Vincent Valentine posted:

What's the title for someone who writes code for a terrible codebase where the only solution product management gives enough time for is an equally terrible solution because they want everything done fast contributing to an exponentially increasing sense of self loathing as you see bad code and go "oh yeah that's me I did that"?

Vincent Valentine posted:

What's the title for someone who writes code for a terrible codebase where the only solution product management gives enough time for is an equally terrible solution because they want everything done fast contributing to an exponentially increasing sense of self loathing as you see bad code and go "oh yeah that's me I did that"?

Che Delilas posted:

At my current place, I'm a Software Archaeologist. I can't think of a better term, because the majority of my job when I'm not helping the newbies is to go on digs to the Ancient Ruins of That Feature That Was Added In 2005, and figure out what's going on and how to fix/add to it - and if I work with anything larger than a chisel and brush, I risk shattering the whole thing.

downout posted:

And I'm triggered. But seriously I've had the opportunity to work on a few different codebases in parallel that last few months, and holy hell is it interesting to get that feeling of fear of doing development on code due to it being so brittle that every little change is a can of worms of fixes required to get it functioning and fix all the broken poo poo it touches.

edit: the real eye opener is when working on the different codebases and realizing the difference in confidence when implementing changes in them. The brittle garbage is a crapshoot; the stuff done correctly is smooth sailing.

rt4 posted:

Junior Developer. Seniors know how to negotiate with PMs and establish authority on technical matters.

Che Delilas posted:

Yeah. When I said I work with a brush and chisel, that's in contrast to the desires of product management, who would prefer if I just shot a new feature at the product out of a cannon. No matter how much and how insistently we communicate to them that there is a cost to taking shortcuts, they never seem to believe us, so now we give them estimates that include the effort it takes to put just like ONE layer of polish on a feature, do SOME regression testing for a bugfix.

They've started to adjust to that now, by which I mean they think we're sandbagging and so take our estimates and multiply by a fraction. Whatever. They'll keep bleeding experienced people until there's nobody left to fix things when they explode (again). I have zero confidence that they will ever take our expertise seriously.

huhu posted:

Perhaps you should find a new job.

RC Cola posted:

Okay I took some advice and was able to try to make a more simple portfolio. Its not done yet and I'm still having issues with the sticky header. I was just wondering for some more advice and tips so I can keep moving this in the right direction.

I was wondering about the section with my projects. Does that look okay with the image above linking to the hosted project and the text beneath linking to the code of the project? I've seen people a hover effect over the image that switches to descriptive text. Would that look better?

I'm all for brutal honesty, so hit me with all of it.

https://royal-crown-cola.github.io/Simple-Portfolio/

Natron posted:

More brutal honesty incoming, but with pictures! I was going to make a mockup for you, but it was too much work so I did a couple things and then just drew all over it and noted the comments below with numbers. Also, this is all just my opinion, so if you agree or disagree I won't be offended or anything, but I think there are a lot of places this could be improved.



The design of this site is inconsistent. I like some stuff about this, like the colour on the top bar and your name in white. That looks quite nice on its own, but there are some things that need fixing. I've noted them in the image above.
(1)The Home Portfolio Resume to the right needs to be brought in the same amount from the right margin as your name is from the left margin, and I also (2) think it would look better white. Less colours, less clutter.

(3)Speaking of colours, I like that pink/purple you have at the top, but it doesn't go with the blue you've chosen at all. Also, there is WAY too much of the blue. Choose a nice neutral colour, like a light grey or white and maybe pop some blue in a couple of other spots, but right now the colours are clashing and overwhelming. If you want to find another colour that will go well with your top bar, just find a site that has an interactive colour wheel and play with it a bit. Put your colour in as the main one and it'll spit out some nice options for accents. Just choose one and use it, but use accents sparingly.

(4) There is a big weird white (blue) space in the center there, and your About Me and photo are all way off on their own. I would suggest combining your picture and the about me section into one or two columns to balance against your skills section. Like, bring your picture over more towards the center with the "About Me" title above it, and then have your description below your photo. This would eliminate the dead zone and balance out your skills section visually. All three elements are off in no-man's land and need to be brought into some kind of organizational cohesion.

(5) Maybe call this "Sample Applications" or something more professional sounding. Same comment for your "Technologies I work with". Also, titles should always Be Written With the First Letter of Every Important Word Capitalized.

(6) There is a lot of white space here, and it looks a bit off. I would bring these closer together, or possibly make them a bit larger.

