Programming as a career

I've been doing some programming at work, but because it's a hardware place, the bar is set pretty low in terms of languages. I've floated my resume out there a couple times, but aside from a couple nibbles, nothing, so I've realized that I don't have enough CS knowledge: a decent amount of perl, less decent PHP, some Mysql, some Javascript, and a couple of C classes that I've taken a couple years ago that have fallen into disuse. What, then, should I improve on? Should I take some Java classes? I figure that I'll have to take a data structure class sooner or later; should I aim for a certificate or even a degree?

Java and C# are very high in demand. And definitely get a Bachelor's degree in CS if you can. Tons of places won't even give you the time of day if you don't have one.

Bump. Anyone else, or did Mr. Burns give the long and short of it?

I've been in this career so long I'm obsolete, so my best advice is look at the want ads for programmers and see what's needed most. And I hope a BS in CS still means you know C inside and out.

Oh, and get the A+ certification. No, it's not very programming-related, but it shows that you know rudimentary knowledge of PC repair, it's a super easy exam, and it's on your resume forever.

Don't bother with most other certifications, though. They're an absolute nightmare to study for and they become obsolete too fast. Instead, I'd start contributing to some free open source project on sourceforge or google code or something, and then bring that code with you to all your interviews. It gives you a good answer to the "yes, but what have you done lately?" question, and voluntarily contributing for a free project makes you look good.

Asking coworkers and family, and two things I often hear:

1. Get at least a bachelor's in comp sci/software engineering (I have an ever-useful English degree already) because in terms of career growth, you won't get priority unless you have that degree. This is important to me, given that I'm currently at a position where I have almost no room for growth.
2. Don't get a bachelor's, because everything's getting outsourced in software engineering anyway.

I'm reluctant to give up before I've even gotten started on programming, since I took forever to find a job, first of all, and one that I actually enjoy.

People who say #2 don't know what they're talking about.

Just make sure you either specialize or diversify your skills (whichever suits your persona, there are pros and cons to either) so you're not a one trick programmer, and you'll be fine. In this late 2009 economapolypse, I'd go with the diversify-yourself-and-learn-a-whole-bunch-of-shit-for-fun angle. Companies will give preference to people who geek out on programming in their spare time, or *ahem* at least can pretend very well that they do.

Yeah, learn a bunch of shit, more the better.

3. Make up for lack of degree w/ experience (fuck going back 2 school)

Other recent observations: open source environment jobs have blossomed.. Microsoft technology jobs have softened (for pretty obvious budget reasons.) It's awesome to know both, but if you had to choose one, choose the former -- since it's free, and if you can prove that you wrestled with bugs in some open source package, and overcame them, that's something you can put on a CV.

(The really stupid thing about tech companies: no one will hire a seasoned C# programmer for a mid-level Java position, or vice versa -- even though the two language skills are highly transferable. This is digressing into rant territory, so I'll stop.)

3b. Or at least spend a number of days going through wiki pages on algorithms involving binary search trees, sort algorithms, and abstract data types like stacks, queues, linked-lists, etc. A BS in CS will teach you that and a lot more, but in practice, it's the former stuff that companies really care about. You do need some math skillz to understand the former. learning O-notation is a bonus.

Then again, some companies just want to hire people who like picking things up quickly.

Yeah, learn a bunch of shit, more the better.

ehh, having a multidisciplinary cv can be a pain, recruiters don't know what to do with you.

I'll back the assertion that it is possible to be a coder without a degree (my ex is an example - heck he didnt even finish high school) but if you go down that path you gotta know C++, C#, assembly, perl, etc relevant to field language. You have to live and breathe code and *enjoy* doing it. I see people who code like other people play and write songs on guitars. Theyre the ones who do well.

i would think with that trayce you kinda have to get a bit lucky, and find a company that's a bit more relaxed in their recruitment drive.

i recently applied for a java role, having a rather great bouncy interview and selling my enthusiasm for coding etc. They seemed impressed and I thought i'd done well but the other guy won the job basically because he knew more about 'business' terms.

all companies are different, worth researching them individually for your applications.

Games industry is perhaps a unique beast compared to coding in all other fields, as it is a lot more of a "prove yer shit" industry.

Know this really well.

Then this.

And then this.

Now you're pretty much all set.

xp Trayce, yeah agree with that

Is learning C++ a particularly good idea these days? There's got to be a lot more jobs in Java and PHP, at least. Hell, probably even in Ruby and Python. People do argue that you learn so much from programming C++ that it makes other languages much easier to pick up etc, but that doesn't seem to me like a good enough reason to start there.

Guess it depends on the job you want -- I imagine the places where they use C and C++ now are ones where you're most likely to actually need a CS degree.

What do I know -- I just quit my programming job last month and have no idea wtf to do in the future.

I had heard that C++ had lost out a lot to Java and Visual C++ to C#, and meanwhile C is still going strong for embedded systems, which C++ is largely unsuited to. But I have never been paid to write in any of those languages so I dunno.

When I was last job-hunting I put just about every language I had even basic knowledge of, and a specialist IT recruiter told me it was confusing and I needed to narrow it down. So don't do that.

I suppose that sounds obvious (writing 30-line programs in yr spare time or in lol college != doing useful work on a real major project), but when your core skills - and I'm not sure I have any - are kind of limited and obsolete, and your jobs to date have involved a lot of whatever nobody else wants to do that day but thinks you can pick up as you go...

I have a good front-to-back knowledge of web development, from html to java, and i do put it all on my cv, but I try to position myself as a java developer. Still most of the stuff i get from agents is for entry level html crap. Basically all agents are know-nothing cunts.

is it worth learning to use stuff like eclipse and that because i guess while most people can do java C++ fewer people will know how to work with the specfic development tools etc?

It might also be helpful to learn about recursion, as told by H.P. Lovecraft:

http://www.bobhobbs.com/files/kr_lovecraft.html

3. Make up for lack of degree w/ experience (fuck going back 2 school)

I kind of sort of have this covered at my current position, but I'm sort of an ad hoc backwater one-person band supporting a group in a hardware company, so there's not a lot of support for me but also not a lot of priority given to me vis-a-vis promotions, accumulating job skills past a rudimentary point, etc. It's good for financial security, but if I need/want a real developer's job, I feel a bit underqualified, thus thinking about doing school part time to get a BA/BS. And that goes to Sock Puppet's 3b; I'm a bit intimidated by the mathier stuff on my own, I do much better in a classroom.

I have some Java on me now, I'm taking a C++ class at jr. college this Winter Q.

People who say #2 don't know what they're talking about.

Re: outsourcing -- does it matter that I work in Silicon Valley? I tend to assume that if the general trend is towards outsourcing programming, SV would be the place where it happens first.

is it worth learning to use stuff like eclipse and that

i guess it'd be a good idea to know how how yer basic ide works but no point going out of your way to learn any particular one. once you know one you know them all, more or less.

OTM. Every company has their own specifics w.r.t. IDEs so it's probably not a good use of your time to worry about the environment outside of what you need to know to get things done.

There's no concrete answer to the get/don't get a C.S. degree question. As you might have guessed already it depends... amount of experience, depth of background, relative visibility, the type of job you're looking for and what industry it's in (something like game development is it's own Universe). I can only offer up anecdotes from my own career - I've had exactly two formal programming classes, but 18 years of job experience from IT garbage collector, to webmaster, device driver wizard, and database king. Like everyone else has been saying, have a broad familiarity with a couple areas of deep knowledge. If I was starting now, I'd make Java one of those deep knowledge areas.

Also, don't underestimate visibility. Write some code, improve on it, and then blog the results. Write comments on someone else's coding blog. I've gotten a couple of contract gig offers just because I posted some sample code to my blog. Go figure.

Lastly, get familiar with database basics. Nothing ridiculous like Oracle but just your basic MySQL/PostGreSQL fundamentals. I didn't set out to be a database guy, but I knew some stuff and now four years later I'm a full-blown DBA and pretty good at it.

> I had heard that C++ had lost out a lot to Java

i think this is due to a shift towards webapps (java servlets). i'm a dyed in the wool c programmer now doing java for a living because everything is now sat on a server being served by JBoss.

(never had a lesson in java, hadn't been invented whilst i was in education... lol, z80)

i am aghast at some of the job adverts i see, the list of disparate things they expect you to know. but a lot of this is due to agency idiots. (that said, if i think about all the disparate things i use at work...)

the thing they don't teach you at college but is fundamental when working professionally and/or in groups is version control. get comfortable with cvs or svn or maybe even git. at the very least know what they do.

i'd also recommend having something you can show people, like contributing, or starting, an open source project. or just having some flashy applets somewhere.

this stuff all takes years, 25 years in i'm still picking stuff up.

Hm, I like a syntax-highlighting text editor with parenthesis matching and suchlike, but for the actual business of compiling and running I'm still alt-tabbing to a console window, guess I'd better stop being so afraid of letting the IDE take care of it...

Ha, agency job ads. Seen ads asking for 3 years' experience in technologies which aren't 3 years old.

This is good encouragement to actually listen to the woman who's been trying to get us all to use svn. The only version control I've used was command-line only and didn't do much beyond locking the file and adding a timestamped comment. Seems they're a lot more sophisticated now.

file locking is so '90s.

Hm, I like a syntax-highlighting text editor with parenthesis matching and suchlike, but for the actual business of compiling and running I'm still alt-tabbing to a console window, guess I'd better stop being so afraid of letting the IDE take care of it...

Yeah, I programmed in notepad etc for years, before moving to a proper IDE, mostly because I figured I should learn to program without any tools to help me out. In hindsight that wasn't a particularly good idea, it just made thinks more convoluted and slow. Rewriting code was a major pain etc.
Learning an IDE (Eclipse, for instance) is hardly any work at all, since you can start off treating it as little more than a fancified text-editor, and learn the cool tricks as you go along. I mean, hell, I'd used one for over a year before I even heard of "extract method"! Sheesh.

