!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!

The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

!rant
Has anyone been paying attention to what Google's been up to? Seriously!

1) Fuchsia. An entire OS built from the ground up to replace Linux and run on thin microcontrollers that Linux would bog down — has GNU compilers & Dart support baked in.

2) Flutter. It's like React Native but with Dart and more components available. Super Alpha, but there's "Flutter Gallery" to see examples.

3) Escher. A GPU-renderer that coincidentally focuses on features that Material UI needs, used with Fuchsia. I can't find screenshots anywhere; unfortunately I tore down my Fuchsia box before trying this out. Be sure to tag me in a screenshot if you get this working!

4) Progressive Web Apps (aka Progress Web APKs). Chrome has an experimental feature to turn Web Apps into hybrid native apps. There's a whole set of documentation for converting and creating apps.

And enough about Google, Microsoft actually had a really cool announcement as well! (hush hush, it's really exciting for once, trust me)...
Qualcomm and Microsoft teamed up to run the full desktop version of Windows 10 on a Snapdragon 820. They go so far as to show off the latest version of x86 dekstop Photoshop with no modifications running with excellent performance. They've announced full support for the upcoming Snapdragon 835, which will be a beast compared to the 820! This is all done by virtualization and interop libraries/runtimes, similar to how Wine runs Windows apps on Linux (but much better compatibility and more runtime complete).

Lastly, (go easy guys, I know how much some of you love Apple) I keep hearing of Apple's top talent going to Tesla. I'm really looking forward to the Tesla Roof and Model 3. It's about time someone pushed for cheap lithium cells for the home (typical AGM just doesn't last) and made panels look attractive!

Tech is exciting, isn't it!?

There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

1. Have some issue with my code which spits out cryptic compiler error.

2. Ask on stack overflow, Reddit, etc for a solution.

3. Get scolded at for "not reading the documentation" and "asking questions which could be answered by just Googling". Still no clue what I'm doing wrong, or what the solution would be.

4. Find someone else's vaguely related problem.

5. Post my problematic code as the answer, with arrogant comment about OP being a retard for not figuring that out for themselves.

6. A dozen angry toxic nerds flock in to tell me how retarded and wrong I am, correcting me... solving my original problem.

7. Evil plan succeeded, my code compiles, and as a bonus I made the internet a worse place in the process.

I think if you tell a bunch of autistic neckbeards that "all coronaviruses are fundamentally incurable", you'd have a vaccine within a week.

So everyone is sharing their work again, so here is mine.
And no 6 monitors, 1 pc isn't overkill.

Well...

Maybe...

But just a little!

Usually, one is spotify, one iChrome, one development (center bottom), one execution of dev, one email&facebook split and one documentation.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

*casually clicking through aws services*

*discoveres ses (email service)*

*tries it out as email driver in laravel project*

*discoveres you are in sandbox by default, means you can only send emails to yourself*

*reads documentation, says to get out of sandbox request a limit increase with default values*

// 200 per day, max 1 per second

*request what is mentioned*

*while waiting, find threads of people with the most well documented use case requests getting denied*

*pretty sure i will be denied to, thinking of starting to look elsewhere*

// next morning

*opens mail*

# your application is now out of sandbox and can now send 50k emails a day with a max of 14 per second.

1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company

2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.

4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.

5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

This facts are killing me

"During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said, "P = 0 or N = 1." Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google’s public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard."

"Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers."

"gcc -O4 emails your code to Jeff Dean for a rewrite."

"When Jeff Dean sends an ethernet frame there are no collisions because the competing frames retreat back up into the buffer memory on their source nic."

"When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his keyboard."

"When Jeff Dean designs software, he first codes the binary and then writes the source as documentation."

"When Jeff has trouble sleeping, he Mapreduces sheep."

"When Jeff Dean listens to mp3s, he just cats them to /dev/dsp and does the decoding in his head."

"Google search went down for a few hours in 2002, and Jeff Dean started handling queries by hand. Search Quality doubled."

"One day Jeff Dean grabbed his Etch-a-Sketch instead of his laptop on his way out the door. On his way back home to get his real laptop, he programmed the Etch-a-Sketch to play Tetris."

"Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard, it ended up on another computer. "

1. See new shiny tech
2. Read install/setup instructions
3. Make Hello World/Todo app by copying codeblocks from documentation
4. Update LinkedIn profile
5. Insist on rewriting entire company ecosystem

Oh wait, thats my horseshit-eating coworker

Steps to fix a bug these days:
1. Google
2. Stack overflow
3. Documentation 😂

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

To write 1000 lines of JS, I need 1 cup of coffee.
To write 100 lines of documentation I need 100 cups of coffee.

For some reason time stops when I open confluence

Okay so this is going to be a rant.

My exams started last wednesday. I'm doing a study called Application Development and I'm in my 5th year now (out of 4, long story).

This is the stuff that's going wrong at the moment and it's getting FUCKING annoying.

- The windows computers were not installed that well so everyone had to downgrade from the last update which took way too long.
- We have to have at least 1-3 conversations with the 'client' and 'manager' for each document but the waiting lists are so long that we have to wait for about 2-4 hours in general (we had a total of 18 hours for the first task) so a lot of people couldn't even have a meeting about around half of the documentation. Having meetings about everything is a REQUIREMENT for a good grade.
- Some of the teachers are so slow that the meetings take way too long.
- Although documentation is important, we calculated that about 80% of the WHOLE FUCKING EXAMS will be documentation which is way too fucking much.
- Some of the grading points (like chapters you have to write in the documentation) ARE NOT EVEN IN THE TEMPLATES MY STUDY PROVIDES. Already had a moment where a teacher was like 'I'm missing this chapter?' me: 'It's not in the official templates?!?' teacher: 'stop right there. I have to grade you for this so is that your or my problem'? unbe-fucking-lievable.
- Some students get so many 'musts' that we are seriously doubting if we can get this to work within about 2 days (12 hours).

Sorry for this rant but I had to get this the FUCK out.

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

In my case I am talking about documentation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.

3 off the most dreadful things to do as a developer
1) Documentation
2) Testing (Multiple device/browser)
3) Wearing formal clothes

The school I went to...

Grade 1:
*GTA and minecraft to let student familiarize with cheating command and console

*Student should find and read the damn documentation him/herself about items, mobs and quests in every game. Be self motivated!

Grade 2:
*Contribute to community for myth hunting, map creation and glitch

*Solve personal networking, graphics problem and understanding hardware limitation.

*Solving game compability problem after Windows update

*Introduction to cracking and hacking

Grade 3:
*Motivation to host a game server

*Custom server scripting => start To really code the first time, Perl, python, etc

*Introduction to Linux server and Debian

Grade 4:
*From DDoS to server security

*Server maintenance and GitHub

*Game Server web development

*Motivation into non-gaming discipline by a random YouTube geek

*Set up mincraft with raspberry pi and Arduino

*Switch to Linux or Mac and just dual boot for gaming

Prepared for the real world.
Congratz for the graduation in the Pre-school of Developers (11-14 yrs old) :)

Fucking kill me right now please. How the FUCK am I supposed to get any shit done when I'm learning something and the fucking DOCUMENTATION has been UNAVAILABLE for the past THREE MOTHERFUCKING DAYS.

