Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling in the mud with a pig; after a few minutes you realize the pig likes it.

Arguing with a engineer is a lot like wrestling in a mud with a pig . After a few hours you realize that he likes it !

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

Will you just behave, dammit.

-Me wrestling with CSS

Worst part of being a dev?

For me it's putting myself into infinite loops wrestling with my own self doubt. Is this really how I want to solve this problem? Could this code be cleaner? Surely there's a better way to do this? Am I adding unnecessary complexity? Is this going to come back and bite me in x months? And so on...

In fact, most days I just feel like an imposter.

Off to the funeral of a family member of mine today. He was one of us, a developer for a cool little startup in London. I'd much rather be wrestling with bugs and support tickets today 😔

One of the things I have no fucking patience for is bureaucracy. For the last year I've been working for a company I have no problem with, I like the place and I like the people here. Recently I was contacted by another company and offered a better salary to work for them. I was open about it with my boss and we both accorded that I will receive the same salary to stay (It was ok to me since I feel comfortable here), but in order to do that I'll have to sign a new contract. Ok, no big deal. Few days later a HR girl contacts me to send her all the documentation needed to elaborate a contract, and I was like 'You guys already have all my documents, been working here for a year'. But Ok, I tried not to be picky and just sent her everything again. Then she requests online psychometric tests, sends a shitload of formats to fill, like personal references, their company-custom resume format, privacy policies, and many more stupid and irrellevant paperwork nobody should need when a person has been working for you for a year and you want him to stay. I really tried to be patient and do everything the HR girl wanted me to do, but for one reason or other, she kept rejecting the formats I was sending (I had to download, print, sign, scan and resend many of them). We've been wrestling for an entire fucking week over this shit via email and she can't just write a new contract, make me sign it and leave me the fuck alone. The last thing she compained about was a stupid personal reference format I didnt scan with my signature on. This other company wants me to start next monday. I guess the next document I'll be sending her will be my resignation letter.

After a long day of wrestling with some bad code and getting it to 'work' leaves me feeling dev angst. Then on my way home I see some minor bug in a phone app I'm using and I think to myself, "MY GOD.. all software is made out of SUFFERING."

Behind every tiny defect out there lays some poor soul's looong hours of overtime, stress, tears, alcoholism, and stale popcorn dinners.

Shit Developers say:

Fuck you Jasmine and your camelCase

I’ve been wrestling cucumbers all day

Oh no all the cucumbers are broken

In a fit of refactoring madness I have gone and changed a lot

Did you seriously just give ME nil?... No!

If the shit sticks, then we put nice paint on it

Fucking red dot motherfucker (Ben and his failing specs)

You know what we don’t do often..kill each others builds. Kill them and reschedule for later. Mwahaha ha ha.

This build is going to be so rad...(5mins later)...Ok this is not going to pass..I can feel it in my waters!

Can i do that in a digital way or do i have to move my meaty body downstairs to find him?

All the donkeys have be out the gate by sundown

God, imagine if you could patent mathematical solutions

actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you can in the states "no, you can't use a laplace transform, you haven't got the rights, you have to use a less accurate transform on your matrices"
ooooo a boolean that's phrased in the negative, my favourite for code review destruction!

Fuck the police i'll call the object here

Web RTC - its super easy, all you have to do is..probably some hard stuff

I want to go to that conference so I can start arguments with dickheads about semicolons. Just for fun.

This this is not the same as that this.

Can’t come to work I can’t find any clothes. It’s best for everyone if I just don’t come in. ...2 hours later... Yeah my clothes were just in the other room and i couldn’t be fucked moving

(OH about bad bug reports) - you know when they are all like oh joogly joogly doesn’t doodle doodle and it should wobbly doodle you know? and im all like fuck i don’t know any of that shit you are talking about.

Him: "I don’t like it, it’s against REST convention its so 2006 that my eyes are bleeding. As a privileged white male i feel entitled to complain about this." Me: "you. were. eleven in 2006

Source: Kellective Github

Overwhelmed by a shitty codebase? Use the boy scout rule and leave the code you're editing a little better than you found it.

Worked wonders for me when I realized I could spend literal months refactoring and desperately needed a systematic approach.

Little by little that rotting house of cards will turn into something okay. It's a nice feeling looking back after a couple of months and see what you've done to make things better.

