I've been doing code reviews all day. The image is more than appropriate for my feelings.

Am I the only one that gets unbelievably annoyed when people put non-inlined function definitions in C header files? I see it a lot and it makes me cringe every time.

Hahahhaa. :D

I am being fired on the 21st, do I win the thread?

I don't have an actual, stable job, I win.

Dammit hell, had to use Google's site:gog.com search feature to even find this thread, enough of that!

I am dependency hell with an old project that badly needs its dependencies updated to work on a modern runtime.

Reconfiguring all of this stuff is only half the battle too, my PM is gonna be unimpressed when I explain to him what kind of retesting he has to do (we have no dedicated QA, bad idea, but I don't write the checks).

The issue that prompted this is of the excruciatingly obscure variety, dynamically rewriting compiled byte code to wrap it in a proxy at runtime fucks up on newer versions of the runtime (for a fairly decent reason, but still). I'm so sick of frameworks that don't keep their shit updated...

So lets see at work the following is true:

- have to use XP which is brutal for web development. I can't even test pages on IE9.
- Using an older version of PHP5 so I can't even use JSON.
- All Database tablesdoesn't support transactions and forced to use the old MYSQL extension in php instead of
mYSQLi or PDO. The only thting that tops that is that we use two separate db's. MySQl and MS SQL so all the data is doubled for no reason which leads to synch issues during the year.
- Boss forced me to write web pages in table format only. At first it seems faster but in the long run it ends up being so much worse. It drives me completely up the wall. It's so asinine to write pages like that it's not even funny. Just because his web page styling is limited doesn't mean my skills development should suffer too (first programming job).

Why don't we modernize? Because they say there's no time. Bull. Even slowly updating the code is better than nothing. In six months it could aleady well on it's way to being updated. Better than still at 0% with the same crappy excuses.

The topper?

The other programmers still have to use VB6. Yeah VB6 for the ordering program. No surprise they have such a hard time finding programmers.

So I went to my first interview today, only I was on the other side of the desk; granted, I wasn't the main interviewer, but it was still an interesting experience.

The candidate didn't really have the skills needed (she was mostly doing web-tech - PHP & MySQL whereas we're more of an embedded place - a lot of C and some Java/Python) but seeing that the position is for a student intern she'll still on the list depending on how badly the other people who get selected by HR do.

The funny thing is that I was selected because I've worked a lot with databases and distributed storage systems, and that's where she decided to bullshit the most. Just let her talk and at the end of the interview told my colleague all the stuff she got wrong.

I feel your pain. I've been asking for a dedicated QA for four years without any luck.
I don't even know what to say to that. Is there a particular reason for such a convoluted solution? It sounds like something someone implemented at some point in the past, because he found out that it was technically possible and thought it would be cool to try.

EDIT oops.

Doing it yourself, raw? No, it's not really a good idea because it's easy to mess up. Yes, there are reasons to do it, it's one way to implement Aspect Oriented concepts, such as dynamically adding transactional behavior to a layer, as an example.

There's people on both sides of the fence on this one and I don't think there's an clear side that has a monopoly on being "right". It just happens to be it's useful for some things and saves a lot of development resources. The bitch is this particular framework needed updating long before this and no one got around to it, which is not as excusable as I'd like it to be.
If I was being verbally abused over it I'd do the same, as it is, I'm not being verbally abused for it, we just suffer from shoddy testing and production issues that shouldn't have happened. So long as the clients keep paying the management seems happy with the status quo and we get treated well enough. I get other benefits from working there so I try and think of the bright side of the job.

Spent the past two days reverse engineering some "obfuscated" code because the developer left ages ago and he didn't write any documentation so now that I have to extend his stuff I can't figure out how some parsing and proxying of values works. It's so much fun that I'd rather be beaten with a stick.

The whole process goes like this: try and figure out what a specific piece of his code does, write my own code to tie into and extend that class, build said code, write the XML that ties into my own code which in turn is tied to the GUI (it basically passes some options chosen in the GUI to more than one component if some enablement conditions are true).

If it works then something's definitely wrong as it can't work from the first time. If it doesn't work then set up a debug environment and go through the XML (there aren't usually issues here) -> my code (there are usually issues here) -> his code (here be dragons).

Also, it's so much fun running traces and debugging Eclipse! As in doing that while Eclipse is actually running. From inside Eclipse. Yeah...

Oh, and I don't understand people who don't use track changes in Word and instead highlight the things they edit/change/add.

Ah, yes. The joys of cleaning up a document which has passed through several hands before yours. I've come to assume that most people simply don't know about the "track changes" functionality.

Hey now, some of us enjoy that type of thing :)