Actually, that reminds me that getting comfortable with Maven or Ant is fairly quickly done, and something well worth doing once you're comfortable with Subversion (SVN) or CVS.
Also, testing frameworks. JUnit if you're using Java. It's both quick to learn, and well worth it; just don't let the annoying Test-Driven Design (TDD) fanatics put you off.

there are things netbeans cannot do that easily vim will do in a heartbeat but i can't live without the code completion stuff as i don't really know the libraries (and they change). plus java projects have such a deep directory trees and our stuff is so scattered that you end up spending most of your time in vim typing directory paths to swapping between files (could use ctags i guess)

eclipse i never got to grips with - there's no 'compile' button as it's continually compiling and i like having a compile button.

svn can be used on the command line but we use tortoise.

Programmers are the magicians of the modern age

Not the ones I've known. And I've known more than a few.

buncha putzes

Programming is the worst

DevOps is the worst.

Software Engineer USA™

we like to pretend we're architects and engineers and builders but we're really more like apprentice mechanics or those dudes that assemble pre-made furniture half the time

programming is great if functions and syntax are well documented. it is the worst thing imaginable otherwise.

I do enjoy the critical thinking parts of my mind that were unlocked by learning CS theory and programming over a period of time, but it really chafes me to see software developers think that they're able to solve non-software societal problems with that toolkit

professional googlers

Oh, I forgot that one. Software Architect. Classic.

I much rather SysAdmin, coder, developer, webmonkey/webmaster, script kiddie

Mind you, my end goal is probably to be a 'Software Architect', so I should lol carefully

yeah, really smart or tricky code makes you seem like a wizard but what it really makes you is an asshole if it's ever meant to be maintained

pretty sure my coding style has gotten progressively dumber on purpose

^^ thank you

I think software/systems architect is a fine title, even if my actual designs-buildings-and-structures friend recoils in disgust. I hate when people introduce themselves as "architects" without the qualifier.

Now, the part of the business where people use "architect" as a verb... not so good.

I do enjoy the critical thinking parts of my mind that were unlocked by learning CS theory and programming over a period of time, but it really chafes me to see software developers think that they're able to solve non-software societal problems with that toolkit

― a strange man (mh), Monday, June 9, 2014 5:09 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they probably also think they can throw together that application in a matter of a few days

programmers are horrible estimators

working with computers makes people feel very powerful because computers are powerful

bring back punch cards

ya, it's just funny because in canada you're not really allowed to use "software engineer", because, well, you're not an engineer. but in the states, it's quite common

I feel like 'engineer' is fair

you are designing and building something more abstract, but you are still designing and building something

I should be a software architect because I have all the artistic pretensions that building architects have

interesting how engineer and developer have become prominent as the job has become less about programing

you should be an engineering software architect or an architecture software engineer.

my dad once purchased landscaping software from a barnes & noble. i sometimes think about the people who developed that software.

i dunno, engineering would imply a discipline that's way more predictable than software. there's no ISO manual you can check that tells you the number of tests you need per 1,000 lines of java.

They might as well claim to be 'magicians of our modern age' and finish the job.

pretty sure metrics for unit test coverage in large companies are getting there

Yeah but are they as useful as "minimum cross-section for structs on suspension bridge given expected load" etc etc, I mean physical engineers actually know things

Programmers - the next job to become demand-weakened by too many people who enjoy it ad thus do it for free

That will never happen, I don't believe there are enough psychos out there who also love programming that'll fit the demand

as a cs student, I'm really not feeling the hyperactive "hackathon/build a startup in a day/be the next zuckerberg" horseshit mentality that i fear dominates. I mean, it's obvious that I'm doing this in order to get a job, why do i have to care about forming a startup

it's difficult, because you do need to keep up on new technologies and development practices, but to do so you end up viewing/reading/attending material that has an overlap with people who are WE ALL MUST MAKE NEW BUSINESSES and it's irritating

I guess the larger tech-oriented gatherings don't have that problem, but then you're at Microsoft's Build conference or JavaOne or whatever the fuck people go to these days

Every year my dad never fails to ask me to go to this one Oracle conference with him

on the bright side, the huge corporate ones usually have really cheesy entertainment

I think I went to one yeeeears ago with Mini Kiss, Battlebots, and a Rolling Stones cover band.

Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

programmers are horrible estimators

Guilty as charged.

Can I still charge by the hour though?

^Just call yourself a consultant instead of a freelancer and you should be good

Every year my dad never fails to ask me to go to this one Oracle conference with him

programming as a carer

Being a programmer means being the smartest guy in the room while taking requirements from the dumbest guy in the room.

If I had to do it all again...I wouldn't.

Can we swap careers? Because I can tell you that doing IT support for 15 years has sucked way more than I imagine being a programmer would have.

xp the zuck is definitely portrayed as an asshole in The Social Network, but his attitude toward those twins was basically otm and well aligned with your feelings I am guessing.

Programmers are the magicians of the modern age

― calstars, Sunday, June 8, 2014 2:36 PM

I wish I had have given up on both attempts at programming and IT careers long before they happened

On my desk at work I have five (count 'em) Blackberrys rebuilding while I curse the chimps who made BES.

I wish I had have given up on both attempts at programming and IT careers long before they happened

otm

i'd love to know what i was doing now in the alternate universe where i never thought "spending every evening staring at the computer" was in any way sufficient grounding for an attempted (flunked) CS degree or IT career

I'm going to be doing a lot less programming per se, after finally having mastered Windows desktop app development (after yeeeears of mostly-backend web development and deployment) I have accepted a position as an enterprise service bus developer. So I'll be connecting services and defining queues and working with project teams to determine how to hook their projects up to the ecosystem.

fwiw I don't think I've ever felt a business client was dumb, although moments where they might not understand the concepts they're asking for me to implement has definitely happened

I wish all the luck to anyone having a rough time of it with their job, though!

hi guys

do u mind not bumping this thread the week I go back to 14 hr days studying evenings in computer science PS yr new job sounds boss mh

computer science is awesome and is not just programming so you are good

feel like programming is better than it used to be. wish we'd had unit tests and code reviews when i was a programmer, i wouldn't have sucked so bad.

my coworker is annoyed because I get to move back to a cubicle from our team cave and will no longer be on a scrum team

actually I'm taking the cube he had before we moved in here. muahaha

friend just moved to california because he was hired by facebook.

said friend, for as long as i've known him, used to have socialist and even some anarchist tendencies, used only debian, hated microsoft, loved open source, liked kernel programming, turned down a job at google, and was just generally super geeky.

i guess this is what fatherhood does to a man?

yup, makes you sell out and suck

feel like if u guys h8 programming so much u shd at least move to ca and make bank

nah i just dropped out of college instead and had a miserable life instead

*cutcutcut*

xp one could conceivably end up in san jose or something. is it worth the risk?

no one can make u go to san jose if u dont want to

he definitely wanted to. i'm happy for him

I like working with scientific data that's not people's personal info, makes me feel mildly ethical

xp one could conceivably end up in san jose or something. is it worth the risk?

If you can get a big salary, sure, why not. SF is always accessible via rail.

OTOH all the dweebs looking to disrupt something or other.

OTOH all the dweebs looking to disrupt something or other.

+ forthcoming crash + worthless equity instead of cash + lack of professional engineering culture + “boys being boys”

yall know u dont have to work for a startup tho u cld go work for an agency that then hires you out on a contract basis to whatever companies and you make a ridiculous hourly rate w no investment or real responsibility, dont have to worry abt acquiring/managing clients like if ur freelance, and can take time off between jobs if ur fed up

tbf u dont have to be in cali to do that anyplace w a decent tech/finance/etc sector is good

youll end up working on pretty lame/tedious/soul crushing stuff a lot of the time but hey if u already h8 programming whats the diff and the benefits of $$$/time off are pretty great

Yeah. I’m fortunate. If you’re interested in systems or scientific computing, it’s easy to find a position in Boston with excellent compensation, strong engineering culture, and technology that’s understood and documented. Hell, I’m writing Erlang professionally. Erlang!

sounds like a greeting erlang mlady! maybe u shd say that to ur cpu when u fire up in the morn

lol

sounds like a greeting erlang mlady! maybe u shd say that to ur cpu when u fire up in the morn

LOL

Are you programming professionally? What are you doing?

lagoon is a web developer, mostly frontend, iirc

omg he develops the web?

only the interesting parts

We should start a consultancy.

ya i wild say im more of a designer but i am getting a little better at programing, i made a jquery function yesterday that i was proud of

not really doing anything professionally atm, been on extended hiatus the last few years doing freelance stuff here and there and even doing a bunch of not sitting in front of a computer type work which was p cool but imna have to get back to the grind soon tryina figure out what to do

We should start a consultancy.

― Allen (etaeoe), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 12:53 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im in get at me dawg

Hell, I’m writing Erlang professionally. Erlang!

How are those loops treating you oh wait.

where do I send my resume I will consider menial tasks but the money must be exceptional

computer science is awesome and is not just programming so you are good

Been struggling with this myself, last few classes I've had trying to get a CS degree were the most miserable of my life, and I've gone through getting a Humanities grad degree. Is the CS degree worth it?

I actually don't know that much about it. I took a logic design course in undergrad that I thought was awesome (though just reading nand2tetris is probably more fun). and most of the grad students that I met in CS (I'm EE) were doing cool things like writing experimental shit for 3d phones.

I loved nand2tetris!

im in get at me dawg

Does your ILX mail work?

ya i think so, i just tried to to DM it to u but i couldnt find u did u go off the tweets or something

do any ilxors have web scripting type expertise? my company is looking for someone for a quick freelance turnaround job. i feel silly advertising it on ilx but i'd prefer to give the work to someone i [somewhat] know if possible

I'm looking for a new software engineering job and I thought with 7 years (5 for real) on my rez, that I'd have gotten something a lot sooner than I have. I've been looking since late March, have had something like 8 on-site interviews, and 7 have already passed on me (the 8th said they'd get back to me by yesterday, so either their discussions are lengthening out or they're contacting the other candidate before they get to me).

