problem is everytime I begin a new project I have to think of the folder structure, packages to use etc. I looked into AdonisJS which seems to be what I need but then there are so many opinions on the internet regarding how it uses custom require mechanism instead of going ES6 style modules and how it is small and this will be no future proof . Tried Next.js and there seems to be steep learning curve. Any advices?2
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Starting to wonder why I tend to like our QA people so much: they often seem so much saner. Yes, sometimes they quibble as with the complaints about a page that is hidden from the user anyway, but they would usually not creep to deep into the hole creating most unintuitive workflows and abysmal logic.
Disclaimer: We're more like backend devs, but we had to do a UI which was beautifully slaughtered by the CEO messing with it - guess what's happening with the new one - and because of that... thing I already nearly smashed my Mac because stupid entered credentials for updating software would only be applied if you defocused once out of the password entry box. Fucked up stuff like this, which devs meddle with, give up, just shrug it off and dump it on the (l)user.
Or a more recent example: So PM wanted a stupid "Apply to all" buttons on a list that can be filtered. Guess to which items the actions should be applied if you filtered it and you currently only see a small selection in your window! Yes, of course it still applies to all items in the universe. QA guy who's just trying the buttons comes to me: "Hey, you sure this "apply all"-stuff supposed to work like that?"
Third example to end this long QA-praise: So there is this virtual appliance we build and we should support another stupid hypervisor.. and he found the kernel modules I have to activate additionally so we can just convert the existing image without having to create a new build system.3 -
Ok so that's my plan, find a kernel with HUGE amout of drivers and , high version.
I built a small os based on linux
-- kernel version 5.0.2 from Plop Linux,
many libraries added 'by hand' -- packages from apts of Debian&Ubuntu, and unpacked packages into system with ArchiveManager,
has GUI but it's called xfree86 ( looks strange when a very old app running on Kernel5 )
So, without compiling, i can make a os.
But i found that Plop didn't compile rtl8188eu module which makes linux support some specific network cards.
I have no professional compiler but a tiny C/Cpp compiler called TinyCC (aka. tcc), but for my pc ( CPU freq = 800MHz ), it seems not possible to compile the module by myself.
And then i downloaded a 5.2 kernel with modules from kernel.ubuntu.com, but when i tried to mount my disk ( part. vfat ), i got some errors like IO charset not found, and then i replaced it with Xanmod kernel but also reported an error said Invalid Arguments, but i checked /proc/filesystems, it supports.
So what can i do? Are there any pre-compiled kernel & modules with 'full common supports'?
I tried kernel 4.4 ( from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ) just now but the driver crashed when wpa_supplicant tried to initialize the device.7 -
self.content != rant
my proposed project was accounting system for small scale businesses. after painstakingly copy pasting codes xD from an existing project(which i have previously made during college days), although i have already anticipated this idea and wasnt really planning to create a five-star-in-usability kinda system for a small project, i realised that i cant make accounting a standalone system, it has to be a module. just a module. but i dont like that, it defeats the grand purpose of what i really want my system to be, it has to be a standalone system with fewer user inputs.
welp. gotta do what u gotta do now. create additional modules(inventory, invoicing, etc). also deadline's a couple of weeks from today.
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