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER MICROSOFT.

Fucking idiots.

It wouldn't be so fucking bad if things like this didn't happen all the time.

But when EVERYTHING is FUCKED - ALL THE TIME, it kinda makes a person lose all hope in humanity and technology.

A typical motherfucking day for me:

Wake up
Go to work
Come home
Eat dinner (if I remember)
Attempt to code shit for 1 - 3 hours before I have to sleep
CAN'T FUCKING CODE SHIT BECAUSE:
1. Internet disconnects every 5 fucking minutes
2. DOCUMENTATION SITES ARE FUCKING DOWN
3. Shit Windows is UPDATING
4. a previous windows UPDATE has royally motherFUCKED my PC
5. etc

FUCK

I'll point names today

Boss: Quick! The Xero integration is not working anymore!
Xero Documentation: place your client secret in the HEADERS
Me: * places client secret in headers *
Xero API: Bad Request!
Me:
*re-reads documentation*
*creates new client secret*
*1 hour of trying*
Hmmmm
* places client secret in request body, not in headers *
Xero API: Ok!

UPDATE YOUR DOCUMENTATION
TELL US ABOUT IT IN THE CHANGELOGS

First time ranter here..

So I started to work in this big company with allegedly many talented devs.

All excited to start and learn a whole bunch of new stuff.

There was this dev, with gazillion years of experience.

We were working on a similar parts of the code base and he told me I should be reusing his module.

I opened the module sources to learn about its internals.

Oh boy...

To illustrate it best, Let’s say there was a function called foo.
It was doing one thing. There was also a function called foo1. Doing almost exactly the same thing. There was also fooA.
And I kid you not, there was a fooA1.
All of them were doing almost the same thing.

Almost all of the functions were documented. The documentation for foo would be:
“This does X. I don’t like how it does it, so there is foo1 which is better.”

Additionally, only 1 of the functions was in use...

It doesn’t end here.
There were functions named like:
cdacictad

You ask what it means?
Well it means “clean directory a copy it’s contents to another directory” of course...

Months later he is no longer with us. I deleted this module.

PS
Glad to be here ;)

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

It's my first week working at shithole.co (can i say that?). My boss is a micromanaging asshole who knows the bare minimum re: programming. He thinks css is hard (no offense). I'm fresh outta college. He expects me to be able to do a very complicated api development through an equally complicated authorization process. Every fucking day "Is it working yet?" [This is my first week on the job]. I don't think he's read the documentation and I don't think he understands how to. As I am typing this out I realize I'm more educated than this dumb ass. Oh, some more context. Our senior dev is working on a more important project So we don't have time to bother him? So I am doing his job for 1/10 the cost. Oh, and i'm not allowed to contact him because he is too important. When the app inevitably crashes and no one knows how to fix it. I will give them my nutsack to swallow (can i say that?).

Add no comments or documentations whatsoever during my initial years of coding (when actually I used to write code worse than a constipated elephant's shit).. In my mind I would be like "This is quite clear-cut.. A first grader will be able to understand this code.."

But then I had to debug my own code barely some 1-2 months later and I figured out the importance of good comments and documentation..

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

docker documentation is terrible. Mf'ers seem allergic to giving actual functional examples.

Watch me generate a 1-to-1 copy of the docker compose docs (real & true):

`docker compose --help > docs.html`

Manager: what is the estimations for this task A nd B?

Me: Task A: 3 months for 1 guys, and task B: 2 Months

Manager: ok, u can have a fresher, and finish task A, and u urself can pick task B, u can train him and bring him up to pace...

Me: (trying to recalibrate my estimations)...

Manager: oh and u have 3 weeks to deliver production ready scalable quality code with junits, documentation and testing done...

Me: then why the fuck did u bother for the estimates?

Manager: oh that is just for the process complaince...I don't want any trouble in audit...

So I've been doing some code jobs now and recently they pushed me to a new level.
This company worked with some silly management app made in cpp which they asked me to edit a little bit giving it another style and some additional functions.
Day 1: this code is a mess.
Day 2: this code is a mess.
Day 3: how does this code even compile.
Day 4: I no longer have faith in humanity.
Day 5: I found my first comment (Yay?).
Day 16: I'm done.
Day 19: I got paid.

If you're making a project in cpp just like that dev you do deserve a punch in the throat.

No documentation, no comments, no patterns, just some thick pasta of poorly written code, names like fCalcAllTaxFilesSizeMB....
This haunts me for real.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Its my morning rant time... Me and my team are working on implementing our solution into 20 year old piece of shit POS system which:
1. Uses old piece of shit computers - which is slower than average calculator.
2. Uses .Net 2.0 - and no higher versions could be installed.
3. Has 20 year old documentation - outdated as fuck.
4. Throws unknown and non explainable COMExceptions.
5. Works slow as fuck.

And we have to deal with all its issues as 3rd side integration.. FUCK... FUCK.. FUCK....

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

Apparently color pair 0 is reserved in curses.

So modifying it will never work.

Even though that's not in the documentation.

I've wasted hours.

I finally changed the color pair to 1 and everything worked.

God.

Kill me now.

1. Visit the official site.
2. Browse for official tools.
3. Check the official documentation.
4. Check the Internet for other non-audiovisual sources.
5. Try making a simple application.
6. Run out of application ideas.
7. Move on to the next shiny dev technology.
8. Go to step #1.

My manager thinks I am Superman! and he is so confident that can do any shit he wants me to do.

Yesterday he asked me to merge an ancient code hotfix (literally ancient) with latest branch of changes.

1. Hotfix is really old, most of the things are hardcoded, very specific to a stone age client.

2. Code documentation does not exist.

3. Developers of that code are probably dead.

4. Many Libraries which code uses are deprecated.

5. It's a legacy code, so no one has fucking idea what a particular clumsy block of code do, or what will happen if you remove it.

'if it runs don't touch it' policy by management.

Despite all this shit I successfully merged the the hotfix, refactored outdated code so as to run the application.

Showed this to my manager in full swag!

He was surprised at first, and asked me to show the code changes.