I just need to vent/commiserate a little. I don't know if 8 on-sites is a lot, but doing that many (plus the coding challenges to get to that point) has exhausted me, and that I've yet to get an offer makes me feel undeserving as a programmer. (Thought tbf, a lot of questions have been intro algorithm stuff that I've forgotten about, since I don't actually use them at work.) I ought to take a break, but then someone gets in touch with me and I feel like I can't pass up any opportunity. I'm sure being in SF means I'm competing with loads of other people, but then, the demand should be there too.

That might be the only place where it's a problem at that scale. At that software architecture conference I was at in NYC, we were commiserating about how it's nearly impossible to find anyone to fill positions that require some experience.

xp

Did you get that CS degree in the end?

Just keep going, it'll happen. It's tough everywhere. Craft yourself a silver bullet. etc etc . Well that's what my friends are telling me, I've been applying since February and not had a single interview yet - and that's just for office admin or Excel work.

I'm am also trying to get my foot in the door on programming now but with no degrees or previous work experience it's not going to be easy, and at my age I don't see it happening ever.

Ste, I dorm nt finish the CS degree because for the type of development I was and have been doing, the program was not offering me anything useful. (I mean, maybe I'm working for the wrong companies, but I only ever use hashes and arrays.)

A lot of places have been asking me for my Github link, even though I've only used it for coding challenges. However, you might use that as a portfolio to show to recruiters. Also, concentrate on learning front end languages, especially React, which is the hot new thing.

Apropos of nothing, but I just looked at attending a full time clown college.

I work at a university and get a tuition waiver. Considering whether to get a second BA (which will interest me but will not help my career prospects), or do CS. Just wondering if anyone here is, like me, by inclination more "right-brained" humanities inclined and how they fared learning CS.

I'm a BA in English and an MA in Humanities, and I sort of stumbled into CS. That was about 7 years ago, and I'm struggling to find a new place, but I right now am working full-time as a developer.

i just got this book: http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/

it looks fun.

A recruiter at a big SV tech firm suggested that I buy that book, in fact.

yeah it's the canonical book

Still no luck, but I've asked a bunch of people, and they say that looking foro 3 months isn't out of the ordinary.

Another obstacle I think could be that I'm search during the spring/summer, which means that I'd be competing with new grads. (Kids ruin everything.)

As someone who's been in the industry for 20 years, I think the whole interviewing/hiring thing is really messed up right now. No one knows how to interview or what experience or credentials matter or if they matter. There's lots of work, but lots of candidates.

The truth is, coding interviews are often a bit more cultural than people want to cop to.

It can easily be a long slog. Keep in there.

for sure

my group has a devops position open and it probably should be listed as a higher paid position. my manager outlined as what he put as "required" and I was kind of in disbelief, because it was incredibly idealized. but the truth is that any candidate will only have 2/3 of the things we want but should be able to explain why they're a good fit.

I jokingly asked if it'd pay better than my job and the answer was no for two reasons: it's listed at my pay grade, and even if it was listed at a higher level, HR would push for it to be a parallel move. rude.

If you're not on a pager rotation now and the new position has you on call outside of work hours (which would be common on devops), that is commonly a pay increase at large companies. It certainly is an uptick is commitment.

I think we’re not there yet – our dev ops has a small cloud component, but it’s mostly the build/deploy/monitoring part of the pipeline, and making sure some help desk tools (jira, confluence) are up and running. So it’s less availability than configuration tools

public CompanyNameJsonBuilder_Factory(
   Provider<ContextSupplier<CompanyNameJsonArgs>> jsonFieldSupplierProvider,
   Provider<ContextSupplier<CompanyNameArgs>> controllerSupplierProvider,
   Provider<Supplier<RoutingConfig>> routingConfigProvider) {
...
}

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Like someone’s worst nightmare of overdesigned Java.

if you're writing code that only you can understand then you aren't being clever, you are being a dick. programming as part of a team means writing code that the entire team can understand and maintain.

programming means writing code that anyone can understand and maintain.

fixed

One place I worked at, someone made this independent decision to learn Groovy by building one of our systems in it. It was all I heard about for years after he left.

it took me almost a year to find a job with 10+ years experience this go-round; i should write a book about all the dumb early-stage NYC startups vett3ry and their ilk kept sending me to (crypto for the publishing industry! uber for ambulances!)

i've been at this new (permanent) gig for like three weeks now and i'm finally starting to settle in a little; i've probably pigeonholed myself as a digital agency guy forever, but i really like this one. unlike other senior/lead/etc titles i've had in the past, this one isn't bullshitting me; i have actual responsibility. my current client is hell-bent on using wordpress as a headless cms to serve graphql to react, which i am...less excited about.

your client is high as a goddamn kite

PY wants to merge 4 commits into master from multi-s3

+427 lines -105 lines

zero comments on what the changes do

(same person added java 11 to the CI workflow the day after it was released)

Any tests, or is that a silly question?

Just a test of patience, it sounds like

there are unit tests but they don't explain what they are doing either.

public void itReturnsAnS3ClientByGettingAnSTSCredentialProviderUsingTheBucketToRoleArnMapping() throws Exception

(that's one of the unit tests)

That test name /sounds/ descriptive to me, but I don't know enough about the Amazon cloud to know what it means, so ... i assume ARN is a thing that makes sense in your domain :o

We added a commit-hook some years ago that rejected every commit that had less than N characters in the commit message.
It helped, though we still get people who will just do like 10 commits in a row that's just the same jira issue number over and over, with no explanation of what the various changes actually are.

I might actually BE that guy though. I made a small commit yesterday where my message was something vague like "optimized and made easier to read". Immediately got a message from someone telling me he couldn't read the code anymore. D'oh.

I should probably take this to the 77 thread, but the branch a colleague has merged in has four commits, all saying 'initial changes'

The aforementioned no comments / Java 11 guy is my new team lead. He is half my age.

we just went to 8 a few months ago. very cool but we're pretty much left to Google everything.

Literally half my age. I was programming, professionally, before he was born.

Ugh, sorry.

oof... trying to find some black humor - failing.

Turned 30 a couple months ago and I hope to be in a non-programming role by 31

Personally, I'm >40 and honestly the best stuff I've worked in has been in the last 10 years.

But there's lots of places where what's important to the craft isn't defended, and I sometimes leave quickly when that happens.

I've come to appreciate the style guides, reviews and processes of my megacorp because they prevent a good fraction of this kind of shit. Just read about something on hackernews and want to check it in? Sorry, let's slow that shit down because everyone has to buy in first. Want to make a big change? Yes you can. but you have to be able to explain and defend it.

On Thursday we discovered that a big part of the project that we've been doing for the last 8 months just wasn't implemented. It had been overlooked.

On Friday we discovered that another big part of the project that we've been doing for the last 8 months just wasn't implemented.

Neither were in code I wrote, but both were in components that I reviewed and missed. Both were things that were meant to be configurable but weren't. I've never liked the way things are specced out here, not enough detail, and in both cases the things were new requirements in tickets where the ticket titles suggested there were no new requirements, just reimplementations of existing functionality. But two balls have been dropped and I feel slightly responsible.

Yeah, badly written stories is something we try to identify quickly. Is there a scrum master that can help out? Not drinking the Agile Kool Aid, but I’ve found that good SMs, which are kind of hard to find, are helpful.

not sure we have a 'scrum master' as such. we don't really subscribe to the agile thing fully.

we've had problems with tickets before - there was one set of BDD scenarios attached to one piece that i implemented only to later be told that it belonged to something further down the workflow. (we were redoing the entire workflow, i didn't know enough about it, figured it was being moved as part of the rewrite, i lost 3 weeks doing that, argued with the writer who insisted he was right)

the new bit isn't that onerous - we currently have a bunch of things

A1
A2
A3
B1
B2
B3
C1
C2
C3

where all the As are grouped as a kind by the configuration and currently ignored, and then all the remaining 1, 2, 3s are processed appropriately. but now they want A3 to be treated specially. we could do that in code but, like the other new piece, they want it in config to make it easier for OPS to support and the current structures can't differentiate between the cases.

it needs a rules engine really. but everybody i know that has used one has had a terrible time of it. and i just can't trust something called "Drools".

My workplace just appointed me scrum master for life. Apparently all this means is you have to hold 15-minute long meetings every morning where everyone talks about what they’re going to work on during the day. All I have to do is facilitate the meeting and make sure we all stay on task. That can’t be too hard, can it?

I'm all in favour of agile methodology but the terminology for some reason makes me physically sick. Kanban, burndown charts, and worst of all scrum master (apologies Mr Snrub).

