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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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love when someone opens a bug in my code and I get to “how the hell did this ever work?”
TFW you realize you haven’t grown as an engineer
As the sole programmer of a certain project, I often leave rant comment on what the previous programmer was thinking.
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.
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.
…"
Electrical engineer: “what was that other guy thinking?”
Software engineer: “What was I thinking?” (It’s code from last night)
What was I thinking?-after every interruption that could have been an email
Electrician: “what was the engineer thinking?”
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.
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 *
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 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.
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 🤣
It gets better: he also refused to restore power to the shed the cousin of the electricians son wired, because the line was buried without a conduit, and uh, was not rated for the absolutely massive drill press he had in there.
Not sure how he didnt trip the main breaker trying to use it, I have been told every electronic in the house lost power when it was on (house had a 60? amp service when I moved in).
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.
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.