'Code review' was done by comparing files 😅

Manager: Dude, you have changed these lines, why? Explain.😧

Me: those lines won't work with new build, with new libs.☺️

Manager: then why can't you do old build with new changes?🙄

Me: umm.. wait... what???🤔

Manager: the code was working previously, it must be working even today without these changes.😡

Me: it was not working hence I made changes and now it's working fine see! ☺️

Manager: you have removed this, this and this!!! 😡

Me: but I also added that, that and that!😔

Manager: "don't touch it' if it works!"😡

Me: ... Idk what to say!
(In the back of my mind: "Don't touch it even it doesn't works!")😌

Becoming a High Reputation Stackoverflow Master

Can work like this:
1. Look for questions like "How do I add a value to a list"
2. Post "Use list.Add(x)" faster than any of the 20 expected answers that will be written for this question
3. Become accepted solution
4. Get 100 up votes as more people unaware of API documentation come across your answer

Sometimes answers and questions are so trivial you wonder how this would be upvoted by anyone ever.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

I am using this SDK and I came across a property "Orientation" of type int.

Why int? Is it an enum or something? Let's have a look into the online documentation...

"Gets or sets the orientation."
😣

Yeah, thanks. Very useful.
It's again that kind of documentation which simply restates the property name or method name. Who needs this?

So I tried to set the Orientation property to 1 to see what happens.

A runtime exception then told me that the only valid values are 0, 90, 180 and 270.

Well, this is kind of stupid but ok, I can live with that.
But ffs, put that info into the documentation, where it belongs!

1. Understand APIs without reading documentation.

2. Write correct code from first try.

3. Know to program in every language.

4. Create the perfect fully functional AI system.

5. Center objects vertically with one line CSS at target object.

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

School gave me 3 DigitalOcean droplets to try out Kubernetes in the cloud, awesome!

Wrote an Ansible script to not only simply install docker and add users but also add kubernetes, nice!

Oh wait, error?! Well I should've known this wasn't going to be easy... ah well no problem. Let's see... Ansible is cryptic as always, it can't connect to the API server? Is it even running?

Let's ssh to the master, ah nothing is running, great. Let's try out kubeadm init and see what happens, oh gosh, my Docker version has not been validated! No problem, let's just downgrade!

How do I do that? Oh I know, change the version in the role! Wait that version doesn't exit? Let's travel to Docker's website and see what versions exist of docker-ce, oh I see, it needs a subversion, no problem.

Oh that errors too? Wait then what... Oh I need a ~ and a ubuntu and a 0 somewhere, my mistake!

Let's run it again! Fails!

Same ssh process, oh wait...

Oh god no...

Kubernetes requires 2 cores and these things only have 1...

Welp, time to ask the teachers to resize my droplet by a small amount tomorrow, hopefully I'll get a new error!

----------------------------------------------

My adventure so far with Kubernetes. I'm not installing it for any serious/prod reason, just for educational purposes. K8s seems like 'endgame' to me, like one of the 'big guys' that big enterprises use so I'm eager to throw stuff at a droplet and see what happens.

Going further down the rabbit hole tomorrow!

Wish me luck :3

(And yes, I could've figured this all out beforehand with documentation, but this is more fun in my opinion)

I'm absolutely fed up with all documentation being tutorial-based these days! Well written documentation doesn't start with you creating a new project from scratch.

This is basically how all of Microsoft's documentation starts: Step 1 - Open Visual Studio. Step 2 - Create a new project...

I just checked out their WPF samples repository, and about 8 of the projects won't even compile. Absolutely ridiculous. There's 205 projects in the repository, and of course the one I need is on the list of those that won't compile.

1) read every pages of the tech's website
2) follow documentation
3) read online tutorials
4) try to use it in currently working some projects

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!

So I’ve been working for this company for +4 years. When I started we were 6 dev. Now we are 1. It’s just me. Thankfully I’m leaving next week to start at another company. But right now I’m kinda loosing my mind. I have a deadline tomorrow and I’m super stressed because I’m not done. I have bugs to fix, documentation to write and all that stuff. I’m pissed off because people don’t understand what I do, why it takes time, why I want to be alone at home just coding instead of sitting at the office being interrupted with stupid ass questions about html or upcoming project. I don’t give a fuck about their clients or upcoming projects. I’m only working for them 7 more days and then they have 0 dev left. Fuck them. Fuck the CEO, fucking piece of shit. Can’t wait to flip them off leaving next week.

Jeff Dean Facts (Source: God)

Jeff Dean once failed a Turing test when he correctly identified the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than a second

Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler and CPU bugs
Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O(1/n) algorithm

When Jeff Dean designs software, he first codes the binary and then writes the source as documentation

Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers

Jeff Dean wrote an O(n^2) algorithm once. It was for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Jeff Dean's watch displays seconds since January 1st, 1970.

gcc -O4 sends your code to Jeff Dean for a complete rewrite

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

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

WHYYYY

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Sigh *

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

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

A manager who asked me to research and produce documentation on findings on a new system upgrade we could apply. Report on the risks, the amount of resource and time that would be needed etc. And the benefits of upgrading. Then after recieving the documentation and taking 1 month to read it, refused to make any form of decision without asking managers 2 levels above them who respond with "It is your decision". Then deciding it's best not to upgrade at this time. Okay, no probs.

6. Months. Later. That thing I said I didn't want you to do? I want you to do it now, could you get that done by the end of the week seeing as you have done the research already? Oh yeah and I will be off for the next two weeks as I am off on a ski holiday, so good luck with that.

Extract from a quite old recruiter email (excluding the formalities):

Position: junior dev
Workplace: office for first year, can be changed to remote after (salary will be 50% lower if you go remote though) *suspicion levels starts raising*
Payment: 1€ per line of code (empty lines/comments excluded) or page of documentation *alarms start ringing*
Additional info: on high alert for 4 weeks every 6 weeks *wtf is going on*, salary bonus is 10€ per week *I stopped reading here and moved the email directly to the spam folder*

Rant

I'm tired of this shit!!!

First I receive a task to create a new functionality for the app that I'm working on and some documentation (this is the only good part of all the rant) but no design.

It's been 2 weeks since I got assigned to this and still no design, no assets, no API calls that ACTUALLY WORK.

Today was testing a plist to get a banner link, and for 1 hour that little fucker didn't returned the image I was asking.

Better, I wasn't getting ANY IMAGE. Turns out that the link sends me to a HTML URL that doesn't have any image... go figure!

So I've been working on this from some images inside the PDF with the documentation given.

Oh! Wait! There's more!

The cherry on top is that I'm implementing a chat/voice call/video call into the app and the framework that I will be using is being created now, and it's not even finished!!!!!!

I'm a sick to fucking death of reading 'documentation' by developers who assume you know everything they did at the time of writing and so leave out 90% of the context that would make the documentation make any sense.

Listen to me. If you are writing instructions on how to do something you have 2 options.

1. Write steps that are so detailed a person who has never touched the system could do them
2. Give enough information for a person who has never touched the system to work it out for themselves.

NOT. LET ME REPEAT MYSELF. NOT: 3. Give some half assed info that assumes you had already been working on the system and practically knew everything anyway.

If I had already been working in this area I WOULDNT NEED THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION TO BEGIN WITH.