Jesus christ I am not in favour of this shit: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/nikoniko/

I'm starting to get brought into those meetings as a "specialist" and it kinda feels like I just joined a cult

i was gonna say - "ceremonies" is even worse jargon than the ones cited above. every single 'retrospective' in my team becomes someone questioning the merits and demerits of scrum v kanban or vice versa. there are some major zealots for agile and within that there is zealotry for methodologies and ways of working. equally, it's so nebulously defined that if somebody doesn't like a suggestion or a comment about how the team works, they might say 'that's not very agile' as if we are all being watched by the agile god who will smite us for offending him, even though someone else's creed would insist that 'yes, in fact defining roles and responsibilities is a good thing to do for any agile team"

i didn't work in software development before agile and i can imagine it is largely a force for good, but it is tiresome too.

i am in hardware, and we are doing this now

another classic is people hiding behind agile to avoid doing things. like i have a delivery manager currently and he's like 'the way we work in agile, it's we as a team who decide how we will organise our work' and this is sort of his excuse for not even gathering info, collating the team's views, or trying to inform discussions in the team to a point that such a collaborative approach might be even vaguely useful or feasible.

it often ends up reminding me of that simpsons with the 'i DO... what i FEEL like' guru - i've worked in other places where it 'wasn't agile' to be unhappy that a colleague took a month off at short notice in a majorly busy time, or like it's 'not agile' to express a negative opinion, etc etc etc.

xpost

xp

my experience of agile has largely been that it's a way for management to abdicate any responsibility whatsoever for running a project, because deciding on requirements or planning anything is not agile. just give a vague idea to development and tell them to get on with it, then complain when what frustrated developers come up with isn't what they imagined in their heads

my current manager doesn't bother with retrospectives "because people complain about things but nothing ever changes" which at least is "refreshingly honest"?

i think our retros are useless for that reason, but it points to a problem of culture when they never result in change.

i think a huge problem with agile is the delivery manager (or scrum master) ends up as some middle management type who thinks their job is to maintain discipline and do the odd job interviews when in fact for it to work well it's more of a servant leader role. i had a delivery manager who like cleaned the desks every morning and evening. when i first started i thought it was absurd and then over time i realised that he would do literally every possible thing to make your work and the delivery of the team's work go more smoothly, he would meet anyone on your behalf, he would help you in any way he could. like your parents when you're a kid or something, i prob didn't appreciate that enough at the time!

admittedly when I had my performance review recently I said to her "I don't know why we persist with this ridiculous charade" so I guess I'm in the same position

lol - they really highlight it though - same problems every week and nobody doing anything.

we have not as yet managed to seamlessly integrate agile into our lean prince2 philosophy but otoh our servicedesk is itil'd to an inch of its life

turns out the bulk of the unimplementated functionality was in the Epic ticket (and not expanded beyond note form), and didn't make it to the Story tickets we were assigned and were working from...

most people are terrible at writing (tickets)

Yeah, that's why when I brought it up I didn't mean for it to be a be all and end all. I can go on for days about the problems agile has. My experience has been mixed.

In hindsight, I agree with Fernando that a scrum master is supposed to help things run smoothly. The best scrum master I ever had so far was this way. And I grew to deeply appreciate her work.

Having said that, agile is rarely fully implemented in most organizations I've heard of, which is what makes it such a difficult thing to pin down and criticize. Theoretically, yes, it should work, but in practice it's always this weird subpar version of agile that is used.

Anyway, koogs, glad that some(?) of it was figured out. Hope things improve!

my worst "agile" experience involved daily stand ups with 50 people in. about as agile as a concrete elephant.

We are up to 15 or so if everybody's in. Worst part is that it's a long, narrow space so you can't hear people standing on the far side. And one of them has a habit of standing directly in front of me.

There's definitely been some lack of reading of requirements, that thing where you're so certain of what you're doing that you don't check, but I don't think we're entirely to blame. Deploying to live tomorrow regardless.

(If we had done the missing bits we wouldn't be done yet, so...)

wait do ye actually get requirements

Having said that, agile is rarely fully implemented in most organizations I've heard of, which is what makes it such a difficult thing to pin down and criticize. Theoretically, yes, it should work, but in practice it's always this weird subpar version of agile that is used.

yeah i think that prob is true of almost all my four/five years experience with it - it prob sounds almost cliched but imo the organisation has to be trying to develop a culture of agile top to bottom for it to really work. that's the diff between standups where nobody bothers to try to run them effectively and yeah, it's 50 people and taking 70 minutes, versus actually seeing how short the standup can be. i actually think standups are a p good example of the cultural stuff - one place i worked anyone who went off topic or too in-depth would instantly be told this, but because it was something we did in the team, and because the place was a really nice place to work, and because we all socialised with each other, and because we had good retros etc etc etc, it never felt rude or snippy, it just was a culture where productivity and questioning things was encouraged in a democratic way.

in other places the same dude drones on in a standup trying to aggrandise his own importance/authority, tho eventually someone will fix it. i guess it's all connected tho. constant shit tickets/badly scoped work leads to longer standups, retros clogged with issues of scoping etc. the delivery manager or scrum master (i've seen the same role called either but ymmv) really is the key.

tbh when I eventually crack up and rage quit my job I may have "must not be an agile environment" for my job requirements, I've been suffering the scourge of agile for 10 years now and enough's enough

Are there any decent size development teams/companies that are not agile?

Working at a startup is such a gamble.

everybody says they are agile, no matter what their process or lack thereof is

This is all very useful. Thanks everyone!

has it gotten to the point where college students interested in software engineering are warned that this kind of thing is actually going to be a major part of their day-to-day, or even forced to take courses on it?

because those poor saps who are just into coding and wanna code for a living, lol

I'm in favor of any process which prevents code from getting written

I was told from my first CS course that all the coding is done by subsubcontractors in India

In my experience, coding is probably only 40-60% of your day to day anyway. Unless you’re on a refactoring spree, I guess. But so much time is already wasted in meetings planning, strategizing, designing, redesigning and generally trying to communicate

Communication is such a huge part of the job and a skill that hardly anyone tells you going into this line of work that you really need to work on, I think.

my job is p much to do the communicating on behalf of our programmers but i also get the coffees

You want to move to the states, darragh?

cant afford to, the pension here is just unfuckwithable

The rise of DevOps is insidious too. I can spend whole days doing cloudformation templates or worrying about cnames. That's no fun.

has it gotten to the point where college students interested in software engineering are warned that this kind of thing is actually going to be a major part of their day-to-day, or even forced to take courses on it?

because those poor saps who are just into coding and wanna code for a living, lol

― j., Monday, 8 April 2019 13:59 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was told from my first CS course that all the coding is done by subsubcontractors in India

― brimstead,

I keep reading this, but 80% of my job is writing code for new features, 10-15% fixing bugs or fishing information out, and 5% any of this other stuff. standup is done in slack

Do you mean devops as a job function or title? I barely have to deal with that because we have a dedicated devops, and any other infrastructure stuff that touches code gets handled by our lead developers.

I'm getting more responsibilities at my current place, meaning more meetings, and I've gotten a reputation as the unit tests guy, so now I get more pull requests too. I'd say writing code, either for new features or tech sent, is 60-70% for me right now.

devops, the way it used to be two jobs, both with largely different skill sets but is now one. i'm now supposed to be an expert on, i don't know, machine cofiguration and dns, rather than just software, stuff that people have years of training in but which i just google.

i get the nasty feeling that new team lead has just assigned himself the bits of software that haven't been written yet and is going to do them himself. which strikes me as... indelicate?

^ he did. Changed about a dozen files that we were working on yesterday, introduced new idioms into the code, used an editor that changed the whitespace on empty lines so that the diff was twice as large as it needed to be and then got another member of the team to review it. Didn't involve us at all. Just rude and it has fucking annoyed me.

I'm in a team that's basically enterprise services for our department -- providing things like queuing, workflow, etc. engines and pushing things like data governance so everyone can write code that uses the same concepts across development groups

learned last week at a conference that agile processes fucking up groups like mine is nearly universal. coordinating with other teams, even when multiple groups are working in the same realm, is something agile development groups refuse to do. so while it's kept project scope reasonable and kept groups on-task, it's a complete nightmare from a data analysis and reporting standpoint if anything works across multiple development teams

we're going to end up taking the carrot/stick approach: if you want to use the larger scale tools that make your development cycle easier, you're going to have to coordinate with the data governance committee

Trying to keep track of all these different approaches and philosophies to software development/design is overwhelming. You’d think this would be the kind of thing we’d have learned about in CS school but no, we learned about AND, OR, and NOT gates.

trouble is nobody actually knows how to develop software so it's impossible to teach

otoh my work sends me on all these courses

i cant program for shit obv

learned last week at a conference that agile processes fucking up groups like mine is nearly universal. coordinating with other teams, even when multiple groups are working in the same realm, is something agile development groups refuse to do. so while it's kept project scope reasonable and kept groups on-task, it's a complete nightmare from a data analysis and reporting standpoint if anything works across multiple development teams

i've never seen collaboration team to team across a big overarching project work well, dunno if it's even possible. i'm more on the design/user experience side, mainly writing content based on research and working closely with interaction designers, and while there are reusable things and some general stuff that can be shared, i've also seen the pressure to treat the work like a patchwork quilt can end up totally ignoring the needs of users. i've learned to an extent, unless something is completely absurd, that if something appears odd or illogical to me in a project i didn't work on, there's a good chance it's fixing something that came up in user research that i didn't see. i mean, unless every element seems odd, then it might be just crap.

it could be i've never seen this collaboration work well because again, the people doing it are middle managers doing roles that require knowledge they don't have.

i mean i know in theory you have some flat structure with everyone dovetailing perfectly but i've also never seen that, seems to me you need some people who are good at facilitating collaboration and whose job it is to join the dots between things. but it always seems intensely difficult and complicated. planning one project is hard enough without another 20.

among the reasons why software should be developed by teams of two or three programmers and a manager embedded with every non-software organization doing almost anything instead of in huge software companies

trouble is nobody actually knows how to develop software so it's impossible to teach

― moose; squirrel (silby)

trouble is nobody actually knows how to make software engineers rigorously follow the standards so it's impossible to implement anything elegantly.

if software developers were rigorous thinkers they'd be real engineers, for like bridges or something

Hey now! [insert gif of the Tacoma Narrows bridge here]

Seem to recall something on Coding Horror once about how the majority of people who code never really get any better at it.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-become-a-better-programmer-by-not-programming/

the software architecture conference I went to a few years back was enlightening!

at that level, it's all larger patterns, largely platform and implementation technology agnostic. that's obviously an approach that's hard to stick to when your in-house people immediately jump to the same bucket of tools, but there is the possibility of a pure vision

re: Fernando's comment about a big overarching project, our problem is that the entire business, which is a research-to-commercial pipeline, is in effect *one project*. so in order to gather metrics on the entire process, from the conceptual phase through the pipeline, you need a solid data model or there's no traceability. instead, we get a series of task systems that are single-purpose with minimal handoff between them

if yall think agile is bad, pray you never have to work at a place that implements SAFe

Moysey certainly couldn't manage it

Underlying principles of SAFe

1 Take an economic view
2 Apply systems thinking

We had some SAFe ideology at a previous employer. The concept as a whole could never fly because developers still had a strong say in how to manage projects.

