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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.
god, this code is awful. Who wrote this?
git blameOh
Past me was a moron sometimes.
I love that they called it “blame” lol. They knew what it would be used for.
Subversion tried to call it “annotate”, but that didn’t stick ;)
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.
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!
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
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.
Sometimes you don’t even recognize your own trash, 6 weeks later.
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
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
I don’t think you have to be a software engineer to understand that people do shit half-assed.
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.
I love when someone opens a bug in my code and I get to “how the hell did this ever work?”
But it would work beautifully, if it would work.
That’s what happens when you take your code from a Stack Overflow question.
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.
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.
It can work or it can look good, you can’t have both
Just code in a fancy font
I recoiled in horror. Thanks.
Yeah, JavaScript is a true nightmare
lmfao
TFW you realize you haven’t grown as an engineer
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?”
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
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.
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 did some fun metaprogramming today. i can practically hear my future self screaming.
Two red flags for trades and swe and other work:
1 - never saying that they would have done it differently if not outright roasting the work 2 - letting someone else take over their project, willingly, and not because they’re busy. Assuming it’s not a pile of shit they don’t want to do.
Fun trick with Markdown. Put a double space at the end of a sentence so it formats the lines correctly.
- Double spaces
- allow for lists.
That’s the part I hate most about being a SWE. Just shut up and do your job. I’ve seen your code. You code like you read blogs for a living.
You code like you read blogs for a living.
Do you not?
No. I code like I know what I’m doing.
*like you think you know what you’re doing. Programming experience is a continuum.
Am electrician can confirm
If I dont do it the homeowner tries to and I have to awkwardly nod instead of fixing the problem and that just takes so much longer
I mean, I once had to explain to my electrician that the reason the dryer plug was screwed to the side of my panel box (6’ off the ground) was because the previous homeowner was the son of an electrician.
Yeah that tracks 🤣
