2w ago

Learn to code

Programmer Humor @programming.dev

cm0002 @lemmy.world

2w ago

Learn to code

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119 comments

If you learn to code, you learn that major bugs in releases are horrible and indicative of neglect.
- In a professional sense my experience is that they're more often the result of under-staffing and rigid, fixed release schedules.
  
  And changing priorities and scope.
  
  Yes. Generally, tons of major bugs in a production release are a sign of the company just not working right in general
- Yeah, I learned to code almost 20 years ago in order to mod video games, and learned that many bugs and massive problems in mods and games are caused by coders being either extremely lazy or making extremely dumb decisions.
  In general, a ginormous problem with basically all software is technical debt and spaghetti code making things roughly increase in inefficiency and unneccesarry, poorly documented complexity at the same rate as hardware advances in compute power.
  Basically nobody ever refactors anything, its just bandaids upon bandaids upon bandaids, because a refactor only makes sense in a 1 or 2 year + timeframe, but basically all corporations only exist in a next quarter timeframe.
  This Jack Forge guy is just, just starting to downslope from the peak of the dunning kruger graph of competence vs confidence.
  
  Here's a copy of that image without the watermarks

I am still complaining, but now I blame the managers
- "wow, what director level ass pushed them so hard that they had to leave that bug in?"
  I think of the T-pose all the time in cyberpunk, that was a bug that was horrible but obviously it was tracked somewhere, and some director was like "it's fine, ship it"
  
  Still stuck on FF15. So much time and energy invested in reinventing Unreal Engine... badly. Then they have to attack the corners of the actual story with a hacksaw to push a title seven years in development out the door half baked.
  
  There was a Dead or Alive game in which a manager literally released it before it was ready without consulting with the team. The game was still in beta and a glitchy mess.

That's not true - I'm complaining about the bugs in our software almost every day!
- My favorite part is guessing what they do that results in the bug!
  
  Right?? That's one of my favorite aspects, like there's a weird bug and you can kind of backtrack what happened like "Oh I wasn't supposed to jump out of the car I had to walk through the precise path, I missed the trigger or something I guess??"

Wrong.
- Yeah, that's something a shitty developer who is bad at debug would say.
  Bugs frustrate me more because I can often guess at why they are happening and how to fix them but can't just apply the fix myself. Even more frustrating when there's an update and I'll think, "oooh maybe they finally fixed that annoying bug!" and then see it again shortly after installing the update.
  
  the dunning-bugger effect
  
  "ugh I know exactly why this is happening" is such a frustrating feeling. Especially when it's stuff that should've been found in testing, or that you know probably was found in testing, but they deprioritized the fix.
  
  Bugs frustrate me more because I can often guess at why they are happening and how to fix them but can't just apply the fix myself.
  That's like a big portion of bugs lmao, lots of bugs exist because the spaghettification of the code makes it too costly to fix. Do you really think devs don't know why the bugs are there? They usually can't be fixed because there is no time or no willingness from management or the root cause is so deeply rooted it requires a shit ton of work to be able to fix it at all.
  
  Sometimes what's worse is when I am pretty sure something they suggest won't fix the bug and then it does fix it. Like I experienced a race condition in my Android email app and talked to support about it. They said try clear app data / cache and see if it worked. I thought there is no way that would solve it and they're just giving be the boilerplate support thing. It did fix it.
  Now I'm even more scared at what their code is doing.
  
  The DMR in call of duty years ago. "Here's a bug with a gun that instakills from 4 miles away that breaks the game dynamics. It's literally unplayable. Instead we added more features that make us money."
- ITT: Learn to code and you'll never understand irony again!

Show a man some bugs and he will be miserable for one day.
Teach a man how to code bad and he will be miserable for his whole life.
- Yandere dev be like: 17000 line main class, take it or leave it
  
  "what is this switch case you speak of?"
- True words by a wise programmer

I seem to complain more, actually.
- Seriously, every time I see null interpolated in a receipt or email I always think "you fucking donkeys".
  
  undefined
  
  Dear {{ user.first_name }}, We would like to personally thank you for registering at {{ brand.name }}! Regards, {{ employee.name }}
  
  Like, it printing out "Null"?
- It's a bell curve.