The most scary stuff when changing jobs is not the fear if the code is spaghetti or not. It’s onboarding and how the company expect new devs to learn the domain.

When I joined the company I am working on, they did not have at all documentation in regards to domain knowledge. I had to ping devs who have been with the company for years so they can explain to me. Product Managers are useless. They can explain the ticket but cannot point me in the codebase and DB fields that that ticket needs to touch.

They would say to me “Ask what you don’t know “. MF, I don’t know what I don’t know. How am I supposed to come up with questions?

Cherry on top are JIRA “Stories”. It’s title and 1 sentence and it was expected of me to do the discovery.

Fast forward, there are still things that I am learning. I work in an industry that is very complicated and has a lot of information to take. I don’t get burned out of code and tasks. I get burned out of trying to understand my tickets and connect them with the code and DB.

step 1) open and browse producthunt for new dev tools to use and try out
.
step 2) opens dev tool/app's website *ooh nice landing page*
.
step 3) tries to find api and documentation, scrolls to bottom of the webpage
.
step 4) "we are still in private beta, sign up to be notified about the final release!"
.
step 5) lol *sighs* bookmarks tab before closing it
.
step 6) repeat step 1
.
.

> be me
> be developing a react native app
>realize the iPhone X notch is clipping your content on the first/home screen of the app
>google says: simple fix
>find a built-in react native thing to add safe area padding
> refresh the app
> ohno.png
> the other screens with navigation bars already have built in padding
> TOOMUCHPADDING.jpeg
> remove safe area thingy
> finds a clever, not particularly hacky way to pad the home screen without showing the header bar by setting its height to 0 and the color to match the content background
> more-problems.app
> there’s a small 1–pixel light colored line separating the header from the content clearly breaking the otherwise continuous single color background
> google.sh
> wtf.txt
> stackoverflow.html
> no responses except something I’d already done
> keep experimenting
> tries basically everything to figure out where that line is coming from
>sets borders to thicccc and bright red
>no bottom border? Ok that’s not it
>opacity?
>forgetaboutit.mov
>try shifting the header position around by a few pixels? Maybe it’s misaligned with the white parent layer underneath?
> nope.jpg
>it’s past bedtime
>Sleep.jpg
>thenextday(today).zip
> what about the content? Is that misaligned?
> nope2.jpg
>Maybe its an iOS feature not a react thing?
> make a test Xcode project, completely native to test
> negative.dng (pun intended)
> more-furious-googling.mp3
> find a native iOS stackOverflow question with the same issue (1px line)
> realize your Xcode test wasn’t done properly.
>atleastimmakingprogress.iso
> start looking into the SO post
>it’s native so I have to find out how to do it in react-native
>invent a bunch of style parameters that don’t exist in the documentation to see if there’s an undocumented thing
>loadsaloadsaerrors.log
>googles for a react native version of the iOS only SO post
> somethingpromising.tar.gz
> *tries it*
> “Haha nope” -my code
> whataboutthisotherthing.bin
> KENSISHSBUCNEGWISBVSIDNRVSIDNFIRJRBDKFNFIDJFIFKFNR
> HOLY FUCK
> IT WORKED
> AFTER TWO FUCKING DAYS OF SHITTERY AND SHENANIGANS
>AND MANY STACKOVERFLOW EDITS TO A NOW VERY MESSY POST
>THEREISNOMOREBORDER(final).zip
>*screams of relief*

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.

Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:

Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.

Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.

Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.

Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.

Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.

And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.

So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.

Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.

Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

Hey fastlane!

Great tool and all, but your documentation is at 🤡 levels, I need to read 20+ pages to get a full overview and understanding. So far I've had to read a dozen plus blogs and stackoverflow posts to find hidden flows (authentication first to do this, etc. etc. etc.)

Don't market your tool as "reducing complexity & saving time" and showing one-liners in the docs when in reality there are lots of hidden steps and NOT one-liners!!!!!!

This is why everyone complains it takes 1-2 days to just get a freaking pipeline working!!!!🤡

How did you spend your weekend?

- 1 day wasted on trying to configure a project

- 1 day spent on formatting documentation ( including changelogs & mailing archives, project started in 1987? The repo still has files that were last updated 26 years ago )

python machine learning tutorials:
- import preprocessed dataset in perfect format specially crafted to match the model instead of reading from file like an actual real life would work
- use images data for recurrent neural network and see no problem
- use Conv1D for 2d input data like images
- use two letter variable names that only tutorial creator knows what they mean.
- do 10 data transformation in 1 line with no explanation of what is going on
- just enter these magic words
- okey guys thanks for watching make sure to hit that subscribe button

ehh, the machine learning ecosystem is burning pile of shit let me give you some examples:

- thanks to years of object oriented programming research and most wonderful abstractions we have "loss.backward()" which have no apparent connection to model but it affects the model, good to know
- cannot install the python packages because python must be >= 3.9 and at the same time < 3.9
- runtime error with bullshit cryptic message
- python having no data types but pytorch forces you to specify float32
- lets throw away the module name of a function with these simple tricks:
"import torch.nn.functional as F"
"import torch_geometric.transforms as T"
- tensor.detach().cpu().numpy() ???
- class NeuralNetwork(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(NeuralNetwork, self).__init__() ????
- lets call a function that switches on the tracking of math operations on tensors "model.train()" instead of something more indicative of the function actual effect like "model.set_mode_to_train()"
- what the fuck is ".iloc" ?
- solving environment -/- brings back memories when you could make a breakfast while the computer was turning on
- hey lets choose the slowest, most sloppy and inconsistent language ever created for high performance computing task called "data sCieNcE". but.. but. you can use numpy! I DONT GIVE A SHIT about numpy why don't you motherfuckers create a language that is inherently performant instead of calling some convoluted c++ library that requires 10s of dependencies? Why don't you create a package management system that works without me having to try random bullshit for 3 hours???
- lets set as industry standard a jupyter notebook which is not git compatible and have either 2 second latency of tab completion, no tab completion, no documentation on hover or useless documentation on hover, no way to easily redo the changes, no autosave, no error highlighting and possibility to use variable defined in a cell below in the cell above it
- lets use inconsistent variable names like "read_csv" and "isfile"
- lets pass a boolean variable as a string "true"
- lets contribute to tech enabled authoritarianism and create a face recognition and object detection models that china uses to destroy uyghur minority
- lets create a license plate computer vision system that will help government surveillance everyone, guys what a great idea

I don't want to deal with this bullshit language, bullshit ecosystem and bullshit unethical tech anymore.

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

So my IT teacher wrote his own web server framework for NodeJS and he forces us to use it for assignments. Would be fine if:
1. It worked properly.
2. It had any kind of documentation.
3. He knew how it worked.

But no, we have to debug his shit and edit the js files in node_modules to get shit working.

Is he open to suggestions? Not really. If you have a fix, you have to create a gitlab account and send a pr. Even if you tell him what exactly is wrong. He won't do anything about it.