Also, make sure to remember the cost of wrestling with hurried legacy solutions in your estimates as well. Just adjust the level of bluntness depending on your work environment: admitting that things can/need to be improved can be unpleasant for some to hear even though it's true.

A long time ago, I've started my journey into web development. Discovered HTML, CSS and was great, then it came WordPress.

As a self taught developer I thought this was an awesome way to develop sites quicker, didn't really knew any better and, for all I did at the time it was fine.

Then I discovered .NET and MVC, I was amazed (I kinda love the MVC pattern)

Then it came Laravel, really really liked working with it, felt free to develop isntead of focusing on mundane stuff

Last week a client came by, requesting a site for his business, he wanted all sorts of custom stuff, but he needed it in WordPress because that is what he knows how to use.

After three days of dealing with "the WordPress way" I'm seriously considering doing the whole thing in Laravel and style the admin to look like WordPress. I feel like wrestling a 500 pound gorilla, geez, why do every little feature has to be implemented in such an unnatural way.

I'm grabbing a hook but to hang myself on it

Had a couple occasions to feel like a badass, recently.
I'm the only programming polyglot on the team. They've been wrestling with an encryption problem. I crack open C, make a few calls to wincrypt (yes, I'm sorry, we're a Windows company) and give them a dll they can call in their IDE. They were stunned by how fast it was.
Last week, my manager asked if I could put together a communications module for our flagship software.
Him: will 3 months be enough time?
On Monday, I had an alpha of the module ready, and a standalone simulator of the module, and a couple different examples of how to communicate with it written out in python.

Evening of wrestling, death metal and alcohol. Didn't think about development or work not even once. Evening of relaxing.

Apple: "We're justified in taking 30% of all our customer's in-app purchasing revenue because we've implemented an awesome super-secure in-app payment system"
Me, after spending the last week wrestling with Apple's shitty, horrible, unbelievably obtuse, poorly documented system for handling subscription renewals and having to write my own god damn crypto shite for reading receipts: "You're shitting me, right?"

What a complete scam.

My duck wanna be luchador. Some Mexico code review is coming.

Next ducks will arrive soon :D

Just needed a good looking material os datepicker - ended up wrestling with react, webpack, npm and gulp. 3 hours later, ta-da, I have a datepicker! webdesign nowadays...

got my left bicep bone fractured from srm wrestling. dude just took my hand and half bicep bone away with him. what a happy new year 2024.

and just few hours ago, i was having death thoughts just because my parents were not allowing me to take car to work on a foggy morning.

karma can hit anytime. be humble.

So after multiple hours of wrestling with Jira I finally managed to autofill fields in the service desk. How? By installing a plugin to show message boxes and injecting JavaScript through it, what else?

Fucking wonderful piece of crap :)

Next up: automatically capture errors triggered by employees with Sentry and raise Jira requests. "A button didn't work" isn't enough god damn it.

So,
Im coming from PHP. I feel comfy around PHP.

I needed for other project GO lang (there is no library for what I need to do in PHP, and it's low level thing anyway)

I need dependency that is in form of modules.

Okay, so importing it (just writing import "github.com/blah/blah/v3/blah" as suggested in docs did not work. something something, not found)

Some googling later, I created go.mod file.

And all the hell broke lose. So I am trying to fix that using random stack overflow, IDE highlights entire project on red, go complains it can't find "./" while it looks for it in gopath not project files and claims it's remote repository.

Among other WTFnessness after adding go.mod it suddenly stopped fetching ANY dependencies (including stuff like github.com/pkg/errors ), so, that's fun...

I added go.mod before 9 AM.
It's 13 and Im still wrestling with this

I fail to connect the dots why go lang get's so much praise for it's apparently awesome or something package managment... I find "composer install", and have pretty much guarantee it will work, much easier to wrap my head around.

[edit]
forgot to mention that Im literally starting to learn go. Just cherry on top

Spent a few hours wrestling with AMD ROCm to get it working. Had to change my kernel a few times, install different versions of the rocm packages, and in one case selectively upgrade a package. I also need to run my programs with a few shady environment variable exports to work around some bugs. The whole thing looks shaky right now, nowhere near as simple as CUDA. Also, horrid names (seriously AMD, what's with the 3dgy names).

