terrible programmers: my god, it's full of chars

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > terrible programmers: my god, it's full of chars

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Janitor Prime: Jan 22, 2004; PC LOAD LETTER

What da fuck does that mean; Fun Shoe

tef posted:

hi,

even if something did come up you would shoot it down

most job openings are "we want a magical unicorn" and eventually they settle for slobs like you and I, warts and all

so, go write a cv, and try to make it not look as if you've just got your foot in the door

less a "look at the things you don't have to teach me to use" but "look at the scars and wounds i have recieved from trying to do a thing"

then, ask around. lotta places are good on remote but bad on timezones, they'll pick someone like you over someone in EU

i'm saying that if you don't believe you can land a remote gig then you will pretty much sabotage any chance you get

I don't know, you and LMO are leagues better than me and every other dev I've ever worked with so you're selling yourself short if you don't think you're a Unicorn

# ? Jun 10, 2016 01:43

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# ? May 11, 2024 17:23

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

thanks for all the words everyone. i think im bad at taking praise, cuz my reaction to it is always like "youre crazy im bad".

i think im going to talk with my wife and see about at least sending out feelers resume wise.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 01:51

MononcQc: May 29, 2007

Janitor Prime posted:

I don't know, you and LMO are leagues better than me and every other dev I've ever worked with so you're selling yourself short if you don't think you're a Unicorn

there's always a big difference between how people perceive things and how they actually are. A lot of seniority is getting it in your head that no, you may not know what you're doing, but that's okay and you can figure it out given enough time. Then there's accumulated knowledge and because you know things people turn to ask you questions but nobody starts senior anyway.

It's definitely more tempting for me to give a +1 for a hire if it's a motivated person who appears to be a good communicator (especially a remote) than a very experienced one who seems unable to hold a conversation.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 01:57

DONT THREAD ON ME: Oct 1, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo; Floss Finder

simble posted:

is elixir a cool and good language? i've been reading about it and it looks like a cool and good language

elixir is good because it's a gateway to erlang, which is better

time spent learning elixir before jumping to erlang will not be wasted. most of the concepts commute pretty well because you're learning the same APIs which enforce the same program structure.

so imo, spend a week with elixir and then buy monoqc's book and jump to erlang. i spent a few weeks with elixir a while back and while i'm not using erlang for anything right now (and havent used it for anything serious) the OTP concepts I picked up were pretty mind expanding and super valuable to me.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 02:02

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

my wife just told me im stupid if i dont send u guys my resume, lomarf. she told me to get out of my own head.

would most places be amenable to me saying i wouldn't want to quit my current job until after my current place finishes paying for my expense paid month-long sabbatical to europe next march?

# ? Jun 10, 2016 02:02

DONT THREAD ON ME: Oct 1, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo; Floss Finder

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

my wife just told me im stupid if i dont send u guys my resume, lomarf. she told me to get out of my own head.

would most places be amenable to me saying i wouldn't want to quit my current job until after my current place finishes paying for my expense paid month-long sabbatical to europe next march?

probably not, but if you find a job that is exciting enough that you want to skip your sabbatical in favor of taking it, you've probably found a good job

# ? Jun 10, 2016 02:03

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

Most places won't mind if it's going to take you a little bit of time to wrap things up on your end. Taking 9 months is a bit of a different story, though.

That said, depending on how long interviewing etc. takes, by the time you're actually getting an offer it might be possible. And it's never really going to hurt to ask about it once they've committed enough to start talking about start date - the worst that happens is that they say no and you're in exactly the same spot as if you hadn't asked.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 02:11

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

ya, im going to polish up my resume this weekend. is it even worth listing any of my experience prior to programming, or should i just talk about my relevant education and training and projects ive worked on? i dont know how much i can pretty up "took a handful of cs courses in undergrad, a handful more as a returning student, then spent a few months keeping an extremely bad and esoteric codebase from completely fraying apart"

# ? Jun 10, 2016 02:20

mekkanare: Sep 12, 2008; We have detected you are using ad blocking software.

Please add us to your whitelist to view this content.

Today I made a std::thread a class member and I feel like this is awful, but the program is working. RIP

# ? Jun 10, 2016 03:41

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

holy poo poo piss constructing cards out of 3 separate graphics this is so awesome

# ? Jun 10, 2016 03:54

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Jabor posted:

Most places won't mind if it's going to take you a little bit of time to wrap things up on your end. Taking 9 months is a bit of a different story, though.

a company that does mind waiting a month without a very good reason is generally a sign you should run screaming anyway. 6-9 month out hiring would be pretty drat awkward though and not something i'd want to deal with for anything but an intern (where you're kinda forced to because the good ones are interviewing for summer internships in the fall).