Why use express when we can learn something we'll never use again?

At this point I think we're using it only so that he gets downloads on npm.

Oh ya, he also copies package.json from project to project instead of creating a new one with up to date dependencies.

🙃

SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.

-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?

2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:

error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped

NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.

Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----

This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.

Worst architecture I've seen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google cloud platform.

1. Great documentation and support
2. Good free tier & dev freebies
3. Cloud console + SDK rock
4. Did I mention the great documentation?
5. Seriously the documentation ❤

- i = ++i or i = i+=1
- No Documentation
- Not Splitting up a Stylesheet
- function()
{ }
if(){ } (inconsistent style)
- Using a ton of if's instead of a switch
- Installing Nvidia drivers manually on Linux thrice! Had to reinstall it everytime!
- sudo rm -rf /
- Being unorganized in terms of personal projects.

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

I'm so fucking fed up with the npm ecosystem. Every single god damn time I've had to do anything it always takes DAYS to figure out how to get anything working and I always have to try multiple tools or libraries to final get it half way sorta.
I'm so fucking annoyed right now. They always turn out not that great, have lacking features or trivial oversights in functionality and ALWAYS have garbage documentation.

I just want to build a fucking npm library with TypeScript to be used with node. That's probably the NUMBER 1 use case so how fucking hard can that be?

So obviously I start out with tsc. That's quite simple, compiles all my stuff and shits out .js and .d.ts files. Okay so how do I use them via es6 import? I don't fucking know, because it doesn't work no matter what I do. The 'module' option in tsconfig is absolutely useless btw. It does *literally* fuck all. Nada. Absolutely nothing.
Okay I'm far from defeated, maybe I'll just have to bundle it. So I waste two days finding something that half works (I'm using fusebox right now) and at last I get a stupid es6 module as a single bundle... But what about type the declarations? They are nowhere to be seen and of course there's no option for that. Because Fusebox the pile of shit that's oh so well Typescript integrated apparently doesn't think TYPE DECLARATION FILES are needed. What the actual fuck.

And that's where I'm now. I need the fucking .d.ts files so I can use it as a module with import. Do I really need another fucking piece of shit tool that bundles these files? Honestly fuck all of this. "Oh the Javascript ecosystem is so great" YEAH fucking great, alright. Where 90% of the ESTABLISHED tools and libraries (we don't talk about the landfill of all the other shit) flat out don't do what you need. Again, how fucking hard can it be to make a npm lib with typescript? That should be NATIVELY SUPPORTED. If not by npm atleast by typescripts tsc.

FUCK NPM. FUCK JAVASCRIPT. AND FUCK THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM

Here’s my step-by-step guide for the idiot:

1) take <cutting-egde tech> (Tech)
2) read documentation for Tech
3) figure out what you want to do with Tech
4) if you are being ambitious, simplify the idea appropriately
5) Go do the thing with the Tech
6 When you fail at something, RTFM
7) Rinse and repeat

1) Let me work with devs without me having to explain fundamentals of programming

2) Stop devs from copy pasting code from StackOverflow or any other project without actually understanding what it does

3) Get devs to actually read and understand project documentation FIRST before jumping into any programming work

man this google android documentation fuckin sucks shit

i have NO idea in what order to read the document

they did a great job separating components into each different category but there are a lot of categories that use the knowledge of other categories so all of them are dependent on one another

and even when i read the documentation, they explain it like this in steps:

1. do this
2. do this
3. do this
7. do this
8. do this
45. do this
83. do this
84. do this
85. do this

and for the last step, step 2357 do this

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

Life as a Software Engineering intern so far,
Travel 10 miles everyday from home to workplace.

Week 1: Understand the existing stack and start working on Django + Angular JS.
Task : Add something to existing documentation.

Week 2:
Task : Start working on existing product and improve request and response time for a particular module.

Week 3: Shift to new stack. Learn new stuff and start again.

Mandatory work policy for 9.5 hrs. FML

1) search a project on github
2) read its documentation and decide if it's worth it
3) read contribution guide lines
4) contribute
5) start at 1)

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.

For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>

The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.

Create a library without writing a proper documentation.

1. I'm lazy.
2. No one is going to use it anyway other than me.

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.

Reading 1 tutorial/ part of the documentation
Trying it on my own
Realize that your code doesn't work
Googling the problem
Fixing it
Repeat

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

So I'm finally doing the job I was hired to do 2 years ago, with the promise of working 1.5 years ago, and scheduled to work 1 year ago as the project slips about a 1.25 years.

The project is on it's 3.5th year of a 3 year plan and based on the architecture of the project, the project architect started a degree in software architecture 4 years ago. In Latin. When his first language was Japanese and his second was Indian English while this was a US company. And his entire degree was in Lisp, PHP, and html, this project is in C#, and his professional background is in Fortran.

This is a man who is no longer on the project, not allowed to contribute or talk to us about the project, and what little documentation he left us is in Swahili translated from Korean via Google translate from the second year Korean language major exchange student from Russia who got really into meth and Telenovelas.

It is every version of MV* without the M and with every definition of * including some he made up and some that have only been proven to exist via machine learning algorithm written in SQL statements.

This project represents an implementation of the presentation tier of an n-tier application, yet attempts to reimplement the other n-1 tiers in html5 and the dreams of children.

The new lead is a former engineer that couldn't begin coding until he figured out how to map all of his variables to his former cars and girlfriends inclusively and learned his management skills from the big book of micro managers and that one time everyone else in the office was sick but the intern. Who now has a girlfriend whom he works 200 feet from so he isn't 100% thinking with his largest head. At least from observation.

Yet, I still can't bring myself to go be with the whales/become an accountant.

I really don't understand this particular Government Department's IT Unit. They have a system and network to maintain except:

- They don't have a DBA
- They don't have a dedicated Network Engineer or Security Staff
- Zero documentation on all of the systems that they are taking care of (its all in each assigned particular staff's brain they said)
- Unsure and untested way of restoring a backup into a system
- Server passwords are too simple and only one person was holding this whole time and its to an Administrator account. No individual user account.
- System was developed by an in-house developer who is now retired and left very little documentation on its usage but nothing on how its setup.

But, the system has been up and operational for the past 20 years and no major issues whatsoever with the users using it. I mean its a super simple system setup from the looks of it.

1 App Server connected to 1 DB Server, to serve 20-30 users. But it contains millions of records (2GB worth of data dump). I'm trying to swing to them to get me on a part time work to fix these gaps.

God save them for another 20 years.

We've had a project we knew was going to happen since February, and every 2-3 weeks we have been requesting feature requirements and gear to work on (hardware for test automation).

1 month ago we got the official request. 2 weeks ago sales said no to ordering equipment. Sales is now asking for weekly progress updates.

My boss said we have documentation of our asking and the group director (bosses' boss) is behind us saying, "work to make it function, not to get it done quickly."

Sometimes things work out.

