Category Archives: Code

Anger! Unlimited, Unmetered ANGERRRR!

August 10, 2014 Dimitris Leave a comment

Developer Anger!

Developers often face situations where logic bends. Now this happens quite a few times. Suppose we have an equation with factors that the outcome of this equation is the “bending logic”.

The first factor, and larger at times is the client input. “Yes, we know we asked for that, but now things have changed, so we have to change it” , “What? I did not ask for a red line drawn with a blue pen!” and so on. More on that at The Expert.

The second factor is the programming language we are using. And that is the point were we stand for now. Third and fourth factors is experience and capability but those are irrelevant on each person so, we wont be discussing them now.

ANGER. WRITING CODE THAT SEEMS TO WORK.

Quite recently I stumbled upon this interesting site :

http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/

Turns out that this guy: @abestanway is parsing repos from github and records each curse in the commit log message. A commit log message is a message we developers use when we are completing a project/code snippet/change/bug in the code of a system we are using.

This guy, took it to another step also. He gathered data and created a presentation, showing the languages with the most curses. He even created graphs of the most cursed and least cursed language:

As you can see, Javascript is the first. Undoubtedly this language is the most widely used, so it makes sense for it to have the most curses (and yeah many other stuff you already know like changeling scopes and other Javascript shitty stuff).

He also created graphs with the most used curses:

Next, he compared the Most Cursed languages with the most used languages in Github. You can have a look at all the above from the relevant video :

Therefore :

To conclude he points out that the more the curses, the better the code…

Code

Coding is a Way of Life

April 5, 2014 Dimitris Leave a comment

When it comes to coding

I often find myself looking back at those years while in the high school and later in the university. It turns out that both those institutions that in terms made me who I am, did not provide sufficient knowledge on how to write and run computer software.

Playing a little bit the part of devil’s advocate, I think I always had it in me. Were those small Visual Basic scripts I often tended to write while in high school. Were afterwards in the university, the endless hours trying to “optimize” the given university projects. That all combined provided me the technical “thirst” for further development.

That development in terms of skills and more coding, was mostly provided by myself. I was the one searching to find more stuff to do. Not the university. Not the high school either. I had literally no one to guide me into this procedure. For all I cared, especially in the university where you could choose the courses, I could have chosen a much more easy path, without the computer programming skills. That’s what it was everyone was suggesting anyway. Since this path was the easiest in terms of engineering.

Being at 2014, this should ultimately change. We live in a world where computers are honestly playing a huge part. I do not think that there should be a single child in the fore-coming years that does not know even the basic principles of computer coding and algorithms.

Although, I personally did not like Steve Jobs (for various reasons), I do believe in his following words:

Watch this video. You will appreciate the things you do. And reflect for the future of our kids. Coding will literally give you super human powers in the future…

Code, IT Funny

The Art Of Commenting Code

Image March 20, 2014 Dimitris Leave a comment

Ever Since the Appearance of TDD

Comments have started been replaced from a separate unit test. At least this happens in theory….

After numerous head-wall-banging sessions though, even at large companies where they tend to have a more standardized method of coding with large codebases we often find many, many good gems.

Commenting is art! Trolling while commenting is a given!

Have a look below and for crying out loud laugh until you break 🙂

Personal Favorites :

Dear maintainer:
Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine, and have realized what a terrible mistake that was, please increment the following counter as a warning to the next guy:

 total_hours_wasted_here = 42

And another one, which by the way I have said it many times :

When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing

Now, God only knows

Best Comments Ever!

On a relevant note while browsing source code of battle.net

Look what I found!

Screenshot from 2014-03-20 11:14:24 — Put on your robe and wizard hat and lets Play Hearthstone ? While binding events with jQuery 😀

And last but not least, from the company’s large codebase I currently work at:

**********WARNING******************
*********GRANDE KOLODAXTYLO ***************
To solve issue with serializing data coming in different parts of the response array

Kolodaxtylo in greek means “the middle finger”.

And some dummy user names / passenger names in unit tests :

Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and in general names from Star Wars Universe.

But also Greek ones:

Lelos Observes

A sidenote here, working primarily on a travel agency booking site, while we all devs use this name for our tests, it turns out that this guy “Lelos Observes” has “traveled” virtually 2-3 times around the world…

Mitros Karamitros, Loula Karaloula and Loulis Kouklentes

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