# ? Jun 10, 2016 05:29

triple sulk: Sep 17, 2014

MALE SHOEGAZE posted:

elixir is good because it's a gateway to erlang, which is better

time spent learning elixir before jumping to erlang will not be wasted. most of the concepts commute pretty well because you're learning the same APIs which enforce the same program structure.

so imo, spend a week with elixir and then buy monoqc's book and jump to erlang. i spent a few weeks with elixir a while back and while i'm not using erlang for anything right now (and havent used it for anything serious) the OTP concepts I picked up were pretty mind expanding and super valuable to me.

lol if u didn't get a physical copy for free :smugmrgw:

# ? Jun 10, 2016 05:36

VikingofRock: Aug 24, 2008

Luigi Thirty posted:

holy poo poo piss constructing cards out of 3 separate graphics this is so awesome

This is awesome

# ? Jun 10, 2016 05:42

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

my wife just told me im stupid if i dont send u guys my resume, lomarf. she told me to get out of my own head.

would most places be amenable to me saying i wouldn't want to quit my current job until after my current place finishes paying for my expense paid month-long sabbatical to europe next march?

plenty of places are hard up enough for good ~~engineers~~ developers that they may be willing to accommodate

plenty of places will pay you enough more that you won't care about your current employer having agreed to pay for that sabbatical, as long as your new employer will give you the time off

in fact, even plenty of places that say they don't do telecommuting and everything must be done on-site are actually fine with telecommuting-with-regular-company-paid-visits-until-you-can-move, whether that's because you need a visa to be able to move, or because your kids need to finish the school year, or your spouse is finishing grad school, or you need to sell a house, or...

basically if you're a good fit at a good company, you will be taken care of, you don't have as much to worry about as you might think

# ? Jun 10, 2016 06:57

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

ya, im going to polish up my resume this weekend. is it even worth listing any of my experience prior to programming, or should i just talk about my relevant education and training and projects ive worked on? i dont know how much i can pretty up "took a handful of cs courses in undergrad, a handful more as a returning student, then spent a few months keeping an extremely bad and esoteric codebase from completely fraying apart"

it's most definitely worthwhile, especially that last part, especially since your experience prior to programming involves loving documenting things

I did a "coding test" at one interview a couple decades ago that involved writing some C code to read an image file and print out its metadata given only a spec and an IDE. later I learned that the fact that I not only actually did it, but broke everything into sensible functions and wrote comments for each one caused one of the programmers to say "holy poo poo, hire him now"

# ? Jun 10, 2016 07:05

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

holy poo poo gently caress even talking to managers that are not your boss. they are without grasp on the concept of you not having to listen to them

# ? Jun 10, 2016 15:42

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

HoboMan posted:

holy poo poo gently caress even talking to managers that are not your boss. they are without grasp on the concept of you not having to listen to them

right, basically everything about programming jobs is great except for the job part, lol.

today i discovered a place where multiple fields were being serialized to the server as a comma-delimited string. the guy even took the time to define a constant COMMA to use in lieu of actually typing "," but at no point thought "what if one of these fields contains a comma". 15 years later, when ambulance data on claims gets sent to the server pickup and dropoff addresses are overflowing into later fields if they contain commas.

fortunately this was caught by a qa person internally who was just running general workflow tests so i released a patch along with a little search to find any claims that could potentially have been affected by this to make sure customer db's didn't get hosed.

it's not so bad though, it's not like we actually use the ambulance data for anything, we just give them a spot to enter it in. what do you mean, someone might want to pay claims differently based on geographic distance from the pickup spot to the er? that's too big a project to commit to right now, let's focus on adding colors to this rich text paper bill template.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 15:53

Bloody: Mar 3, 2013

Plorkyeran posted:

only if you're sure you're actually going to leave. if you coast for a while and then realize you don't actually have any better opportunities it's pretty hard to re-engage.

yeah this is the part that is bad and also my life lmao

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:00

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

that's too big a project to commit to right now, let's focus on adding colors to this rich text paper bill template.

this

half of my meeting with the branch mangers today was them round-tabling a change to the wording on a single popup (we were planning on removing the popup)

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:07

Bloody: Mar 3, 2013

shave every yak & shed every bike

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:12

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

my most significant contribution today was making some validation error messages less beep-boop computery

from something like "the starting date of qqqqq (2016-01-01) occurs after the starting date of wwwwww (2015-01-01)" to "qqqqq starts on 2016-01-01, after wwwww"