- Tbh, while it is funny out-of-context, I encountered the same exact thing (and I can guaran-fuckin-tee the offender used copilot for this).
  It's not funny to be on the receiving end of this, ESPECIALLY in professional environment, where you should not react like that 😅
  
  I agree, but would like to add I find AI generated code without thought or care put into understanding it more offensive than this to begin with.
  
  But sometimes it's just what people need to get their shit together. People get too complacent sometimes, and when everyone has to deal with the consequences sometimes a little emphasis on how bad things are is necessary.

Not true, I bitch about them more than ever
- "Who fast-tracked this shit?" -me
  "It's a small change, should be safe, we will test it in production" -also me

Learn to code and you'll wonder how in the hell some bugs even got created

Nah, I complain more about things. Especially ones that should work. “Oh you didn’t test this in my preferred browser and now it only works in Chrome, idiot”. I can see the error and I know why the shortcut was taken or the test that would have caught it was skipped and it pisses me off.
Sometimes it’s deadlines and outside forces and not laziness, and for those the coder is forgiven. And sometimes the bug is hilarious and not frustrating. But if you have an e-commerce site, basic utility, healthcare portal, or other required site that is broken because you couldn’t be arsed to test with something other chrome on a desktop monitor then fuck right off.
- One of the things that pissed me off fierce was when my natural gas utility company redid their website, and got redirected to a landing page with an autoplaying video. Excuse me I'm already a customer, I want to spend twenty seconds paying my bill, not two minutes dealing with unnecessary crap someone thinks looks better or more trendy.

I must have learned programming wrong, then, because dear ducking god, the amount of incompetent shit I have to see is surreal.
One system we've got from a different state was marketed as having geolocation. It doesn't. All object relations have to be created manually in a separate page, as in, you register a city, then register an address, THEN, on a different page, you connect the two. Now imagine this for some 24 objects. It has some specific profile permissions hard coded by id (like, only profile with id 4 can create some stuff)
This is just the shit I remember off the top of my head. The cherry on top is that they didn't validate unique emails for users, you could have 999 users with the same email and no way for them to reset their passwords. I asked why: "we didn't think about it"
- I asked why: "we didn't think about it"
  I have Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz ringing in my ears: "IT'S YOUR JOB!"
- Feel your pain there, my second and longest role was doing automated phone systems(IVR) and sadly Everytime I call another company I hear all of their fuckups
- This read like a movie review. I love movie reviews.
  Don't watch this movie! Died by the second half. My neighbors called SWAT on me cuz the movie script was that bad, the actors completely unlikable, and the direction almost nonexistent. The CGI was not bad if it was 1990s. There was almost no humorous scenes. Just wet paint dripping dialogue by actors that couldn't fake an emotion or facial expression to save their life.
  Every time a critic dies a little on the inside
  Can't get enough. The opener is always fresh and hilarious

Learn to code and you will never stop complaining.

As a software engineer, annoying bugs that should be so simple to fix are so frustrating! I wish I could just have a crack and fixing it myself!
- Whenever I feel like this I think back to how many of those "simple" bugs I've had to fix in my own code and how many years it took off my life expectancy and feel a little connection with the poor developer who is probably currently losing their hair over this too
  
  Definitely true, I dread to think about how much tech debt these companies have. 😬
- If you only use Free Open Source software, you can!
  
  Unfortunately my bank, government, national health, surgery, local shops, food delivery services, etc. don't open source their code. It'd be nice if they did however.
  
  True open source software runs on frustrated developers
  But yeah, that is a really nice part of FOSS. I have myself been in situations where I just went and fixed a big myself because it annoyed me lol
- That's what I love so much about open source. Currently have a fork of kiTTY going, working on tracking down a little bug I found in my daily use.
  