Hey, do this thing, it's quite urgent.

Ok, here you go.

Thanks, here are 6 pedantic review comments to slow you down...

Gah!

String processRequest() {
  // do something here
  // and here
  String messageId = sendReply();
  return messageId;
}

void someMethod(String input) {
  if (input != null) {
    // code that does something with input
  }
}

(
the crime in the first one is that i could just return the result from sendReply, i don't need the local variable. the local variable makes it clear what the return value is and allows you to attach a debugger to something should you need to debug it.

the crime in the second one is that input cannot be null because the calling method has already checked it. i see no harm in checking it again just in case. also, you can't guarantee that future methods won't call this method with a null
)

i hate the nitpicking that is rife in programming. is it a male thing, i wonder. men will argue over anything.

I'm with you on point 2. what if someone else changes the calling method so it no longer checks for null?

Never submit anything 'perfect', always leave a little low hanging fruit. Though goes more for QA than PR!

code looks fine on both of those, people need to stop nitpicking

if it’s some public library that’s on github or w/e maybe standardize the style a little but, on the other hand, Microsoft’s samples for their Azure services that they publish on github is much worse

*are much worse

I wish those were the types of issues that came up in code here!

that's my point - they aren't issues 8) why flag them and delay the fix that they wanted in the first place?

meanwhile, the new team lead, see above, is stinking the code up with cryptic syntax and bad config file formats but has such a superiority complex that he won't listen.

yeah I don't mind either of those. we deal with a lot of 3rd party software that uses our stuff so the more null checks the better.

also like it when code is easy to debug. I always get irritated when people write one line methods that invoke five separate calls, which can be really irritating to debug when something goes wrong. though Java 8 streaming and lambdas sorta encourage you to write this way, I've (luckily) never actually had a problem with those...they're like the one thing that actually work exactly how you want them to

the impossible bargain of using higher-level APIs that just work 90% of the time versus the struggle to wean people off them when you've outgrown that use case

My life has become easier due to recent versions of Eclipse (the Java IDE we use) having a debug variable for "that function we just came out of returned this!"

I would have probably asked you to put in a null check if your method didn't have one. As much as possible you should never assume that any checks are going to be made before a function is called. This is basic stuff I would think.

First one is definitely a pointless nitpick.

had a fun time refactoring something yesterday...we call a module which returns a bunch of class codes, which has four components...two numeric codes, a description, and an indicator. for whatever reason the programmer decided to return this as an UnmodifiableVector of String[], which you have to read vertically (vec.get(0)[index] + vec.get(1)[index] etc) to return a full result...which I guess worked fine until we had to filter some out. I don't understand why people don't just create objects for stuff like this. Creating objects makes your code so much more readable and it is also fun and rewarding

I definitely agree that anyone nitpicking over this code has too much time on their hands. For the second, my personal preference would be to reverse the logic of the null check- ie if it’s null, throw- to reduce nesting, but I wouldn’t ever ask anyone to change it.

I've really started to like the defensive coding strategy where the entire first section is null checking, validation, etc. and then the rest is just "do stuff"

also lets you throw the right exceptions more easily

That vertical string array is one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

i hate the nitpicking that is rife in programming. is it a male thing, i wonder. men will argue over anything.

IME reviewers do this when they don't feel like they have any other substantive to add, whether it's a gendered thing idk!

True, I've done it myself, just to prove that I've read it in detail. But always try to phrase it as a comment rather than something that's wrong and must be changed

Certainly I don't keep insisting it's a problem after the writer has explained his reasoning, as happened here. (For example, I said that I used a local variable because it makes using the debugger easier and I was told that I should instead set a breakpoint in the calling function and use the special return value thing in the variables window. My way I get to *mouse over* the variable name *in the method i'm debugging*, no extra windows taking up screen space, nothing. Plus it explains what the return value is, whereas the method name isn't always obvious)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBld6I_AKs&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBld6I_AKs

xp An error occurred. Please try again later. (Playback ID: gmdBDNX-8DB0KXgZ) lol

Please open a ticket

If the ticket management software is anything like the one I use at work, I'll have to make a second ticket when the ticket management software crashes when I try to make the first ticket.

What hub are you on?

Please send a screenshot to the following distribution list: sixfootmeneh✧✧✧@vax✧✧✧.c✧✧

Would it be cromulent to ask an intern candidate to differentiate a function that I need for work because they list calculus as a concentration?

Is that something they'd probably need to do on the job?

they opened the door

Not normally! It's just that I'm working on a feature that requires equations that algebra can't solve, and I like human feedback to complement what Wolfram Alpha has given me.

I want, not I like.

Is SQL knowledge among developers something that's on its way out? And I don't mean DBA-level knowledge, just simple familiarity with basic selects, joins, etc.

It's all about the nosql now, I fear.

Probably, which is dumb, because databases are good, and it’s possible to use them in smart ways, but only if you know SQL, and nobody has designed a language other than SQL for RDBMSes that can actually use all their features efficiently as far as I know.

idk how common this is but where I work each team has its own database person. not that we really get any special privileges but we do get to optimize stupidly complex queries and run endless scans for marketing people

I certainly haven't used sql in 5 years.

Database layers in code always used to be a faff, as was waiting for the DBA to write you a stored procedure to do what you needed.

That said, getting errors at 9am every morning because you've gone over your opaque iops limit in an aws hosted dB somewhere gets old quickly too.

(first job I had involved the sql-based Informix report generator language and I used to love crafting those reports)

i just used an sql query the other day!

it reeeeally depends on what you're doing

persistence and mapping frameworks are good enough now that, unless it's really high traffic or a very complex table structure, it's a good idea to *not* write your own queries

I think the new status quo is fine because developers wrote too much bad sql

I wrote a few queries the last few weeks but they're being used in a data transfer tool

btw I'm all in favor of Apache NiFi now, as long as it's used intelligently. nice software!

The trouble is using ORMs exclusively will not teach you how to design a database well, and depending on the ORM can teach you actively bad ways of using a database.

oh, for sure. someone else should be designing your database, but the majority of the people actually writing software to hit the database, no prob

do NOT do the code-first, auto-generate the database path if it's going to be hit by more than one application. a particularly bull-headed jerk of a former coworker apparently was the software architect for a piece of software where he did exactly that and he completely fucked the project and I think people realized he wasn't as good as he liked to claim. dude should not have been designing anything used by more than a couple people imo

"Payment amount
£54.2400"

dunno who's doing the QA at (large electricity provider)'s website but they need to be better than they are.

had an hungarian tester once who did a report which contained a *mix* of european format numbers and english numbers. wasn't even consistent within the same one page email, really confusing. ie:

25,456 = 25 thousand 4 hundred and fifty six in english, 25 and 456 thousandths in hungarian

4.294 = 4 thousand 2 hundred and 94 in hungarian, 4 and 294 thousandths in english.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html

While not a “programmer” I love SQL - so simple, so elegant

Me too! I love that its grammar is so much closer to natural (english) language than anything else I've worked with. It's intuitive! More so for "verbal" people than "quantitative" people, I think, if that's a real distinction

It’s a language for writers

y'all would love COBOL then :)

I agree that SQL is intuitive and expressive for a large range of problems. Unfortunately it also leads developers to put a lot of business logic in the database which is kind of an anti-pattern.

It never ceases to amaze me how much “mission critical” shit is written in toy languages designed to be intentionally “dumber” than Real Computer Scientist code

lol dan have you tried a little language called ~applescript~

SQL itself is adequate, it’s relational databases that are truly a great invention

On the other end of the (in)comprehensibility spectrum, I find myself forced to trial-and-error my way through a regex thing (program? query?) today and wow, I fucking hate this. This kind of Perl-like bullshit needs to die forever

(I know, it's "powerful" or whatever, but as a human being--*barf*)

Oh I see, Perl descended from regex. That makes sense

perl is ludicrous but with regex I'm grateful to not have to write 50+ lines of complicated loops just to do a search and replace.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Perl-induced madness.

SQL is fun. But it’s when dealing with massive amounts of data that things get frustrating. Large amounts of data is rarely organized in a way that allows you to write “elegant” SQL, unfortunately.

perl is the most wonderful language i ever learned and you are all monsters

xp yeah but it isn't really made for that, I'm a 'write a readable query and parse the data in Java' sorta guy

lately I've had to write a lot of queries involving aggregates and subsets its frustrating because I get into a lot of situations where it's like..."ok I can do this and this and that, but I can't figure out how to do ALL of it together, even though I'm 90% sure there's a way to do it"

I fall into the trap of trying to craft a single query to do some complex things that are probably better left as multiple queries, but I also use Rails which makes that kind of data manipulation much easier.

Crafting a single query to do a complex thing is fun as hell to me now, I love doing it. Sometimes I give up and cheat with a temp table :(

ive a fella from dundaaàwk ahint me at work tackling some new code or something and he has taken to yeowling "och ye know wharray fucking meant ye tick baawstird" at his screen oh maybe ten times an hour

SQL rules

I’ve been playing around a lot in R recently. I like that it’s more of a really powerful calculator than a programming language.

Regex'es are painful to work with, no doubt, but there's often not a simpler alternative to accomplish what you can do with them. Actually one thing that I don't like about SQL (despite it's being mostly awesome) is the lack of regexes.

