One of my colleagues just tried to deny a buggy code change was his on the grounds that the new code contains logging and he never uses logging.

Two new paragraphs in our Contingency and Disaster Recovery Plan.

Never seen a dev choke at interview, only fakers pretending to be devs.

!dev

Was exhausted yesterday so was in bed by 9.00pm, asleep by 9.30pm...

NOW WIDE AWAKE SINCE 1AM! FUUUUUCK!!!

i, j and k declared as globals. You fucking moron.

catch (Exception e)
{
Debug.Print(e.Message);
}

Like... everywhere...

I’m all for writing boolean statements that are readable, quick to grasp the real life case they’re representing and align with the spec rather than being ultra-reduced, but sometimes the spec is written by someone who clearly can’t reduce logic. So when the spec says “if it’s not the case that any of them are false” and you write:
!(!a || !b || !c || !d)
then I think you should try harder. At least put a note against the spec to say “i.e. if they’re all true” and then write the sensible code. Just think of the poor developer that might have to augment your code at a later date and has to follow and intercept that shite.

Take one day a week for side / non-priority / experimental projects.

!dev

What's the difference between the middle two options? Surely 'a few weeks' is about as long as or longer than a month?

The number of scripters and 'data scientists' that call themselves developers will increase, the true art of development will become sidelined and the world's code will become progressively more bloated and inefficient as the rift between hardware and software widens to an echoey chasm.

Then quantum processors will come along, requiring new logic, languages and practices, and once again the true developers will rise up and pave the way for a bunch of entitled, know-it-all and self-promoting QuarkaScripters to come along decades later and pretend like they invented programming.

Any other devRanters at the Develop Excel conference at Microsoft Reactor in London today?

Clients: give them some free extra cheese and they'll just complain they don't have enough crackers.

How about adding a downvote category for wrong category? It could work something like:
- Hit downvote
- Select "Wrong category"
- Choose which of the main tags are misused
- Once you have over 100,000++ of cumulative downvotes on a particular tag (with a minimum of three people to stop the big guns going autonomous) that category gets permanently removed from the post

Example of cumulative downvotes:
- Downvotes from 100 users each with 1,000++
- Downvotes from 10 users each with 10,000++
- Downvotes from 3 users each with 33,334++
But not:
- Downvotes from 2 users each with 50,000++

Thoughts?

ArgumentException(message, paramName)
ArgumentNullException(paramName, message)

Attribute "label" in element "label" in the namespace "label" in a file called "labels.xml"...
Cool, thanks for that.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

A prize to the first person to correctly tell me what the function is for.

Why have the majority of social networks decided that people using their service in the most basic way deserves a notification?

"Ooh, I have 3 notifications according to the app icon, they must be things that need my attention."
<opens app>
* In case you missed DickSlap's [tweet/post/other]
* RomanHelmet liked a [tweet/post/other] from SpaffMuncher
* MuffSnapper added a new photo

Why does that need a notification? That's just users using your app. That's what I expect when I open the app. I expect to see people posting things. This is going to make me start ignoring notifications in the same way I ignore emails marked as urgent.

Lots of master/slave chat on here... ironically not a black and white issue it would seem.

3. After that I take a decent break (e.g. an hour) because my productivity and efficiency reduce, and I'm not paid by the hour so a sustainable, high quality output that fits in with my life is the objective.

Any browser (+plugin) recommendations for viewing JSON and XML? Ideally for Mac OS, but have a Windows 7 VM I can use instead if there's a much better option. Currently I'm copying from Safari and pasting into Notepad++ and formatting with a plugin, but that feels pretty sub-optimal. Suggestions much appreciated.

!dev

Wife had a dream last night that I cheated on her and we got divorced. She woke up mad at me. It’s now 12 hours later and I just picked her up from work... she’s still mad at me.

My avatar has some catching up to do

"There needs to be a Home option on the side menu, people won't know to click on the company logo in the top left."

What sort of fucking moron doesn't know that?

"The website is slower to click around than I'd expect."

No shit. Do you remember the part where you said we had to build it in WordPress?

Core library was giving serious blow out of execution speed as data file size increased.

Traced it back to a GetHashCode implementation that was giving too many collisions for unequal objects, so when used as the key in a hash table it was causing the lookup to fall back to checking Equals (much slower).

Improved the GetHashCode implementation, and also precalculated it on construction (they were immutable objects), and run time went to warp speed! Was very happy with that.

Obviously put in a thread sleep to help manage expectations with the boss/clients going forwards. Can’t give those sort of gains away in one go. Sets a dangerous precedent.

Boss: Any idea why ColleagueX's code might be blowing out the memory?

Me (internal): Cos he's a fucking retard who can't code for shit, doesn't listen when I tell him to do stuff properly because he's fucking lazy, has no idea what stack and heap are, uses goto everywhere, doesn't know how to debug, doesn't write any unit tests, and generally WASTES MY FUCKING TIME!

Me (external): Probably a memory leak. I'll take a look.

New Stack Overflow Code of Conduct: Do you think it will work?

Is it sad that I look forward to the weekend so that I can actually write some code rather than:

- Helping clients that can’t / won’t read docs
- Explaining to test colleagues that we need repro steps and can’t fix a bug based on “I was doing something and it crashed”
- Writing any regular expressions for another dev where it’s more complicated than ^[A-Z0-9]*$
- Wading through legacy VBA that’s littered with GoTo, global variables (even i, j and k for loops are fucking global!) and all the other fucking lazy shortcuts that save you 10 seconds at dev time and cost you (which ends up meaning me) hours in subsequent debugging.

I love writing code, and I think I’m pretty good at it, so can I please just get on with it?

Fellow ranters, please tell me I’m not alone in this.

I've been staring at the same section of code for about two hours now. I want to solve this puzzle and design it properly. I'm desperately trying to resist the urge to hack it. Not sure I can hold out much longer...

It would appear that having the same application open for 14 hours a day everyday takes its toll on your monitor.