(wwww's start date is visible higher up on the form)

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:14

Captain Foo: May 11, 2004; we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Bloody posted:

shave every yak & shed every bike

this could also be a good thread title

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:15

qntm: Jun 17, 2009

Wheany posted:

my most significant contribution today was making some validation error messages less beep-boop computery

from something like "the starting date of qqqqq (2016-01-01) occurs after the starting date of wwwwww (2015-01-01)" to "qqqqq starts on 2016-01-01, after wwwww"

(wwww's start date is visible higher up on the form)

good error messages are a killer feature

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:45

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

lol if half your error messages aren't just "exception occurred in target of invocation"

# ? Jun 10, 2016 16:49

dick traceroute: Feb 24, 2010; Open the pod bay doors, Hal.; Grimey Drawer

Top errors :
Nullable object must have a value
Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Transaction failure

With as little context as possible

# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:17

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

i used try/catch in a script for the first time yesterday and it's way easier than doing if/else for checking if a thing exists and returning something else if it doesn't. if you haven't used a try/catch before, I highly recommend it.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:19

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

right, basically everything about programming jobs is great except for the job part, lol.

well yeah. 90% of my job is things that i do for fun in my spare time. the main thing i actually demand money for is giving a gently caress about what management wants

# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:30

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

my idea of a user-friendly and helpful error message is just dumping the exception message and stack trace on screen. i mean it has all the information about the error you could ever need

# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:35

Progressive JPEG: Feb 19, 2003

Stack trace can be passed back to you by support so you can figure out what exactly the problem is

AMA about writing error messages with slightly different phrasing so that each is uniquely identifiable

# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:47

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

Wheany posted:

my idea of a user-friendly and helpful error message is just dumping the exception message and stack trace on screen. i mean it has all the information about the error you could ever need

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:10

gonadic io: Feb 16, 2011; >>=

Lol if u write exception messages

Just restart the process!

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:11

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Wheany posted:

my idea of a user-friendly and helpful error message is just dumping the exception message and stack trace on screen. i mean it has all the information about the error you could ever need

Something happened
_{Something happened}

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:12

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

exception catches that just display something saying something went wrong to the user and then not throwing it again are the worst.

e: also this

C# code:

public static void Main()
{
    try
    {
        RealMain.Run();
    }
    catch
    {
        Popups.Alert("There was an error");
        Main();
    }
}

HoboMan fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jun 10, 2016

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:13

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

scanner something error happens

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:31

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

actually we dump the stack trace in the JavaScript console so our support people can just say "press F12 and paste the big paragraph of red text into an email for me"

# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:33

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

i write detailed error messages with descriptions of what went wrong, what the user can do to resolve it, and buttons to automatically take the best course of action if that's possible. if your users are like system administrators or something then it's probably fine to just dump a stack trace since you probably want them to just contact your support anyway, but if you have real human end users who are not pro computer touchers you should be as friendly and detailed as possible.

note that friendly does not mean doing the win 10 "oops, our bad

" screen. it means explaining what happened as nontechnically as you can so that the user feels actually informed and confident to continue with their workflow after resolving the issue or reporting it.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:52

Janitor Prime: Jan 22, 2004; PC LOAD LETTER

What da fuck does that mean; Fun Shoe

Overheard a dev say this today:
we need to put all the documents in the central suppository

# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:56

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

the uh, book suppository building

# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:57

Dr Monkeysee: Oct 11, 2002; just a fox like a hundred thousand others; Nap Ghost

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

i write detailed error messages with descriptions of what went wrong, what the user can do to resolve it, and buttons to automatically take the best course of action if that's possible. if your users are like system administrators or something then it's probably fine to just dump a stack trace since you probably want them to just contact your support anyway, but if you have real human end users who are not pro computer touchers you should be as friendly and detailed as possible.

note that friendly does not mean doing the win 10 "oops, our bad " screen. it means explaining what happened as nontechnically as you can so that the user feels actually informed and confident to continue with their workflow after resolving the issue or reporting it.

on the other hand, no one reads error messages.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:12

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# ? May 11, 2024 17:23

Shaggar: Apr 26, 2006

Luigi Thirty posted:

actually we dump the stack trace in the JavaScript console so our support people can just say "press F12 and paste the big paragraph of red text into an email for me"

write your traces and logging to the same central place internally. You create a correlation id for each request that is included in each log message and in the event of an error, is sent to the client. Do not ever send stack traces to the client. If you run into a problem you can ask the user for the correlation id for their failed request and then find the related trace in your logs along w/ any other log messages related to the request.

# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:19

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