I need to vent or I'm going to fucking explode like a car filled with bombs in motherfucking Iraq...

A couple of months ago I inherited a project in development from our team leader who was the sole developer on it and he was the one who designed every single thing in it.

I was told the project is clean, follows design patterns, and over all the code is readable and easy.

Those were all fucking lies.

See throughout the period he was working on it, I saw some of the code as it was going through some pull requests. I remember asking the dev why he doesn't comment his code? His response was the most fucking condescending shit I've ever heard: "My code is self-documenting"...

Now that I have full control over the code base I realize that he over engineered the shit out of it. If you can think of a software design pattern, it is fucking there. I'm basically looking at what amounts to a personal space given to that dev to experiment with all kind of shit.

Shit is way too over engineered that I'm not only struggling to understand what the hell is going on or how the data flows from the database to the UI and in reverse, I'm now asked to finish the remaining part and release it in 8 weeks.

Everything is done in the most complicated way possible and with no benefits added at all.

Never in my career have I ever had to drag my sorry ass out of bed to work because I always woke up excited to go to work... well except for the last 2 weeks. This project is now taking a mental toll and is borderline driving me crazy.

Oh, did i tell you that since he was the only dev with no accountability whatsoever, we DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT IS LEFT TO BE IMPLEMENTED?

The Project Manager is clueless.. the tickets board is not a source of truth because tickets set to resolved or complete were actually not even close to complete. FUCK THIS SHIT.

For the last week I've been working on 1 single fucking task. JUST 1. The whole code base is a mine field. Everything is done in the most complicated way and it is impossible for me to do anything without either breaking shit ton of other features (Loosely coupled my ass) or getting into fights with all the fucking libraries he decided to use and abuse.

1 whole week and I can't even get the task done. Everyday I have to tell the project manager, face to face, that I'm still struggling with this or that. It's true, but i think the project manager now thinks i am incompetent or just lazy and making excuses.

Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the what and why behind every decision he made with this code. But I'm sick to my stomach now thinking that I have to deal with this tomorrow again.

I don't know if I'll make the deadline. But I'm really worried that when this is released, I'll be the one maintaining that nightmare of a code base.

From now on, if i hear a fucking developer say their code is "self-documenting" I will shove my dick + a dragon dildo + an entire razor gaming keyboard up their ass while I shoot their fucking knees off.

oh... and there are just a couple of pages of documentation... AND THEY ARE NOT COMPLETE.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

saw this girl's post LinkedIn. a typical influencer like format post which had nothing of value and instead was a post asking for help with a question (basically it consisted of a android doc link for an android component followed by some hashtags like #6969daysofcode #day69 #xyz and "has anyone used it before?share resources")

then i noticed 2 things:
1. she works in my previous company in the same position that i did , and started a month after i left. so basically she is my replacement.
2. i and my senior (who also has left that org) had created the exact same component that she mentioned in the post, and we had created that component as an awesome plug and play component that would handle multiple usecases with decent documentation

now am having this urge to dm her the exact classname in the code to see and learn 😂😂

or i can play this uno reverse card and write a blog on that component writing another influencer like post: "in my previous company, we created this awesome component and here is how it works..." her boss (our TL) also follows me and what i know of him, he will be tagging her, pinging on slack, and discussing it in the DSA the next morning 😂

I have started a new journey on a company on Jabuary 25. I put a lot of effort but apparently the client told my employer I took too many time in my onboarding process (they expected me to be ready in two weeks or less) and they deactivated my slack account (this was on monday, because although I had holidays I turn on my machine in order to advance). The client said this on friday and I got awared on monday. I feel frustrated... Because I put a lot of effort resuming the documentation and even my team mates said it was unfair; some of them took longer than two weeks and they havent make a PR.
So it seemed to me strange as I said... Some of the conclusions we arrived were: We should ask for credentials 1 week before. The other thing was: The guy who technically interviewed me was really important in the project and he has a cool posibility on Barcelona (spain). We assumed that the client feel angry or sad about this and because they want to keep still the relation but want other provider to supply that dev guy, they arose with silly and stupid time requirements. I did all I could taking into account they didnt give me all the credentials at the same time; the first one came one week after.
Soooo here I am... Enjoying a good bench time and learning angular !!!!... sincerely... I wanted to release some shots to the air jaja

I am going to rant about this here because there is nowhere else where I can "SCREAM".

My work process....

Working on a project that does not have mockups nor a plan. I am building as I go. Design, infrastructure, EVERYTHING. Because my boss is a "genius".

And the project goes like this....

1. Boss tells me to build something.
2. I tell him the functionalities and design.
3. Boss, "Figure out yourself and we will see how it goes".
4. Me, Builds something.
5. Boss does not like it and demands changes.
6. I make the changes.
7. Repeat.

1 year and a half for one project that is a simple e-commerce. Show the products, a search functionality, users sign in and can order and show their orders.

A simple page in which does not take time, but without a plan, without A FUCKING PLAN this project will go on forever.

I am losing my mind. I put on test and tell my boss to test it for bugs. He demands a meeting and tells me, "we need to add this".

OH FOR FUCKS SAKE. TEST THE SITE FOR BUGS YOU FUCKING USELESS THING. I WILL FIX THE BUGS AND THEN WE WILL TALK FOR NEW MODULES.

I am doing documentation, database infrastructure, front-end, back-end, testing (because my boss cannot do it. It took him 2 week to start testing for some things after asking him every fucking day "Did you test it", "Did you test it").

Maintaining out CRM for bugs and new modules and maintaining our company's website.

My new favourite license

# The "You Can't Have It" License (YCHI)

**Version 1.0, October 2024**

**Copyright Me. All rights reserved.**

## 1. Definitions

**1.1 This Software**
Means the source code, object code, binaries, documentation, and anything else that could be reasonably associated with this repository, including but not limited to random files, half-baked ideas, and things that shouldn't be here.

**1.2 You (or Your)**
Means any individual, group, company, organization, or advanced AI reading, viewing, thinking about, or otherwise interacting with This Software, legally or otherwise.

**1.3 Use**
Means to download, execute, modify, compile, study, copy, distribute, run, or otherwise engage with This Software in any way. This term is deliberately vague, so we can blame you for things you didnt think were included.

**1.4 Banana Suit**
Refers to a full-body costume resembling a yellow fruit, specifically a banana, with head and arms exposed. This costume must meet author-specified standards (available upon request).

**1.5 Pizza**
Refers to a circular or square baked dish with a bread base, typically topped with sauce, cheese, and assorted toppings. **Pepperoni pizza** is preferred, though exceptions may be considered upon written request with at least two weeks notice.

**1.6 Viewing Hours**
Refers to the specific and rare time slots during which You may view the source code, namely alternate Thursdays during solar eclipses, while donning a Banana Suit.

