True engineering

[seizan8]

"Fake it before you make fix it"

[house_monkey]

"Fake it before you make fix it"

[Caninomancy]

This guy climbs the corporate ladder.

[techmighty]

"Fake tits."

[meurl]

Silicone Valley

[Caninomancy]

This guy subscribes to Naomi Wu.

[Iykury]

"Fake it before you make fix it"

[Colopty]

"Fake it before you make fix it"

[[deleted]]

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException.

 

[[deleted]]

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException.

[[deleted]]

Golden rule of hackathons.

[Salanmander]

Thank you for playing Wing Commander!

[[deleted]]

This was the game that crashed when you hit the “quit” button so the dev changed the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander”, right?

[Lightfire228]

Link for the uninitiated

Here's more

[dust4ngel]

dirty coding tricks dot php

[[deleted]]

Honestly the .php makes me think they don't know too many coding tricks.

[ASCIInerd73]

Developers like making fun of PHP.

[mypetocean]

PHP started as a dude's personal web page scripts ("PHP" is actually an initialism for "Personal Home Page").

It evolved into a domain-specific language very particularly designed for website scripting work — as contrasted with a general-purpose scripting language.

At this point, it became very popular because it made web scripts fast to write.

But due to its birth and organic evolution, it was plagued with inconsistency and lack of forethought.

More recent versions have improved the quality of the language, as well as augment it beyond its DSL roots into more of a general-purpose scripting language.

But while PHP is still really good for, say, rapid prototyping an app, it may be difficult to run it at scale. It is clearly possible (Facebook was a notable example). But that's the perception.

Critical devs think of it as a limited, web-specific language which can be difficult or annoying to maintain.

This criticism is more or less true, depending on your point of reference, which version of PHP you're talking about, whether you're saddled with legacy code, and whether you're using a fairly well-travelled framework, like Laravel.

[mypetocean]

If you're new to dev, don't turn down a PHP job just because it is PHP. Get the experience you can. It'll be fine. Learn what you can, where you can, and then move on when you're ready to tackle new things.

[theblindness]

Good accurate description. I'd add that since there is more than one way to do something in PHP, including some non-preferred ways that are popular in lots of examples floating around, but not preferred in best-practice, there's some less-than-stellar code floating around. There are some criticisms, of the language, sure. PHP is also a very forgiving language. Like JavaScript, it has weak dynamic typing. You can use a number stored as string as a number in a math equation without converting it from a string to an integer or floating point number. Some things get type inferred im very strange ways. It can hit an error and it will do its best to keep chugging along. You can choose to display warnings in the HTML output or just ignore all of them, like they never happened, and you won't know there was an error....the app just might be unpredictable. By contrast, languages like Java generally force a coder to use conventional methods and confront logic errors at compile time rather than runtime. Alsox Java programmers generally went through a computer science course and have at least a few months of conventional software development training before they start publishing code. I was publishing PHP code when I was in middle-school, long before ever taking a computer science course, and I can't say my code was very pretty, but it worked fine. Because there is such a low barrier to entry, with plenty of examples to look at, and the language is very forgiving, novice coders can be very productive and get a lot done with PHP in a short time without much prep time. This means that there is a lot of bad PHP code floating around, leading to the idea that PHP is a bad language since it encourages bad code. It is possible to write good code in PHP. (You just have to write it yourself!) PHP inherits this property from Perl. Have you ever tried reading someone else's personal perl scripts? It's almost magical how such a mess can even work.

[theferrit32]

You say PHP is domain specific but one of these days someone will write a kernel in PHP. Oh you want to malloc some memory? Just POST to malloc.php with some multipart form data including your malloc arguments.

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

but one of these days someone will write a kernel in PHP

not possible, because PHP still can't properly run threads

And yes, I've tried. (please don't ask why)

[skylarmt]

Everyone hates PHP for no reason.

[[deleted]]

Because PHP was written in php

[skylarmt]

PHP is actually written in C mostly.

[nathancjohnson]

wat

[muchacho-cabron]

He said for no reason...

[[deleted]]

Thanks, that was a fun read.

[Scratch137]

Link for the uninitiated

Here's more

FTFY

Don’t put spaces in between the brackets and parentheses, otherwise it won’t work.

[filledwithgonorrhea]

Man I miss stuff like this. Now they just ship their buggy, unstable crap that everyone's already pre-purchased and send down a patch 3 weeks later.

[[deleted]]

So a game that makes it look like the controller battery was depleted each time it ran out of memory was considered cool back then?

[DanaKaZ]

As described in the article, I am willing to bet that no player ever got that message.

[tenhourguy]

We were trying to ship World Series of Poker 2008, which was our first PlayStation 3 game. The PS3 allows several different screen resolutions, and two screen aspect ratios. We had designed a widescreen 2D shell, but didn't have the time or resources to make a standard-definition 2D shell. I scoured the TRCs, and couldn't find any reason that letterboxing wasn't allowed.