(7) Those rounded edges look awful. They look like they're squished or something, and the space between the picture and the description looks off. If it were me I would most likely keep a small rounded edge on the top left and right of the image and then on the bottom left and right of the description, and then have them sandwiched completely together so that visually they look as though they are one continuous block. Right now they're visually separate, and the blue enhances this distance.

(8) This space at the bottom shouldn't be here. Again, it takes away from the visual cohesion.

(9) There's no black anywhere on this page except right here. Get rid of it. See if you can find those icons in white with a nice transparent background. Also, the LinkedIn logo is mostly black but has white edges. I think these icons are both supposed to be on a white background, which you don't have.

I think that's all I've got for now. I know this looks like I'm making GBS threads all over it, but I do think it's a decent start and I think you can bang it into shape now that you have some bones to work with.

Natron posted:

More brutal honesty incoming, but with pictures! I was going to make a mockup for you, but it was too much work so I did a couple things and then just drew all over it and noted the comments below with numbers. Also, this is all just my opinion, so if you agree or disagree I won't be offended or anything, but I think there are a lot of places this could be improved.



The design of this site is inconsistent. I like some stuff about this, like the colour on the top bar and your name in white. That looks quite nice on its own, but there are some things that need fixing. I've noted them in the image above.
(1)The Home Portfolio Resume to the right needs to be brought in the same amount from the right margin as your name is from the left margin, and I also (2) think it would look better white. Less colours, less clutter.

(3)Speaking of colours, I like that pink/purple you have at the top, but it doesn't go with the blue you've chosen at all. Also, there is WAY too much of the blue. Choose a nice neutral colour, like a light grey or white and maybe pop some blue in a couple of other spots, but right now the colours are clashing and overwhelming. If you want to find another colour that will go well with your top bar, just find a site that has an interactive colour wheel and play with it a bit. Put your colour in as the main one and it'll spit out some nice options for accents. Just choose one and use it, but use accents sparingly.

(4) There is a big weird white (blue) space in the center there, and your About Me and photo are all way off on their own. I would suggest combining your picture and the about me section into one or two columns to balance against your skills section. Like, bring your picture over more towards the center with the "About Me" title above it, and then have your description below your photo. This would eliminate the dead zone and balance out your skills section visually. All three elements are off in no-man's land and need to be brought into some kind of organizational cohesion.

(5) Maybe call this "Sample Applications" or something more professional sounding. Same comment for your "Technologies I work with". Also, titles should always Be Written With the First Letter of Every Important Word Capitalized.

(6) There is a lot of white space here, and it looks a bit off. I would bring these closer together, or possibly make them a bit larger.

(7) Those rounded edges look awful. They look like they're squished or something, and the space between the picture and the description looks off. If it were me I would most likely keep a small rounded edge on the top left and right of the image and then on the bottom left and right of the description, and then have them sandwiched completely together so that visually they look as though they are one continuous block. Right now they're visually separate, and the blue enhances this distance.

(8) This space at the bottom shouldn't be here. Again, it takes away from the visual cohesion.

(9) There's no black anywhere on this page except right here. Get rid of it. See if you can find those icons in white with a nice transparent background. Also, the LinkedIn logo is mostly black but has white edges. I think these icons are both supposed to be on a white background, which you don't have.

I think that's all I've got for now. I know this looks like I'm making GBS threads all over it, but I do think it's a decent start and I think you can bang it into shape now that you have some bones to work with.

RC Cola posted:

I want to thank you for this. I ask for advice because I need it. I'll post again sometime this weekend to let ya'll know when I've updated it again.

Edit: I did some minor changes to address some of your points. Let me know what you think. Color schemes is easily my weakest point so it might take me a bit to update it.

RC Cola posted:

I want to thank you for this. I ask for advice because I need it. I'll post again sometime this weekend to let ya'll know when I've updated it again.

Edit: I did some minor changes to address some of your points. Let me know what you think. Color schemes is easily my weakest point so it might take me a bit to update it.

Grump posted:

I would also recommend using Chrome dev tools and running your site through an accessibility audit. This will give you some more info about why your color palette is a problem for color-blind folks. For example, the white links in the header against the purple background doesn't meet either a AA or AAA grade when it comes to contrast ratio:

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/accessible-styles#color_and_contrast

This is something I actually learned pretty recently and is a pretty easy accessibility win if you pick a palette with a nice contrast ratio. I recommend making your site mostly one shade of white with an accent color for things like the header, links, footer, etc. You'll see the contrast ratio for your header links is 4.41 in the inspector:

rt4 posted:

The book The Little Schemer fixed my understanding of recursion without much pain

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Fun story: something like five years later, my wife wanted a plugin in The Gimp to perform some fairly standard operations in a macro fashion, and it was using Scheme at the time. I hadn't touched it in, well, five years, but I went from installing an interpreter, reading the API, and getting a script going for her in an hour. At the end she was like, "No offense, Rocko, but for how much you boast about programming, wouldn't you have done it faster?"