  100%, sounds interesting! I'm going to spend some time tomorrow looking at a bug in the jellyfin android TV app related to DTS audio over HDMI.
  
  This can also be one of the frustrating parts of open source.
  Find something you don't like? Fix it. Will the repo owner approve your pull request? Who knows. Maybe they're a bit absentee. Maybe they view the original behavior as working as designed. Maybe your design doesn't fit their architectural model, so they'll (eventually) heavily refactor your changes and merge them in.
  You can always stand up a fork, but keeping those two at feature parity and going in the same general direction can become harder and harder with time.
  That's not to say not to try! But it also means reaching out to the repo owners/maintainers before making your first change.

Yes, because you'll be too busy being infuriated by badly designed user interfaces that you realize could have so easily been better.

I start to appreciate games that implement complex and sometimes rarely noticeable (immersive, boo) mechanics that come off naturally. And I notice how a thought pattern behind bad ones could've progressed.
Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics. I only get annoyed when the game bores me out, and if bugs can't make me feel like it, it's fine. And some better-done games are pretty boring to me.
- Put four pots over the squares over the ground.
  Shoot the dragon head statues, the pedestals raise.
  The pedestals make stone grinding sounds and...
  Only one pedestal has raised, the pots have caused the animation to bug out and the game engine to assume that the pedestal is in the final position on the floor.
  The floor position has the lever locked.
  The game developer never anticipated what a massive idiot I was
- Dying to a stupid bug is a great way to suddenly get frustrated though. Hard agree with you though, buggy games are my favorite. Especially small indie projects because I you can find the great bugs.
  
  Dying to a bug in indie game can be so hilarious some youtubers in niche game communities got their rep from doing compilations of these. Case in point: PhanracK of WH:VT2 fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlWiMg3bUg
  Have you got some like this to follow?
- Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics
  This is pretty much half of competitive Brood War.
  
  That's the spirit.

False

No it just makes me even more frustrated. The amount of incompetence and neglect I see and have to deal with on a daily basis, even with software developed by multi-million dollar corporations, is astonishing.
Why is modern webdev such a clusterfuck? Why does VisualStudio take multiple seconds to open an empty project? Why does Nvidia's control panel have multiple seconds long pauses to switch between settings categories or loading lists? Why does this game run like garbage on a 4090 when it has mostly static environments and the graphics aren't even that good?
I could go on but I'd be here all day. All of those things, with the exception of webdev (because god there's so much shit in there...), could be easily fixed* or should've never gotten that bad in the first place.
*Provided the entire architecture isn't garbage, otherwise see the rest of the sentence...
- And I know much of it is not necessarily the fault of the devs, with management and deadlines preventing them from doing the best possible job, I myself was forced to release half broken updates a few times because of that, but they are not the only problem.
  There's a real problem in today's programming culture with thinking that computers are so fast, any garbage code you write will be fast enough, or that you only need to optimize the hot path. Apply that philosophy throughout all your codebase, and suddenly there is no hot path, everything runs like shit. People should also actually learn how things work, not just frameworks, otherwise they won't be able to make informed decisions about what they write.
  Also stuff like "Clean Code" and other similarly dogmatic principles still permeate many of the codebases I see. Nigh implementable jungles of <10 lines long functions and OOP garbage that make working with everything a massive pain, other than making every function call virtual and thrashing performance. You need to maintain such a massive amount of context in your head just to figure out the flow of a particular piece of code, with the aid of a debugger because everything is done through abstract classes or interfaces, that even making the smallest change becomes a tedious and error prone task.
  Also fuck dynamically typed languages. They suck, every single one of them.
  
