I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

Would not expect Texas to go to bat for this. Maybe they’d be okay if they were doing it to hurt women or something

Conservatives having bad ideas seems to be a universal truth

For work, a Mac and vscode. I don’t love vscode but it’s what everyone uses.

Well, some of them develop on windows with like notepad++ and it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s no ci/cd, linting, or testing, so whenever I check out someone else’s branch it’s full of red squiggles.

My personal is pop!_os Linux where I’m also using vscode because I’m too cheap to pay for pycharm.

I comment. Reminds me of how I’d end up playing medic in tfc/tf2- someone has to do it.

I don’t post original stuff often, though.

I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

Yeah I would use python and pytest, probably.

You need to decide what you expect to be a passing case. Known keys are all there? All values in acceptable range? Do you have anything where you know exactly what the response should be?

How many endpoints are there?

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I’d expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

I had that specific problem trying to run an elden ring mod (reforged) this week.

/home/myuser/Games/er_reforged/ERRv2.0.1.1-541-2-0-1-1-1762909215/ERRv2.0.1.1/internals/modengine/bin/me3: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.39' not found (required by /home/myuser/Games/er_reforged/ERRv2.0.1.1-541-2-0-1-1-1762909215/ERRv2.0.1.1/internals/modengine/bin/me3)
[RED]Error:[/]
me3 failed to launch due to error code 1: Unknown

That kind of thing happens on Windows sometimes, but there’s also more people finding and posting solutions.

Of course, a regular user isn’t installing mods for games. That’s already kind of a niche activity.

Linux is still my choice, though.

I’ll stick with Linux. Even with the occasional “what do you mean clib2_39 isn’t installed?” nonsense it’s still better overall.

Lowering indent levels is nice in functions. Early returns mean you don’t have to think as much. “If it got here, I know foo isn’t null because it already would have returned”.

Yeah some comments are not useful

# returns the value as a string
return str(user.id)

Some comments are

# returns the user id as a string because ZenDesk's API throws errors if it gets a number.
# See ticket RA-1037
# See ZenDesk docs: https://etc/
return str(user.id)

One of my jobs went to microservices. Not really sure why. They had daily active users in the thousands, maybe. But it meant we spent a lot of time on inter-service communication, plus local development and testing got a lot more complicated.

But before that, it was a single API written in Go by an intern, so maybe it was an improvement.

It’s wild to me how some places I’ve worked are like locked down, all the infrastructure is in terraform or whatever and can be deployed immediately… and other places are like “ssh into prod with the credentials from confluence, edit the config in vim, and paste the new code into a new file”