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i hate when it’s not one person’s fault but like, ten years of bloat. who do i hate for that
Management
Manglement as I call them.
Pray to the Omnissiah and light some candles.
“Which idiot would do that?”
* looks at git blame for the section and promptly shuts up *
Should have checked the
blamebefore running clang-format himself.Man past me should have done a better job
//Crappy hack to make this work immediately so management will stop breathing down my neck
Oh wait nevermind lol
I’ll bitch and moan about my own work from a few months ago “before I knew better”.
In each of us, not two, but three. Paraphrasing Superfast matt, “that was done by past baahb, and he’s an idiot, but it matters more to future baahb, and that guy is an asshole.”
god, this code is awful. Who wrote this?
git blameOh
Been writing the same software for 20+ years now, don’t even need git blame to figure out what asshole wrote this shit.
Why is it always me? Haha
Yup there are certain patterns that I can just tell
I love that they called it “blame” lol. They knew what it would be used for.
Not sure if was there from the beginning but it was originally developed by Linus Torvalds and he can be quite harsh to the Linux contributors.
Subversion tried to call it “annotate”, but that didn’t stick ;)
Isn’t it alias for git praise?
That exact chain of events happened to me at my last job and I audibly laughed realising it was my own code. To my own credit though, it was a file I had written four years prior which at that point was more than half my whole career in the past
If you aren’t ashamed of your work a year ago, you’re stagnating!
Sometimes you don’t even recognize your own trash, 6 weeks later.
These days I see so much AI slop that my reaction when I see code I hand-wrote myself is “hey, that’s pretty good”.
My team’s code is great, but we use a lot of shared code written by other teams, with varying levels of quality.
Past me was a moron sometimes.
Still am. But I used to too
I mean, admitting you have a problem is the first step to a solution…
Oh, man. Can you tell what the second step is? I’d really like to learn that.
Working to fix it… (which of course varies wildly based on the problem!)
Not if the author was your boss.
I have lately jokingly guessed when I see the particular style and confusion: it’s you isn’t it? And so far I have been right. The particular author’s magic has expired, and I see the same fault replicated everywhere he has been.
One of my coworkers is fond of using ternary expressions instead of “if” blocks. Even ones without an “else”. So I see things like:
condition ? someVar = "blah" : null;or
condition ? doSomething() : nullWhich should both just use “if” statements. Or my favorite:
condition ? someVar = "foo" : someVar = "bar"which should really be
someVar = condition ? "foo" : "bar"UUUuuuuuh, I am not a programmer (you’re going to say “thank god”), but…
I sometimes even chain them. You can put yet another ternary operator in the else and keep going. You know, else-if.
So anyway, I can get ternary operators spanning 2 - 3 lines.
Oh, I also often have issues thinking of proper loops, so you’d see a few terribly usedgotostatements.Although I do remove ones that are obvious brain fart.
For example, quite obviousvoid example(bool true_or_false){ if(true_or_false){ //code if true } else{ //code if false } //other code }Well, I’ve already had my brain goof up even that once or twice. “How the fuck”, you’re asking?
void example(bool true_or_false){ if(true_or_false){ goto if_true; } //code if false goto end_false_if; if_true: //code if true end_false_if: //other code }The brain-fart if-else.
Dear lord lmao
You need another goto end right before the end_false_if:, otherwise the false code will always run
I tested it, it works as it is.
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdbool.h> void main(){ bool true_or_false = true; if(true_or_false){ goto if_true; } printf("This code runs only if false.\n"); goto end_false_if; if_true: printf("This code runs only if true.\n"); end_false_if: printf("This code always runs.\n"); }If true, it jumps to if_true, then runs other code. If false, the if gets skipped, if false code gets run, then it skips over if true code.
I totally did the thing where I commented without reading properly before. Sorry!
The last thing, that would be a “request changes” for me.