SQL wuz here ‘19

I’m a bad person who does SQL irregularly and rather than remember how to do a partition statement the other week, I once again wrote a query in LinqPad and had it generate a query for me

It never ceases to amaze me how much “mission critical” shit is written in toy languages designed to be intentionally “dumber” than Real Computer Scientist code

― El Tomboto, Friday, July 12, 2019 2:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I’ve known a few people who worked on code for fighter jet stuff and it was all, by regulation, done in Ada. I think it’s less dumb than incredibly explicit and lacking abstractions that would make fuck-ups easier

Apparently the rules have changed and the F-35 has been programmed in C++, which makes sense considering how much of a boondoggle that entire project is

Yeah I heard ADA is used in aeronautics and shit because it’s really really hard to fuck up (there’s a word in programming language concepts for this, extra safe or something )

seeing some dumb fite on Twitter about '10x engineers' with no idea what means

developers' inability to use SQL these days does get a bit infuriating sometimes.

my colleague added a page to the CMS just to add values to a lookup table the other day then deleted the page when he was done, because he can't write an INSERT statement. but he is completely hopeless and hopefully will get fired soon

I'm not sure why SQL doesn't support regex out of the box really. it's completely trivial to add it to SQL Server with a C# CLR function, so why they don't just include it as standard I don't know. I think Postgres might support them?

Postgres has built in regex support yeah

& mysql.

and Oracle, I'm pretty sure (I use regexp_like and regexp_replace on a p. much daily basis)

I like SQL but I'm glad my queries are mostly for one-off reports and aren't called regularly or made available for Joe Public to dial up at will because the more interesting ones (and some of the less interesting ones) get really fucking slow

this is partly because the tables don't always join in a sensible manner and useful fields aren't indexed but also I don't know what I'm doing and can't read an "explain plan"

so, I like SQL, but should probably not be allowed to write queries used in the back-end of anything busy

...I say I "like" SQL, I also swear at it a lot and find it ugly and etc

sometimes I have even been known to miss features from our previous database, a multi-value Pick database which felt like it was straight out of the 70s (though the iteration I was using was apparently out of the, ooh, 80s)

(the 2nd link there is the only reference material I could find anywhere apart from the original 80s manual, which was falling apart, jealously guarded on the boss's desk, and also borderline unreadable - so luckily that site there is actually very good and rescued me from many an impending disaster)

I was about to say something that I thought was interesting and constructive, but instead read that Wiki and found that OS is named after Dick Pick.

I believe ILX has created a repository for this kind of stuff? Great Real Names ?

a standard regex query in sql sounds neat

the problem is probably related to a bunch of vendors coming up with extra shitty versions of useful features, fighting over what should be standard

a coworker did a presentation explaining how oracle’s xml querying (which was probably an insanely bad idea anyway) was so fucked they actually tore it out of a newer version and retooled it

generally if you want to do document storage or mongo stuff, just... use a document storage db. relational databases don’t need to include every damn thing and doing so just encourages people to do very bad things

I can see not wanting to include regexes out of the box, since it's possible for an unlucky combo of regex and input string to max out CPU and bring the server to its knees. I think it was a bad regex that brought Cloudflare offline a few weeks ago.

yep that was a great postmortem.

who decided that percentages in en-US should have a space between the number and the percentage sign and can I shake them until their teeth rattle?

that thing where it's easier to rewrite the code than it is to debug it.

(somewhere in ~3000 packets the data is getting out of sync but this only manifests as an error in the last packet. just can't nail it down)

((there's a peculiar case where you've got just enough data to go into a fixed-length packet but when you've added the extra 2 bytes to say that this is the last packet you no longer have the space for the all data, so this ends up being the last-but-one packet and you have to add another packet containing a single byte))

fwiw, the second attempt at the code is much neater.

as long as you're sure the original code didn't have obscure and undocumented but vital side effects...

it's ALL obscure and undocumented side effects.

(it's not, it's new, non-production code, something i wrote 3 weeks ago and have spent the last two debugging. file in, slightly modified file out. unfortunately the output is fixed-length packets and some of the modifications add / remove one or two bytes from some of the packets, meaning all the rest of the data has to shuffle down and new packets may be created)

code review. github tells me 84 files have changed. +769 -451 lines

in those files there are *4* comments, all similar to this (but with different numbers, 1-4)

    generateNoof(malUnits),  // #1

the "84 files changed" aspect of that is really what scares me the most

we recently went on a big code formatting kick and committed basically our entire codebase which sucks because now the 'show annotations/history' feature in RAD points every line to that one revision cuz it replaced all the tabs with spaces

my last job the codebase had a "tabs-to-spaces" commit that messed up git blames but it's possible to skip over it/reblame starting before that commit in various ways

cf git blame --ignore-rev

it's a refactor of some classes into smaller classes. so all the test classes need refactoring too. and then some test utility things have been changed to static methods so everything that used them have also changed.

(it might also be that the 84 is for the entire pull request whereas i've only looked at the first commit so far)

and some default formatter keeps dicking wih comments so you end up with stuff like

// very long comment that would be fine all on one line but the formatter
// disagrees

wait, is RAD whatI think it is? If so, condolences

I finish bootcamp in two weeks, gang! :D

Congrats...was this an online bootcamp? How was it affected by covid?

Which one did you do? Was it a Rails one, or JS, or something else?

I did ReactJS!

I went to an actual campus six days a week until the COVID lockdown

my last job the codebase had a "tabs-to-spaces" commit that messed up git blames but it's possible to skip over it/reblame starting before that commit in various ways

― silby, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 12:17 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

cf git blame --ignore-rev

― silby, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 12:17 PM (four days ago)

Oh nice! https://www.moxio.com/blog/43/ignoring-bulk-change-commits-with-git-blame

Cool

lmao I didn't even realize that was a new feature, I perhaps haven't actually used that yet. idk whatever.

anyway, condolulations Whiney

Thanks!

definitely going to make use of --ignore-rev from now on but it'll be a pain to set that up for every giant squash merge.

squash mergers being fucking savages is the only programming hill i'm willing to die on

sorry whiney but you have to turn in your cool badge at the security desk now, prepare to be bullied, NERD

breh if i'm working on a giant project i'm definitely squash merging my fuckton of commits into 1 for the sake of keeping the master branch clean

smh if you aren’t interactively rebasing your feature branches into a glittering necklace of logical and well-described commits.

sorry whiney but you have to turn in your cool badge at the security desk now, prepare to be bullied, NERD

― j., Sunday, May 3, 2020 2:50 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

going from "geek" to "nerd" will be a difficult transition but not an impossible one

It's been fun meeting people who have no idea what noise music is!

silby otm.

Just you wait, Whiney.

having a true commit history is infinitely more useful than having a clean master branch. also you should be doing what silby said

always said i'd leave ilx after stet adds inline manscaped adds

Congratulations whiney!

I did ReactJS!

Welcome fellow ReactJS dev!

"I did ReactJS!"

How is the 40 hour course on Udemy, anyone know?

Which one is it? Don't pay full price, the courses are often 90% off!

https://wesbos.com/courses is definitely worth a look

also worth noting is that react has some of the best documentation I've come across -- had to learn enough of it in about two-three weeks for a quick project, and that definitely helped

of course the downside to it is that I can't really say I know it, I just know enough of it to make stuff and google in the gaps

That describes nearly all software developers. The rest don’t know how to use google.

i was gonna say tbh

I guess my point was more, it's definitely possible to learn on your own, particularly if you have experience with coding/specifically javascript, but a course formalizes that, if that makes sense

My experience is that the formal stuff crops up more often in interviews, although at the same time there are some things that fall into that category but which I've internalized as Just Something You Should Know.

Which one is it? Don't pay full price, the courses are often 90% off!

https://wesbos.com/courses is definitely worth a look

― cherry blossom, Monday, 4 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's this one:

[Removed Illegal Link]/

I have a free pass. My background is Data not web Development (SAS, SQL), know the project lifecycle etc.

I am currently picking up some Python and like R (doing a course of each for the next 1-2 weeks), but was wondering about a JS course.

Let me try that again:

https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-react-bootcamp/

(Only have it for free due to my company's account, not sure how long that will last)

I don't know that one but just the other day I was recommended 'The Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp' by the same author

My hot take is that by this point all courses are probably good. The only danger I think with courses is you follow along and build the app and maybe some of it is easy and some of it is hard, you follow along the path and get to the end, and think I kinda got this. Then any slight divergence doing your own thing and you're off the path and in the weeds drowning.

I think there's a lot to be said for the opposite approach, building things from the ground up and googling how to do each step. The reason primarily being each thing sticks a lot more, you don't lose what you've learned. There's definitely a danger with following courses/tutorials alone that it doesn't stick. A combination is best, smaller apps/projects for the second because its tougher than following a course

google in the gaps

This is the best skill to have, especially given the weird things that can come up you would never be able to prepare for!

Thats more of an all purpose answer, looks like differnt people have different needs/goals!

Lots of good courses to get a start on the basics but yes googling around the labyrinth of answers when something unexpected comes up and working through problems is almost like the key skill, whatever you code/script in.

I just want to say I was very anti-squash right up until the first time I had to rollback something out of the dev branch that hadn't been squashed; now I am all "if you do not squash that shit before merging, I will murder you"

smh

Right, BEFORE merging, not AT THE MOMENT OF merging.

If you're not committing to the trunk multiple times -- meaning that your changes are in an isolated feature branch that is eventually merged into trunk -- then you can revert all of that stuff by reverting the merge commit.