---

## 2. Terms and Conditions for Use, Distribution, and Modification

**2.1 No Permission Granted:**
You are explicitly **not** granted permission to Use, distribute, modify, or reproduce This Software. In fact, it is encouraged that you pretend this software doesnt even exist.

**2.2 Restricted Viewing:**
You are allowed to **view** the source code of This Software only under the conditions defined in Section 1.6 ("Viewing Hours"). Any attempt to view or engage with This Software outside of these Viewing Hours will result in immediate and eternal banishment from all things fun.

**2.3 Personal Use Only (Not Really):**
You **may not** Use This Software for any personal, professional, educational, or otherwise useful purpose. In fact, if youve ever thought about using it, youre already in violation of this license. Apologize immediately.

**2.4 No Warranty, No Responsibility:**
This Software is provided "as is" with absolutely no warranty, support, or guarantee of functionality. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. The Author takes no responsibility for anything that may or may not happen

I found the best text editor for basic code fixing

For a couple of days, I was looking for a simple terminal-based text editor for taking simple code notes or basic code fixing kinds of stuff.

As an aspiring developer, I really like the concept of coding without touching the mouse.

So I downloaded the king of CLI text editors, Vim.

Now, guess what happened.

Yeah, you're right. I stuck inside vim and couldn't even quit from there.

Then, I started watching a bunch of tutorials and started reading vim's documentation.

But then I realized, I have to learn a lot of things only to operate vim and it's a pretty lengthy process.

At that time, I really needed a very simple text editor for doing basic stuff.

But, vim is not simple... you know :)

So, I had to come back to 'nano' & I was not happy enough to write codes by using 'nano'.

Suddenly, I discovered another really cool text editor called 'micro'.

It's really awesome.

It's not as advanced as vim but definitely a lot better than nano.

Micro is an open-source command-line text editor created by Zachary Yedidia.

Some basic key points of Micro:
1. It's really easy to operate.
2. It has different colours and highlights.
3. It supports syntaxes for over 70+ programming languages.
4. It has mouse support.
5. Plugins & colour schemes.

The best thing for me is colour schemes & screen split support.

Check out my full article on DEV - @souviktests.

Years ago we had been developing a game for the handheld consoles. We were very young && inexperienced back then. Some more than others... Version for one of the consoles finally saw the light of day, while the other one was sadly canceled.
The development of that canceled one was very troubled.
One example of that would be the core team during the initial stages of the project. One fairly seasoned programmer... Yes - that's it.
Obviously he needed some help, so... the studio hired interns. Two of them, IIRC. One of the interns was put in charge of the game's multiplayer code.
He was ostensibly doing a good job, as the mode was working. Sure it needed some fixing && some tweaks, but it was there.
That is until it came time to check the platform's requirements by the testers. By the time they got their hands on the documentation, it turned out that the SDK used by the game had become obsolete && was no longer eligible for submission. Once the SDK was updated to a newer version, the multiplayer stopped working for some reason.
The issue was investigated which revealed that the intern who wrote the code had been using functions that were marked as deprecated && were no longer available in the newer SDK, explaining why the mode was FUBAR.
Moral of the story? Pay close attention to:
0. Interns,
1. Platform's requirements,
2. Changelogs,
3. Deprecations.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

Asciidoc! I finally got around to play around with it and it is just so awesome! Best tool for documentation hands down! So many improvements over Markdown:

- importing real code snippets based on tags with syntax highlighting and annotations (which can be also auto numbered with "<.>" instead of "<1>"!)
- Admotions! Love them!
- automatic TOC! Finally!!
- joining a child item to a parent item in a list with "+" in a new line (this one took me a while to understand, but no more offset items in lists! Love it!)
- making tables and loading data from an actual CSV-file! The future is now!!
- embedding images with a fixed size

Just a few things from the top of my head. I don't know why I put up with vanilla Markdown all these years...

Last but not least, a big THANK YOU to everyone who recommended Asciidoc! I accidentally stumbled across multiple mentions of Asciidoc a few months ago. Sorry, but you know who you are! Much love to you and your loved ones! You changed my life for the better. Thank you!

I started as intern at the place. Worked unpaid for 4 months. Then they started paying. That's when shitload started. 5 web developers and 10 projects. 1 months later they fire one of us. Next month they fire another one. 3 developer and 8 projects. No documentation for they projects that were already started before I went there. Provide support for 3 year old project and nothing for reference. Salary was paid 10/15 days after the month war over. I couldn't take it anymore so I have a two months notice before leaving job. A month later all of the 3 android developers gave their notice. After we left, they haven't still paid us our final month's salary. Reason was it was not formal east of leaving and they projects we worked on haven't rolled out to market yet.
Talked and then mailed them the resignation two months in advance is not formal then I don't know what is.
Also how can the project be rolled out when there is specification change every 6 hour to 1 day on the project. Also we completed what was given to us and then the project hasn't rolled out because of new changes in the specification.

*Working on code: 😋😃🥰

-

* Goes to todo list

-

* Item on the list: Documentation (1 month overdue)

-

Let's see what's on the menu today:

* Web Application Catastrophe Special *

Includes, but not limited to:
- Orphaned server processes in the configuration management cluster
- Microservice back-end architecture with no API documentation
- Poorly implemented cache microservice with no documentation
- Stale data causing everything to be shown as down in production, despite everything running fine

Cost: 1 developer's sanity

!rant!
I have replaced a dev in a company where the project already started and it is shit! The project is directed already to fail, no requirements documentation, no proper communications, and a stubborn dev teammate.

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

All the documents that we have right now is I am the one who created it. Like c'mmon! this project is already going for 1 year and I recently just joined the team!

I *hate* it when a senior asks me to write a functional test report. Like I thought we hired functional testers to do that sort of stuff? I'm a programmer, I only write 3 things: code, documentation, and more code. Not freaking reports about how something did not work before, and after this 1-line fix does work. Oh and don't forget to include screenshots and a description of the issue. Arghhh

It's been 3 busy weeks. Had so much to rant about, but I could lurk at best.

We had 2 big features coming to 2 different projects. I told my boss it's take 3 weeks for the one I was working on. The guy working on the other one, said he only needed 1 for his. Guess who got labeled as negative, worrying too much over nothing, and so forth? Especially since a "much more complex" feature would take just 1 week!

Whatever. Fast forward to this week. I was done by tuesday, including testing of both features and deployment. By wednesday, I had even a good looking documentation. Everything was ready. EXCEPT. The 2 features have to go live together, due to various reasons. Guess who ia still a ling way from completing his task? Gueas who asked to postpone his deadline by 2 weeks? Guess who's gonna have to work on weekends for no extra pay?

Guess what? I know how to give an eatimate, and I rather be "negative" and schedule 1 or 2 extra days to be prepared for hiccups and what not rather than having to waste my free time for nothing.