However once I got it working it works pretty well, happily training stuff via tensorflow-rocm, with decent performance. This is also probably a good project to contribute to, I'm nowhere close to AMD's engineers at this stuff but basic bug fixing and quality of life stuff are probably within reach.

It's one of those days where I have absolutely zero fucks left to give.

Was up all night wrestling with a segfault stemming from compiler internals (assembly, no less - zero debugging symbols). Now I just power-cleaned the apartment and need a bowl.

Theregister.com is wrestling with gpus that need 700 Watts of juice and how to cool them. 50 years ago I was reading an excellent magazine called "Electronics". And I remember that IBM came up with a scheme to absorb enormous amounts of heat from chips. You simply score the underside of the chip in a grid pattern and pump water through it. Hundreds of watts per degree Celsius can be removed. Problem solved.

a friend of mine sent me some hobby drama and it reminded me of this innate fear I have that's difficult to explain and nor do I really know where it's from or how to describe it

honestly, fuck, I don't know how to describe it

because the issue is every time you do something good for the world, the world ends up vilifying you for it

I saw this when I was growing up and making mods for games, I'm seeing it now in this hobby drama to such a striking degree

this person outdid the community, became famed and god-like a figure due to their personal drive being different, and now... even the people describing the drama are editorializing them into a hated villain of the arc. I literally can't find their original posts, people just say rumoured things about them but won't link them which is super suspicious. even if they do link to a post of theirs the account is banned so I can't read the posts, the website link is 404, etc

the community quotes their backtalk to the person instead of what the person actually said and celebrates it and it's making my stomach churn

this feels like a hit job
then they make fun of this person for being "paranoid everyone is against them" um yeah you literally shit talk them, probably are making things up about them, vilifying them at literally every opportunity, trying to use cheap gotchas to feel superior... I'm starting to think this person is correct, and I want to read what they wrote instead (because of the few quotes they had actual insight into the hobby-sphere) but it seems like you've somehow scrubbed it off the internet, wtf?

I like building things but my fear is exactly this. I've done it in the past when I was little and in my experience if you build something people love, somehow it is a gateway to them mistreating you because they feel entitled to you. so why would you ever contribute to humanity if this is what happens? ever since I was a kid I wanted to keep these things to myself. fame is terrifying. does it even make sense? I can't even put it into words

it would be nice if you could do things and make humanity better but somehow by doing things you literally bring out the worst in them. and yeah, you can tank it and endure it, but it makes you ask why are you doing it if it's so evil onto them? why does this happen? it also frankly sucks, like who wants all this drama? you give people stuff and they spit in your face? that's just depressing. how are you to sleep at night, wrestling with that sort of community integration, doubting if that's your place in life, your purpose? why even? does it even make the world better, or are you making it worse by a chemical reaction of your existence combining with the masses generating vitriol fluids in the collective consciousness? it's just somehow so fucked up

I think promoting 'a quick lookup on Google' every single time you need to add something useful into your codebase is a bad mentality. It's the same problem with populating your code with Stackoverflow snippets.

I think this is not a good approach because your code will eventually rot and you won't have full control over your codebase in that you didn't write those parts and you don't fully know what's going on underneath. Then, you will forget about that code. A new feature request will come up and oh no, you will be wrestling with your old code because you just quickly inserted it in there, not fully knowing it under the hood. Hours will be lost on debugging.

I advocate much more the approach of really knowing the language and the solutions you're using, instead of just constantly hacking it with the excuse of "Oh, there's no time to learn everything", "You don't need to know the details" and "This is the real world".

No, this is not a good attitude. With the former approach, you will be much more able to safeguard your code and improve on it, rather than wrestling for hours with it. I think it's important to have as much ownership of your code as possible and depend as little on outside libraries as possible.

Fundamentals first, practicality second.

NoSQL database solutions are only useful for event streams. Nothing else. Wrestling with DynamoDB to try and filter a complex query is unnecessarily complex .

SO TIRED of the typescript generics system. I get why you can't assign Thing<Foo> to Thing<any>, I do. But also, WHAT THE FUCK!? This is such a giant waste of time having to fix everything to pass around generics that I don't care about.

I've probably spent ~500 hours of my life wrestling this stupid ass type system.

NCAA wrestling nationals is going off right now. Coding has many similarities with wrestling: hard work, determination, individual performance, team building / scoring. For some reason I feel like coding might be a more sustainable venture...