My wife is now a product owner.
(just kidding).

Private Speech posted:

Had that experience the first time back in school when my friend asked me to make him a program to sort his few gigabytes of mp3s into folders based on tags and filenames, with a basic GUI for setting up rules on how to do it. Since I liked programming and stuff. Spent practically the whole weekend coding it up in early Java only to be told on Monday he's already done it manually and getting gently mocked for it.

Ever since then it takes a fair bit of convincing for me to program something for someone and I always mention it will take a while to do.

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Okay I think I have more of a handle on more goofy ways of doing things recursively. I just happened to take on a problem that was just ridiculous and had despaired. I still want to figure it out. There was a HackerRank problem that was messing me up. I can't even get a handle on a basic subset of the problem.

The subset is something like: Imagine you have a sorting algorithm that works on a list of lists. It grabs the next element from each list, bags them together, sorts the bag, and then adds them on to its sorted output. This is actually an incorrect algorithm because the subsequent grabs might pull some stuff that should have actually gone earlier in the sorted output. The question is how many different permutations of the original lists are possible given a certain output?

So if you had [1, 2, 3, 4] as "sorted" output, you could have (commas omitted from output here):

code:

[1][2][3][4]
[14][2][3]
[1][24][3]
[1][2][34]
[1][234]
[134][2]
[13][24]
[14][23]
[1234]

...for a total of 9 different unique combinations.

Some other notes:
1. Something like [12][34] would not be legal because the sorted output would actually be [1, 3, 2, 4].
2. I'm just looking at combinations given sorted order for now. As far as I can tell, if the sequence fucks up some ways down, it pretty much throws everything afterwards off.
3. It's looking at unique combinations so things like [2][3][1][4][5] aren't considered.
4. Technically I only need the count but I was trying to actually collect all the combinations to show I had it under control.
5. It smells like something like a power series at play. For sorted lists of length 1 -> 5, I think I evaluated 1, 2, 4, 9, 25 combinations.

Some observations from banging on this:
1. I see I can kind of split it up into groups.
2. Each group has to start with the next lowest available number.
3. I can start to smell some recursion here in taking what is left after creating the initial groups and trying to permute it between them, but I keep screwing that up.

So I thought I'd see if anybody can think of anything. If not, I guess coins on a clock is now a thing so I'll be playing with that instead.

User posted:

I don't really have the time to dig into this, but at first glance this looks like a backtracking problem to me. First formalize the constraints of the solution space and then search it with a backtracking algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking

edit: Regarding your note 4 they may be looking for you to be clever and come up with a closed form solution. I agree though that finding the actual members of the solution set is more fun.

awesomeolion posted:

Would love some resume feedback if anyone feels like taking a look: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HogbaKr_mIK7okMuTnbu0BajyC6I4y0a. I didn't anonymize anything because I have been spamming this out to random job openings and all the info can be found via Google

Goal is to get a remote job doing iOS dev so sprucing it up to optimize for that I guess is what I'm trying to do.

awesomeolion posted:

asur posted:

Not showing the test cases for a problem that someone is going to presumably review seems bizarre. I can understand it on HackRank to prevent just returning the result but that doesn't seem applicable here.

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Well, I did an Amazon online coding interview yesterday. It was it's own little HackerRank kind of thing. There were two problems that I am not supposed to share. All I will say is that I was surprised that they were simpler ones than I have seen before. Two years ago, I got hit with permuting all the ways to sum a number and got stuck. I feel like I could have done similarly as well (or poorly) without the past month of dynamic programming cram poo poo against the problems I was given.

Regarding "or poorly," I nailed the second question in all of 15 minutes on the first try, but I had to close out the first one with only 23 of 25 tests passing. The site only shows you two like HackerRank so you have to guess towards the others. I assumed it was corner cases and tried all kinds of crap that made no difference.

MickeyFinn posted:

Edit: Does anyone know how to turn off autocomplete on HackerRank? I've tried all the buttons in the coding section and none seems to do that. I'm going to have a seizure from the amount of useless crap that gets sprayed on my screen while I'm typing. Not to mention every statement ends with *furiously pounds escape 4-5 times* to prevent it over writing what I've written with even more useless crap.

pointsofdata posted:

Some of the codility tests have requirements that aren't obvious without a very careful reading of the text, and the test cases they provide don't cover them at all. You also can't see results of the unpublished tests, only the results of ones you add manually. Seems super dumb.