Programming as a career

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