Programming as a career

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 :)