The OFFICIAL programming thread
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
There are some one-off tasks I fire up Powershell for because they are a pain in the arse to do without a dedicated tool and can’t as easily be done in “one” line in a terminal with other languages.
This is an example:
Get-Content .\deliveries.csv | ConvertFrom-Csv | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File .\deliveries.jsonI find PowerShell ugly to work with for larger scripts (probably no more so than bash), but as a general purpose command line tool it’s brilliant sometimes.
I just implemented a powershell command because our usual utility software has a limit we didn’t know about. It’s stupider then the usual utility but good enough and likely backwards compatible enough to stay working past my retirement.
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I inherited a team after a reorg and with that a report that has years of powershell scripts upon scripts added to it to pull data and make charts. It was apparently originally converted from VBA. We have to produce this weekly and it takes one of my people maybe half a week of running scripts and waiting to get it done. Obviously we are going to automate, but trying to dig down into what each thing does and how it gets data is going to be a research project. There are many such kludged together bandaid scripts like that in my company.
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The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.
I feel you. We don’t have different languages, but rely on a lot of libraries with vastly different syntaxes and tooling that’s wildly different. I don’t even bother trying to “learn” it anymore, I just refer to the docs, GPT or copy/paste from stack overflow for about half of what I do. Only the stuff specific to our data I have to hand write and that’s mostly SEEEEEEQUEL. If I have to use Python I get confused because the main Python data libraries Pandas, Dask, Pyspark, Polars and Snowpark all do things differently. A few aren’t that different but then throw in some random syntax change that has me screaming F bombs for an hour or so. Also we have no devops so we have to manage all the infra and learn on the fly how to configure that shit.
Also today in our staff meeting my boss started talking about AI and how he wants to stand up shit because customer service is doing a project using AWS help. I am like we have no AI talent on the teams and we have been working a year and a half on your clusterfuck project and have not delivered anything (said in my mind obviously). I did bring up the point and he is still talking about working it into the schedule even though his schedule is more ambitious than the moon landing. Guy is a total nob.
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@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.
Guy is a total nob.nounINFORMAL•BRITISH
noun: nob; plural noun: nobs
a person of wealth or high social position.Nice to see you think so well of your boss!
[IMG] https://image.ibb.co/nhhF0Q/new_sig_lob12.jpg [/IMG]
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@Lob12 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.
Guy is a total nob.nounINFORMAL•BRITISH
noun: nob; plural noun: nobs
a person of wealth or high social position.Nice to see you think so well of your boss!
I was thinking of a different meaning. I guess I should just stick to Finnish insults though since I understand them better than UK ones.
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Calling someone a nob has always been an insult in parts where i’ve lived.
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I thought the insult was spelled “knob”
“VULGAR SLANG•BRITISH
View definition
a stupid or contemptible man.” -
@Lob12 yeah you’re right.
I’m awarding this match to you and rescinding Gators’ earlier points.
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Good thing I’m here to show you guys how to english!
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Calling someone a nob has always been an insult in parts where i’ve lived.
You are lucky you’ve never desperately needed to open the door to the loo with a knob missing!
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@Lob12 yeah you’re right.
I’m awarding this match to you and rescinding Gators’ earlier points.
I spelled it the fucking American way, not the commie metric way!!!
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SUCKLE¡!!!¡!¡!¡!1!!
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It should be squeeeeal.
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It seems that every other developer that writes code I support has gone to the same school of programming. At that school, they must have taught that everything must be in one function. They must think that if you aren’t scrolling up and down 5 to 10 screen pages all of the time trying to see what the hell is happening inside a single condition then then you aren’t earning your pay. I fucking hate it.
Unless you are processing a bajillion records in a loop and can’t afford the overhead, modularize your code as soon as gets unwieldy so that method names and signatures explain the flow.
/rant
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Guessing the code wasn’t unit tested either. On the bright side without programmers like that, you might not have a job.
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Bit of an anti-rant but, this morning I refactored the behemoth method that led to the earlier rant. I was particularly impressed with how easy and clever the refactoring tools I used were so I sent out a meeting invite to demo the whole process to the 7 or 8 devs I regularly work with.
I titled the invite “Refactoring for fun and profit” and made everyone an optional attendee so I didn’t know how many (if any) would turn up. They all did and they were really impressed with the demo and a couple made comments like “the code is beautiful now”. So I’m pleased they were so receptive to it.
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This is all I can add
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The gorilla is bad at seeeeequel!
Had a similar situation many years ago in the early days of business computing. We connected MS Access, like one of the first versions, to our accounting system via ODBC because the system reports sucked ass. IT created credentials and didn’t worry about permissions so we had read/write access to the system database. A coworker was making a report and didn’t know Access very well, so she started deleting rows in the query output like it was Excel. The deletes passed straight through to the source system and after a while people from accounts payable started raging that vendor records had “disappeared”. Poor girl thought she was going to get fired that day.
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@Gators1 Did she work at CRS by chance?