I haven’t seen him do it lately in any code I’ve reviewed but I do change it whenever I see it if I’m doing work nearby lol
As the sole programmer of a certain project, I often leave rant comment on what the previous programmer was thinking.
I like to structure my comments as song parodies and see if anyone notices.
"Is this a real object, or just an interface?
This gets caught in a pipeline, no escape from transformations.
Any way the data goes doesn’t really matter to this service.
…"
I was complaining to my friends about how bad the programming was on a project I was wrapping up and then they asked, “Isn’t this a personal hobby project?” yes it is.
especially your own code.
“This is obvious” I said. “Surely I won’t need to comment this,” I said.
The worst part is when I leave comments and still wonder wtf I was thinking.
My comments are written to be understood by the stupidest person alive, and I am thankful for them.
That comes with experience. I rarely find things I wrote anymore where I could add or remove a comment.
Sometimes one does something in a certain way (which would otherwise be a shit way to do it) for very good reasons which are external to the code, be they requirements related, external upstream or downstream systems or due to existing system limitations or deployment environment.
More than a decade ago, I learned that even if one isn’t at all prone to put comments in the code, you should add comments for such reasons in that quirky code: months or years later that will yield exactly the reaction of this meme when you or somebody else sees that code (whilst you might remember why you did, somebody else will certainly not)
Maybe even more importantly, it allows other people to actually remove that crap if the reasons behind it don’t apply anymore, which they would otherwise not do because they would be fearful that the hacked-together pile of crap was needed for some reason elsewhere they were not aware of so they could not risk refactor it - most long lived codebases out there are riddled with crap which had pretty good reasons to be there back when it was done but it doesn’t anymore, but which newer people can’t just remove until they’ve gained a full understanding of the whole code base and how it’s wired to the rest (and, even then, there’s a risk that the reason is a requirement and if they just remove that code it breaks something that the users expect).
Even if you’re the kind of coder that thinks that “the code is self explanatory” (something which, by the way, betrays a lack of experience in the full life-cycle of software that has been in production for years and been worked on by several people) do your future self and others a favor by explaining the choices derived from external reasons (“Why has the auto engineer chosen to put the steering wheel in a British car on the right side?”) that led to code design which is NOT explainable by purely internal or good design or coding reasons.
(Or at least make it stupidly clear in the appropriate level of tests, which normally is requirements testing or integration testing)
If you’re really good and working in a proper professional environment (most programmer aren’t), consider tracing things back to the entries in the software requirements document, use cases or even elements of an use case, at least for the “quirky” choices.
Definitely. I’ve seen this advice summarized as “Comment ‘why’, not ‘how’” and it’s always helpful to come back to weird code and immediately understand these things.
Yeah, that wall of text is my rationale for doing exactly that.
I go back and look at my old code and find it clear and beautiful, easy to understand, a pleasure to read. “Ah yes,” I’ll say to myself, “that approach was clever and elegant. Gosh, past me was pretty smart!”
I like to appreciate it in this manner. Because that way, for a moment at least, I can forget about how it doesn’t actually work.
But it would work beautifully, if it would work.
I love when someone opens a bug in my code and I get to “how the hell did this ever work?”
That’s what happens when you take your code from a Stack Overflow question.
Don’t forget AI (that scraped Stack overflow) providing a slightly different basic solution, that usually works (at least until you think about improving it).
And that is before it hallucinates a package that has been typo squatted by malware authors.
Am I the only one too paranoid to ever copy paste code from the internet and/or AI?
Code that I don’t understand feels like a dead pixel when I try to picture the whole piece of software in my head. I even search for what all those one letter flags mean for a command or function before I feel confident in using it.
No, that is a healthy thing to do.
It can work or it can look good, you can’t have both
Just code in a fancy font
This font is begging for some long s love
for (conſt item of imagetagſ)
I recoiled in horror. Thanks.
Yeah, JavaScript is a true nightmare
lmfao
TFW you realize you haven’t grown as an engineer
Also, the previous engineer was me.