Squashing, being a manual process, always introduces the possibility of human error.

but if you squash your commits what will happen to your profanity-laden commit messages that end up here https://twitter.com/gitlost

Whats all the squash talk? Can't you just not allow the PR until its been squashed

We mostly PR directly on to master, ideally with few commits but I just reset and then PR with just the one commit (in theory not always in practice)

Yeah I commit until the cows come home into a feature branch, then squash the feature branch into dev. (I use Bitbucket to do this so there is little chance for human error.)

the trouble is the ideal number of commits to actually land for review is likely (imo) somewhere in between 1 and n

that said I don't really bother anyone I currently work with about this b/c our practices are bad and I'm still relatively new and don't want to waste my energy telling people to be better if they don't already value it

this is why when you "google in the gaps" on git you get three answers with all of them telling you definitely not to do what the other two say.

is version control hard or is git terrible? ('both' is an acceptable answer.)

You get better at googling though! Or maybe more accurately you get better at breaking down the bits so you're googling for smaller steps instead of "how do I build a moon"

I feel like git is as easy or as hard as your team makes it. I only really ever run add, commit, pull, push, merge, branch, checkout, and reset

ime it's beloved of people who like to over-complicate everything they do.

our default at work is to squash merge from feature branch into master. that way you don't get all the 'i'm trying this' or 'changed a thing' commits. before github there weren't feature branches...

I am lazy and just use a GUI

I do my adds and commits from the button inside vscode! the others from terminal

I think it would be cool to work at a shop where people had time to worry about things like squashing commits to make the log look nicer. Our logs look like a tire fire.

to be fair the only times I use git are for projects that don't remotely care about this, or for my own personal projects

git is good but has way too many options so takes forever to learn.

And then there are current best practices but some people didn't upload their brains so are still stuck on outmoded best practices.

goddam I really messed up this whole career thing lol

crushed some SQL today lads

xp -- this isn't career stuff, the only code I've done in the past month is a dumb reverse engineering project

lol sorry that was just a general scream into the void

Scream away!

I was scanning over my old posts, and I'm kind of stunned at how far I've come. Granted, that was (yikes) more than 10 years ago, but the industry's changed a load too, especially with the rise of bootcamps. I think those alone would've helped me out back then, and they're probably the best avenue for people thinking of getting into industry as a part of a career change.

I am proud to have leapfrogged from bash scripts into management like the ambitious careerist motherfucker that I was raised to be

Or basically “I realized I sucked at code so I volunteered for everything else I could do until it worked”

volunteering to do things where you've found a strength is seriously underrated and doesn't work in all organizations, but it's a good strategy

git is good but has way too many options so takes forever to learn.

I think git is great but to me its very much a secondary thing, I don't want to do anything more than the 8 or 9 commands I use. And if I found I was doing anything more than that I would wonder what had gone wrong that I needed those things.

Although hmmm, having said that github actions might be something worth looking into one day

I’ve done some vile things with git

surprisingly, vilegit.com seems unregistered

a foul repository

I am surprised vilegit.com hasn't been snapped up by VI purists

I am a vim purist but I stopped haranguing people about it 10 years ago

Some helpful but less-trafficked git commands that I use:

git ls-files -m

git add -p /path/to/file

My most recent git discovery was -v on git commit (which I’ve now made the default behaviour). It appends the diff (along with the list of staged and unstaged files) in your editor when you edit the commit message. It’s in the commented bit so it doesn’t go in the commit message but it’s useful to refer to, and most useful for catching stuff you shouldn’t be committing.

Oh, nice!

git add --patch whatever.js

is essential for a hygienic commit log

Thanks for the reminder! Any pro tips for using stash?

I always forget stash options so I have to look it up every time:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10726185
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3573623/is-it-possible-to-preview-stash-contents-in-git

And a whole bunch here!

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/useful-tricks-you-might-not-know-about-git-stash-e8a9490f0a1a/

Thanks. Have also started using “git stash push” so that I don’t stash everything, just the files that are causing a merge conflict, say.

Wow just found out you can stash hunks as well.

If that's what you're into.

Lol

And now I have an even dorkier d/n.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7f/cd/36/7fcd3690d0e1b184c2d8d9fef6cbac98.gif

If only!

I'm learning tmux now!

[
git add --patch whatever.js
]

is essential for a hygienic commit log

i visit this page once or twice a month:

https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html

neat

I decided at some point that I hated trying to remember command line options and started using GitExtensions as my Git IDE; I have never looked back.

Sourcetree is nice on Mac.

not found anything decent on linux yet. and the one i did like (gitg) lost a lot of the things i liked about it from one version to the next (and gets confused by binary files, like 100% cpu confused)

(svn is generally better for my use case anyway - large document, lots of tiny changes - than git anyway because it stores the diffs and not a complete copy of each like git does*. i had a git directory that was 40x the size of the original document once)

(* git will compress eventually, i'm told, and i'm sure i could force it to happen faster than it does, but svn does it by default)

We onboarded a new hire recently who came from a bootcamp, and I realized that of our entire engineering team at the local office (we have presences in multiple regions), only our VP and lead security guy and our worst (by far) developer have CS degrees. That leaves a director, a devops lead (who has an EE degree), and two senior engineers (including me).

Actually the other senior eng has an interdisciplinary degree that can definitely fall under the CS heading.

aren't you the one who was trained not to say 'onboarded' though

Me? Not that I remember!

well obviously not now, you've been corrupted

As long as we're talking jargon, yall have permission to FP me if ever use these:

- solutioning
- grow (i.e. grow a business)

My god I use a lot of these I have become that which I hated: https://www.trustradius.com/buyer-blog/27-most-annoying-business-buzzwords-of-2019-explained

"double click"

Is the word “wheelhouse” in that list?

Ha, of course it is

remote pairing with a TDD pedant is killing me.

he writes a test, i write something that implements it (there's a huge clear spec so i know what needs to be done exactly, this is also not the first of these we've done), the change is literally 7 lines - i set a flag in the constructor, test that flag in a later method and call skip() twice if it's true.

"That commit doesn't really feel like the minimum required to make the test pass. It's jumping ahead too far."

yes, because if you insist on backwards and forwards a line at a time then we'll still be writing this when the 2024 olympics rolls around.

seventeen years in startups before this job. the whole thing would be done in a day and just as solid.

ffs

you must now reveal the truth -- the commit itself was a test. and you've good news: they passed. make a certificate, print it out, and mail it.

the certificate should say "Top Asshole" of course

our JUnit stuff is so ramshackle, it's almost not worth doing it at all. either the tests aren't meaningful or they're designed to break on every change. most of them make no sense at all.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to write tests but I can tell you I don’t know how to do it

i like writing tests very early. it speeds certain things up a ton IME. i can see the appeal of writing tests _first_ but i never actually do it myself. but TDD goes beyond that.

that said: all js testing frameworks are dogshit, and i miss pytest.

Static typing is my god now.

TDD* seems inefficient as a concept at the best of times, constantly overwriting tests and implementations. seems like pussyfooting towards something you could just rattle off.

probably wouldn't be so painful if we were sat together but the remote working aspect means i don't even know whether he's there! or whether i'm waiting for him to get back from lunch / meeting.

(*Test Driven Dev, not Top Down Design. too many acronyms, not enough alphabet)

> Static typing is my god now.

nasa swear by it. and yet java has just introduced 'var'.

I'm a big fan of TDD, even though I don't adhere to it strictly (I don't write every test covering every scenario off the bat). I guess overtesting is technically possible, but I don't see how high coverage can be a bad thing? Like if what you're testing is trivial, then the test should also be trivial.

coverage is orthogonal to TDD

"That commit doesn't really feel like the minimum required to make the test pass. It's jumping ahead too far."

^^^ TDD

What? That sounds antithetical to my understanding of TDD.

TDD as I understand it:

- write tests before you write code
- write only enough tests to prove the code works for your use case's defintion of "works"
- stop writing code immediately when these tests pass

I agree with point 1 (though the practice and theory can be pretty distant IME), point 2 seems nebulous, but point 3 seems like an uncharitable interpretation.

since we do mostly services, our version of test-driven is we do OpenApi (swagger, whatever) definitions of the API, someone writes tests against that spec (call a url, validate the returned data is in the expected format and schema, no errors returned) and someone else can code the service at the same time

so you can set up static endpoints with both good/bad data to make sure your tests work properly and then when the actual service is ready you just point it over there and run

integration tests are only good for spotting erroneous changes and regressions imo, good for big infrastructural open source projects

testing code with artificial things is a pain in the ass

The thing that makes me crazy about writing tests is I understand kind of how to write tests for pure functions on data but that’s only about 5% of any actual application, the other 95% is doing bookkeeping with resources like databases and external services and god knows what, setting up mock everything just to test that stuff feels tautological and maddening. I just can’t.

I agree with point 1 (though the practice and theory can be pretty distant IME), point 2 seems nebulous, but point 3 seems like an uncharitable interpretation.

― AxoLOLtl (Leee), Friday, July 10, 2020 2:15 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't understand if you're agreeing/disagreeing with these practicies, or with the claim that they describe TDD.

Point 1 is an accurate description of TDD, though my adherence to it is not complete.
Point 3 does not accurately describe TDD, IMO. In my practice, I'll write the easy tests first, then as edge cases crop up, add appropriate tests (though I probably add it to the code before I add these scenarios to the test suite).

well sure point 3 elides the fact that it's supposed to be a loop in which you get the tests to pass, then add more tests, then get the new tests to pass by writing more code, add more tests, etc.

but the point (and the definition of TDD AFAICT) is that you're supposed to stop writing code on this iteration as soon as the tests pass. you may opt to refactor (and you have tests so that should be easy). but you're done implementing new *features* or *behaviours* until you write more tests.

that's part of the *definition* of TDD AFAICT (based on the wikipedia page haha), and it's certainly consistent with the practice of TDD according to koogs' pairing partner: "That commit doesn't really feel like the minimum required to make the test pass. It's jumping ahead too far."

an example of one of his implementations.

method takes a structure containing a value and two flags. if either flag is true return the value.

so the tests were something like

structure.value = 2
retval = test(structure, true, false)
assertEquals(2, retval)
structure.value = 3
retval = test(structure, false, true)
assertEquals(3, retval)

and his implementation was

if flag1 return 2
if flag2 return 3

which just seems perverse when you could've written

if [flag1 || flag2] return structure.value

and be done with it.

or is that "jumping ahead too far"?

it's not always insane to overtest simple code because:

1. tests are incredibly valuable if/when you refactor/add features later
2. the easiest time to write tests is when the implementation is on your mental stack, not months later, and definitely not if someone else did the implementation.