  It's absolutely the fault of the devs, they built it Also why hate dynamic langs ?
- Why is modern webdev such a clusterfuck?
  Not a webdev.
  Have tried multiple times to "finally figure out how this web stuff works because I'd like a nice website that isn't a huge chonky slowpoke WordPress install with ad-infested plugins."
  I can't do it. Gamedev is hard, but makes 1000x more sense than whatever cargo-cult bubblegum-and-hope the modern web runs on.
  I probably should learn JS, but I'm very hesitant to even bother with it because it feels like an insane time commitment. Like getting a doctorate from scratch in something you're not SUPER jazzed about or starting OnePiece from Ep 1.
  "Oh cool, you learned that thing everyone complains about! But you know nothing until you get good at ~30 out of 400 different highly opinionated frameworks."
  The input to result ratio just doesn't seem like it's there. O.o Maybe I'm just a noob but this is my experience lol.
  And don't even get me started on RAM-munchy Electron apps.
  "Why yes, I WOULD love a separate instance of Chrome running for every ~~messenger~~ app I use! And I love when Discord is the only support resource! :D"
  --Nob'dy Ev'r, 2025 A.D
  
  You might enjoy learning vanilla js and making a site with as few deps as you can get away with. Or a lightweight framework like svelte or preact. The browser stack is definitely some weird shit but it's still somewhat approachable if you dig under the abstractions that most web devs never venture beyond. It definitely helped me cut through all the manufactured noise.

Understanding how software is made, and what are best software engineering practices to make stable software only makes hate AAA studios that release overpriced crashy messes even more.

Instead they'll become curiosities leading down rabbit holes to understand why and how they happened.

You won't have time after spending all day complaining about bad documentation.
- You mean missing documentation?
  
  Or whatever this crap is:
  squeebe(a: Any)
  Perform squeebing on a.
  multi_iterate(a: Array)
  Multi iterate on a.
  physicsObject.delete_with_header()
  Delete physics object with header.

I still complain about bugs, but instead of blaming devs or qa I blame managerial positions and stakeholders.
Huge bug in game exists:
Non dev gamers: “How didn’t they catch this blatant issue?”
Dev gamers: “How many times the issue was addressed just to be told to work on something else with greater priority like
<random stupid thing>
?”

More nuanced reply: I do tend to complain
less about certain bugs and limitations, where I can understand that the problem is harder than it seems
and more about others, where I have to imagine a poor intern dragged around by bad advice for several sprints, finally marking the task done (forehead sweating and all), even though they did not really know what they were doing even for a minute.

Lies

Nah I just changed from "these game devs" to "these game studios"

I code and i ruthlessly bash devs
- Nah man, ZSH all day
- Oh i love you!

Knowing how to code and interacting with stuff like the nintendo e shop scrollimg performance being super shit makes me think I would absolutely be fired if I deployed shit like that in prod for millions of users.

Longtime software dev here. I complain about code bugs all the time - I'm like, who the fuck wrote and tested this piece of crap?
- The answer is probably you.
  
  10% of the time its me. 90% of the time it's me from the past.

learn to code and you'll forever more be going "i could probably fix this if i could be fucked to get familiar with the codebase"
- Staring at some open source code in horror, like you just flipped to a random page of the Necronomicon.

True. Now I'm more triggered by the mere existence of some bugs because I can't fucking fathom how they'd even exist in the first place.

Now i complain about both the bugs in my games and the bugs in other games

Give a man a fish, and he'll be fed for a day
Teach a man to fish, and he'll be training orcas to attack shipping vessels

I only chose this career path because I heard there were a lot of hugs. 🥲

At minimum I think it would stop people from calling devs lazy. I don’t code, but even I know for how boring Ubisoft games are, none of them were “lazy” outputs.

Looks at Undertail and Balatro just being a collection of IF statements…

Learn to code and you’ll be too busy complaining about your own bugs everyday.

Become an entomologist and never complain about them ever.
- Even flies?

No I for sure complain, but for date bugs.. I'll be forgiving

I can code pretty well. I'm a qa tester. Complaining about videogames is my mostprechious pasttime

Instead you report them

As someone who had a career as a web developer and had to build sites that worked pixel perfect on multiple devices and clients I think game developers are jokers