I wrote code today I know I will have to touch in 2 weeks. I’m already dreading it. that shits a mess.
Electrical engineer: “what was that other guy thinking?”
Software engineer: “What was I thinking?” (It’s code from last night)
We went out for drinks one night after work. Upon stumbling back to the office, I remembered I had forgotten that I signed up to make a tool page to mange some data ingest. It was due first AM. I was three sheets to the wind. Fired up LAMP stack, took the samples and made an ingest function. Wired up a textbox, tested it and went home.
Next AM, I turned it in, there was a minor bug. No problem, I’ll just find the issue and they’ll be good to go.
cracked the scripts open…
I could read it. I could see what a lot of it did. I could NOT figure out what some of it was there for. I spent 30m trying to figure out what I was doing. it was only a couple hundred lines. It wasn’t even a copy/paste job. Eventually I ran out of time and just leaned into phpdump, and breakpoints to find the exact error. One function hit a bonefied php bug that caused the debug to go silent. large swaths of the code were unreachable due to essentially a couple of typos. The only reason it worked as well as it did was because their sample data was as simple as imaginable. I put on some Nine Inch Nails and just remade it in about 30 minutes (10m before it was absolutely needed)
I’ve learned that my buzzed self has less inhibitions when writing code. But those inhibitions are there for a reason.
What was I thinking?-after every interruption that could have been an email
Electrician: “what was the engineer thinking?”
I watched a team invent a new language to get around updating some eccentric code.
They could have sat down and commented it and made their changes
They could have refactored what was there.
They could have scrapped it and wrote fresh
Instead, they designed an entire natural language system so that non-programmers who were writing in XML could just write in English.
They ended up making so many required keywords as helpers that the non-programmers kept using the old system because the XML was easier for them work with.
Note: wasn’t my code, wasn’t my dept, when I heard the plan I went to check it out, the old system was functional but like C- work at best. At some point, they wrote a compiler for the new system.
inventing a new language is almost never the right solution. there was a guy at my last job who tried to do this pretty much every time he ran into a problem with some shitty legacy software he had to work with. rather than take the time to fix it to do what he needed, he took ten times longer to slap another layer of custom bullshit on top of it. ultimately it came down to him being a really shitty engineer too afraid to change existing code, too lazy to do his due diligence, just clever enough to implement a shitty workaround, but not clever enough to realize how shitty it was. everything he made barely worked, was way overcomplicated, and no one else even wanted to try to learn his arcane bullshit syntax.
inventing a new language is almost never the right solution.
The time it is correct is so you can be a certified (employer gimic word) developer.
Want to be a certified rockstar developer? https://codewithrockstar.com/
We do all look at code, get immediately annoyed that it doesn’t just make sense. most of us at least have the wherewithal to stick with it and work on the engine as it sits :)
In the 80s. If you look at what your examples have in common, you’ll notice you’ve heard it in the 80s.
Too bad 80s nostalgia is all the hype nowadays, but at least this seems to be passing in other subcultures. I really hope it passes in software development too.
only one of the ones i linked is from the 80s. i think you’ll find the majority are from the 50s.
I don’t think you have to be a software engineer to understand that people do shit half-assed.
i did some fun metaprogramming today. i can practically hear my future self screaming.
Electricians are a rather self-impressed bunch in my experience, like I would rather drink with a couple plumbers than electricians.
Electricians think their way is the only way. Get three electricians together and you’ll get four ways of running the conduit, and a six hour argument. Electricians are constantly upset because “those bastards in HVAC put the ductwork in my way”. There are three types of screw an electrician will run into in the field, which is why the average electrician owns forty-seven screwdrivers.
Plumbers only need to know three things:
- Poop rolls downhill
- Payday is Friday
- Don’t chew your fingernails
Oh, and if you want to piss off a pipe fitter, call them a plumber
Whatever sense of self-importance a person has can’t survive the first day spent snaking shit out of a sewer pipe.