*that* is insane though.

It’s definitely perverse to write a wrong implementation just because it passes your first stab on a test

Actually I think I’m going to throw up

Like does this guy ever want to get anything done in his life

If this is the kind of mind that TDD produces then TDD is bad for your mind

these two chapters of dive into python (nominally about unit testing but not really) actually make me like TDD

https://diveinto.org/python3/unit-testing.html
https://diveinto.org/python3/refactoring.html

In koogs's example, I think that the way to DRY it up would be to write a method like

has_flag

flag1 || flag2

Then in the calling function stub/mock has_flag.

Agreed on both caek's latest two points, and point 2 is particularly why I advocate a TDD (or TDD-lite?) approach.

As to the "dictionary" definition of TDD, that's why I never call myself a strict follower; I do feel that using testing as a framework for development is incredibly valuable, especially with setup and tear-down, and as a prompt for writing modular code.

(oh, irl the flags weren't parameters, they were flags in another structure and this second structure was mocked and passed in

test1
when(mockObj.getflag1()).doreturn(true)
retval = test(structure, mockObj)
...
test2
when(mockObj.getflag2()).doreturn(true)
retval = test(structure, mockObj)

so not possible to combine them, sorry

in fact i cheated by checking in two failing tests at the same time, which is apparently verboten, just to try and cut down the number of iterations
)

the other 95% is doing bookkeeping with resources like databases and external services and god knows what, setting up mock everything just to test that stuff feels tautological and maddening. I just can’t

+ ui interaction, and otm.

i mean i've tried (not v hard) and failed (for various reasons, that being one) to get tdd or any kind of testing culture implemented at our company. and I'm ok with that.

tdd seems a reach for a company that does not have a testing culture

i'm jealous of all of you

xp yeah true, baby steps, but i can't even see how to do those as it doesn't seem worth testing the small bits of fuctionality that haven't got db or ui interaction all over them.

i don't have any major issue with TDD as a philosophy, but pairing with a TDD pedant like koogs described sounds like my own personal hell

i'm not arguing against testing in any sense, but projecting your own orthodoxy onto a pairing partner kinda defeats the purpose of pairing imo!

Absolute psycho replies to this one

my favorite reason to write software is money

— Abby Fuller (@abbyfuller) July 10, 2020

Ugh, I’ll take your word for it. She’s right of course.

galaxy brain:

and this should be the only reason. money is the best way to transform ideas to value and benefit all in the end. other reasons like freedom, morale or noble purpose can't last long enough and may lead to the opposite.

— Andrew Zhu (@xhinker) July 11, 2020

Wow

God, fuck programmers

We’re not all bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp4suZ4jNXg

All bad including me

Every line of code is a brick in the edifice of fascism, or something.

The best code is no code at all

Bob Marley

Or Vonnegut

Giving a talk on that exact thesis in a couple weeks

gotta love unit tests with inputs such as

new byte[] { 0x27, 00, 00, 00, (byte) 0xFF, (byte) 0b11_0_1_0_0_1_0 }

(this actually my forte, have been extracting bits from bytes since i had a zx81)

DEAD BEEF BAD FOOD

I've got a great poke for Jet Set Willy.

Lol

Don’t know if it’s a religion thing but why do some people hate to do a git rebase and then do a fast-forward merge.

we banned merge commits on our project because of one guy

Not surprised. Did the graph look like the one shone here in The Problem? https://mtyurt.net/post/git-using-advanced-rebase-features-for-a-clean-repository.html

Can you lock out all merges? We have fast-forward-only some branches but then I recently noticed that some of the more unenlightened just merge that branch into theirs and then they can fast-forward this merged melange back.

I missed out on the TDD conversation but I wanted to mention that my one experience pairing with a TDD disciple involved watching her create a bunch of tests that were logically incorrect, getting them to pass, and missing giant pieces of logic that interconnected subsystems of the module we were working on and actively mocking other pieces of functionality we were supposed to be testing, so technically we wrote passing code according to the tests but, because the tests weren't actually right, the whole thing was super buggy and caused a bunch of later rework.

I know this isn't the fault of TDD per se but it did play into a lot of my preconceived notions against it.

Re: merge commits, I don't see why anyone should care what I do on my feature branch as long as I squash-merge into the main branch.

Yeah we don’t care what you do on feature branches but main (nee master) is ff only enforced via our code review thing (gerrit). What this means in practice is you hit “merge” and gerrit rebased your change into the tip of main then merged by ff. if there’s a conflict you have to resolve it and resubmit the review. We used to let people do that without running the tests but the number of people who committed the string “>>>>>>>>>” was getting out of hand so it has to at least build after a manually resolved merge conflict.

Doowatchyalike, just don't create a twelve-lane merge superhighway and then (DEAD) BEEF when your merges ultimately break down.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2017/the-biggest-and-weirdest-commits-in-linux-kernel-git-history

Thanks.

Also, I misspelled Doowutchyalike.

It's pulled, and it's fine, but there's clearly a balance between "octopus merges are fine" and "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge".

I would just like to take a moment to say javascript sucks and lodash sucks and _.times REALLY sucks

Why does every fucking thing have to be a function, how about you () => juggle(myBalls)

Not only does it all have to be a function but there’s a strong convention that functions be anonymous whenever possible because fuck the reader, right?

Isn’t most of lodash in es whatever these days though?

our linting rules haven't been updated yet to favor the native implementations, why because fuck everything and everyone

imo this is what happens when you let Perl aficionados design everything

Don't worry, Dan, it will be updated just as soon as Perl6 is production.

Why does every fucking thing have to be a function, how about you () => juggle(myBalls)

juggle(this.nuts)

everything being a function is good not bad tbh

fuck state, keep it in a box

counterpoint: nah

Mutable state is a turd on the polished marble floor of my exquisite grand hall hung with crystal chandeliers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwm3eW9YyFw

Classic or dud: late night email from colleague cc-ing management saying he can’t figure out something you gave him a few weeks ago and it is crashing and you need to put in more error checking etc. ( because his time and productivity etc)

Well this has been sorted for now.

# get password via terminal without echoing
password = STDIN.noecho(&:gets).chomp

reasonable, right? sentence in english explaining the cryptic command that follows. i don't get the "document WHY not WHAT" review comments i always get.

coming new to this code, debugging it later say, such things let you understand which part does what without having to decode the code. = useful, especially if you're in a mixed ability team.

also, review comments from people you haven't asked for reviews, classic or dud?

Leaning towards dud.

Codesplainers gonna codesplain.

If people would just put in fucking comments saying what they were trying to do and what their expectations were, basically defining the contract they're trying to fulfill, it would be about 8 billion times easier to identify logic mistakes than it currently is.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/what-comments/

i have an issue with that

> //f.ex $F1a3

f.ex? for example? what's wrong with 'ie' or 'eg'?

(my whole script only exists because someone checked in an aws kms encrypted key without explaining how it was generated, and 3 years later we needed another - lack of documentation again)

I can see where the anti comment review on that is coming from. The comment duplicates stuff that’s in the docs, right? It’s not a “trick” that depends on undocumented behaviour (like the fact that piping to xargs is a way to trim leading and trailing white space?! Did you all know this?!). It’s just something that’s not obvious from reading the code. That’s not where I draw the line and your point about mixed ability teams is a good one, but it’s not a terrible place to draw it.

Whoa, xargs trick is neat!

I am old. I still use xargs -i and never switched to -I

Also can never remember that xargs idiom using the shell trick.

Ah, xargs -0 will keep the whitespace

Feel like comments should be judged on their practical effects rather than from some philosophical position. If it takes 2 minutes to figure out a chunk of code without comments and 10 seconds to figure out the code with comments, I don't care how "obvious" or "self documenting" the code itself is, the comments are good.

otm

I say this as person who long ago took a course - in Pascal! - nicknamed "Commenting For Credit" in which people were expected to do things like

  i := I + 1; //increment I 

(input wants to uppercase every i)

 i := i + 1; //increment i again

Next topic: git commit messages.

//increment topic

ruby doesn't let you i++. spent a chunk of sunday looking at cryptic error message and not seeing the problem.

Feel like comments should be judged on their practical effects rather than from some philosophical position. If it takes 2 minutes to figure out a chunk of code without comments and 10 seconds to figure out the code with comments, I don't care how "obvious" or "self documenting" the code itself is, the comments are good.

Can we attach this to everyone's monitor?

I think I only write comments that are at least 100 words long

I'm the only one reading my code/commenting so too many of my comments are targeted at my osteoporosis of a memory, e.g.,

// The + 16 offset is event type, commenting so I don't forget it yet again
// The + 16 offset is still event type, it appears I forgot it again

(4000 lines apart, to be fair, and not my code but decompiler output)

public static final int EVENT_TYPE_OFFSET = 16;

trust me that's not feasible in this thing, it's certainly possible but this is 240K lines of code and I can't just ctrl-f

Btw, my posts from a few weeks ago was about colleagues who are part of the development process and are participating in alpha testing but seem to want to behave as if they are end users and are shocked - shocked! - when something breaks. Perhaps this is a touchy subject.

Because no one wants to be that guy that breaks things.

But only the other hand there is the short-term/local/pre-mature optimization of being fast on the send button with "It broke! Nothing should ever break!"