FFS.

in my previous company , we used to create 4 custom ui states for just 1 screen in android app, and we would have task to create 3-4 new feature screens in 1 sprint (of 14 days) the states would be :

empty state : a state where data is not available. usually consisted of message, a graphic and some action button

data state : the usual state where data is filled on various elements

loading : a shimmer ui showing loading. it was supposed to be pixel perfect to that of the data state. it was basically a different xml, but with grey colored views instead of colorful. the tricky part would usually he to create the dynamic views

error/no connection state : as most of the screens couldbget api error or no internet error, this would be the screen for asking user to retry connection

all of these screens combined with their ui in xmls + kotlin code with barely any stuff being reusable , made the life incredibly difficult. however a lot of our customers would appreciate the interactivity of our app

doing these stuff again nd again , i had become trained to do all those 3-4 (x4) screens and the whole ui stuff in first 4 days of the sprint. but now i am in a company where i am getting passed on to managers after managers and getting tasks to change documentation in 1 week, i find those coding stuff incredibly tough.

gotta get back to shape

> wanting to add an embed google maps to a website I'm working on for fun, with React
> Check the API documentation, excepted their iframe they create from your needs, not much info about how to set in a a js framework
> decide to check if anyone has already created something with React
> They did! 1 american dude, one polish, one last from idk where
> The rest is basic doc so let's try each of them
> Errors, errors everywhere
> Screens stays awefully white
> Spend 2 hours checking, checking and checking again each library
> Each of them have a different problem
> Fuck this, let's copy the iframe thingy from Google's doc, adapt 1 or 2 things because of React and run npm
> Google maps works on first try

Why the FUCK did I decide to get this EXPENSIVE ASS MECHANICAL KEYBOARD before examining it to see if its software had non-windows support? THE SHIT IS WINDOWS ONLY AND IT WON'T RUN IN WINE!!! Okay, sure, there's an SDK, a C++ SDK. So I decide to download it and then... the "ReadMe.txt" looks like this:

(§@) Example•ÿø˝§∫®Á:
1.Ωd®“∞ı¶Êƒ“
2.Ωd®“Source Code;
3.Ωd®“ª°©˙
(§G) SDK •ÿø˝§∫≤[
1. CoolerMaster LED Table.xls : LED Øx∞}™Ì(6 row x 22 Column)
2. SDK Function.doc :¥£®—™∫®Á¶°ª°©˙
3. x86•ÿø˝: ∞ ∫A≥sµ≤®Á¶°Æw°B Lib¿…§Œº–¿Y¿…
3. x64•ÿø˝: 64 bit ∞ ∫A≥sµ≤®Á¶°Æw°B Lib¿…§Œº–¿Y¿…

I FEEL FUCKING CHEATED! WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?!?!?!?!? THIS SHIT HAS NO VISIBLE DOCUMENTATION!!!

Started a new role as a front end developer working with React, happy that i finaly won't have to work with wordpress anymore, having a great hope that I will learn from the best with my team, and then ... COVID-19 ... I have to work from home

first task, implement a feature on a react front end build with react boilerplate, first time seeing this repo and dispair quickly took over, there is no documentation except for clone and install, the code is a mess, the console is filled with errors and warnings ...

I did what I could, but it was not enought, my n+1 didn't complain but if I was him i'd fire my ass with no regret, now I understood why almost all my collegues are working as a backend devs.

I don't fear being fired, I fear the feeling of being not good, feeling useless, each morning I stare at the code and I become illiterate, I can't even touch a keyboard, now I don't know what to do, fixing this shitty app, trying to build something with react boilerplate and try to understand how the data flow, or continue my endless tutorial hell .

I think UPS' Api documentation and service must be the worst documented and build API I have ever seen from a corporate.

1. The developer website is a mess. A total mess. You can barely find the API type you are looking for.

2. When you get the API and download the documentation, the files, .pdf etc is still a mess. Pages long that most are craps.

3. Each request returns Status Code 200. Even if it is an error. This blew my mind.

4. Each request, based on error type or based on tracking activity returns different JSON schema.

For example, the JSON Schema for a shipment in transit is different from JSON schema for a shipment that has been delivered. A shipment that has been returned, a shipment that required signature etc. They are different from each other.

5. And the worst. They do not provide with test tracking codes. I have found some on internet, but they do not work in development and production environment.

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

Attempting to deploy my web application using Heroku. It throws me error code H14 so I add scale web=1 to the web dyno per their documentation. I get this console log thrown at me after attempting to deploy.

I'm starting to get pissed. I may end up just dumping this and deploying my node.js/java application straight to my Linux server.

Edit: Or better yet start learning to use this Docker thing I keep hearing about.

If not understanding code, read the documentation or debug the code. When trying to modify...
1. Follow proper indentation.
2. Don't make spelling mistakes and follow naming convention.
3. Don't try to write all the code in one line (based on line length set)
4. Simplify if else statements if possible.
5. If value of method call need to be used once, don't store it in a variable. Directly use where ever it is needed.
6. If there is duplicated code, put it in separate method and re-use it if possible.

How to run PHP in a container :
1. Begin a docker file for an existing php cron app (when all you know is php, everything looks like a php app)
2. Set the FROM.. Apt get update .. Do composer install
3. Builds the image
4. Discover I need git
5. Add git to apt get install step
6. Builds the image
7. Launch the php script
8. Fatal : use of undefined constant SOL_UDP
9. Opens the source code of the third party. The there's no mention of where that constant is from.
10. Spend many minutes online to find what's missing.
11. Find the PHP sockets page about that option. Digs into the documentation to find out that's missing from the installed PHP.
12. Find out I need to add a step to install the socket extension in my docker file.
13. Build the image again
14. Execute it, finally it works
15. Remember why I hate php
(for brevity I've omitted the even more complex part of having to set up zlib)

How to install node js in a container image:
FROM node:8
ADD package.json
RUN npm install

I'm fucking annoyed by low contrast bullshit all over the web!!!
Seriously, 1.9:1 contrast ratio for text on a documentation site?
FUCK YOU ASSHOLE. STOP THIS SHIT. IT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD. IT ISN'T USEFUL. IT'S GODDAMN INFURIATING THAT I HAVE TO SQUINT TO READ SOMETHING THAT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE READING AND MAKE MY EYES BLEED!

It's not cool, it never was.

#contrastrebellion

For an exam we have to develop an app starting from the documentation (still the hardest part), like risk plain, timing projection ecc. we did all this stuff in time, except for the app. At the ending of time the professor ask to us how the app was going, and well... we bluffed, we said that we only need more time (at that point we have only installed Android Studio and JFK) but the prof give us an other month for the app, so we decide (me and my friend because in my team (4students) only 2 of us want to do something.. btw we learn how to work on Android Studio an develop a ugly, tiny but working app (the app consists in a remainder for your pet stuff like give it food,water or take it out ecc..). We took the max vote -1 because u know, timing is important ;) and yes, this is the story of my first, ugly, app :D My friend an I are so proud of that tiny shit 😄