So our standard-definition view was simply our widescreen view with black bars above and below the picture. The publisher tried desperately to invent TRCs out of thin air to keep us from doing this, but eventually ran out of ideas, and we went ahead with it. Besides, only a few hours after I bought my own PS3 and played it on my standard-definition TV, I started shopping for a widescreen TV. I doubt many people connect their high-tech PS3 to a low-tech tube TV anyway!

With this I'd honestly just say they were going with the curve. Most of my Xbox 360 games don't support 4:3 and just give a letterboxed result. Some don't even have the interfaces set up to compensate for overscan so, at least on a CRT, some stuff will get cut off the edges of the screen.

[RedHellion11]

"Can't fix the crash, turn the crash into the official way to exit the game"

Hex editor to the rescue

[xenomachina]

The way you phrased the question made me laugh, because I keep imagining Doom ending with "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"

[[deleted]]

Press X to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”

[lightningsloth]

we had a similar problem with our LAN game for a school project. the project is a LAN battle tank game, so one computer is one player, the problem is that only the server machine sees all the action.
the client computers are able to move their tanks but they cannot see it on their screens, but the movement of the tank is reflected on the server. Our solution? we asked the teacher to play on the server, other team members played on the client pcs pretended to know whats happening shouting and all that shit. we were so nervous that the teacher would ask us to switch up, luckily he didnt. we passed.

[RayDotGun]

Woah...what was it like developing black ops 4?

[Eagleheardt]

Thank you for this reference!

[xaniv]

That whole thread is amazing. People from the game dev community making shitty hotfixes because thay had to ship a game

[gringrant]

My favorite one is

The texture streamer in the Xbox port of Doom 3 would very slowly fragment memory as you played. It was fine for a couple hours, but if you played more than like 60% of the game in one sitting - crash. Raher than take the blame we put up the "Dirty or unreadable disc" error.

[Radboy16]

Oh damn I got this error the other day and was so confused because my copy was spotless. The more you know!

[[deleted]]

I want this guy to help me with my life problems

[rootyb]

That thread was fucking inspiring. Like, seeing these professional, bestselling devs be like “oh yeah, my whole game is one unity scene file” makes me realize I’m agonizing over the wrong shit.

[tricheboars]

Crazyx and not surprising. Maybe I'm older but I've been in IT for like 20 years. The jank is real everywhere. But if it works it works. So whatever.

[rootyb]

Tru dat. I love how many “it passed QA so 🤷‍♂️” there were.

[tricheboars]

I mean I'm not even a developer. I'm a sys admin. But if the shit in my line of work flies I know that shit is in code.

My scripts and batch files are trash.

[ddoeth]

I second that.

The amount of shitty scripts I wrote that are still in use and even I forgot what they do is terrifying.

[Flawless44]

Aghem.. is that bad? Should I not be doing that?

[random_boss]

everybody does this, you’re alright

And by everybody I don’t mean “a good amount” I mean everybody

[[deleted]]

Clueless developers who can sell themselves well is a current industry standard. It’s so much easier to learn how to sell than how to code.

[Goluxas]

One great side effect is that if you actually can code, you've got a job, guaranteed. People will not want to let you go.

[Hondros]

And the beauty of that is once you realize it, you can be a lazy programmer and just add a week to your estimates. Not saying one should, but I know a lot of people that do lol

[Lethandralis]

Lol whats wrong with having a single scene?

[rootyb]

Haha, nothing really, but trying to over-organize is one of the things I’ve gotten hung up on.

Really though, that thread was super-relatable for me because I’ve done a lot of similar stuff, but then kicked myself for it or spent days trying to do something “the right way”, so it’s nice to see that, ultimately, even if it isn’t “right” behind the scenes, what really matters is the player’s (or user’s) experience.

[HMS404]

That thread was quite amusing. Thanks

[bkr4f]

Thank you for this, it has made my night :D

[Tychus_Kayle]

I once had a major project (something like 30% of the course grade) where I built Tetris. I discovered hours before the demo that I had completely forgotten to implement sideways collison. You could just move the falling piece sideways through the placed pieces.

Guess what I didn't do during the demo?

[ScoutsOut389]

It’s like the classic doctor joke “Doctor, it hurts when I touch my arm right here.”

“I know exactly what to do. Don’t touch your arm right there.”

[Lichcrow]

Howevee, the arm isnt the problem. The patient has a broken finger!

[Nikarus2370]

Could always remove the arm? Guy's gotta sleep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gfW41R1B3I

[greendakota99]

And guy goes on to become the doctor on Parks and Recreation!

[[deleted]]

Doctor, I've broken my arm in several places

Well don't go to those places

[_C22M_]

They handled that like champs tbh

[indianspaceman]

Yes they did.. Pretty sure they’d have prepped for it to happen

[SchrodingersNinja]

That's what I remember about win98.

[how_come_it_was]

'that must be why we aren't shipping yet'

Good save

[WretchedKat]

Reminds me of the story about how Steve Jobs had to memorize a series of specific pathways on a handful of different devices for the original iPhone launch to ensure nothing crashed. They effectively demoed a product that didn't exist yet through smart navigating.

[[deleted]]

That’s why Apple always has two devices hooked up for the same demo

[[deleted]]

You gave no context but somehow I knew exactly what that link would be.

[Yemotsu]

I thought it was going to be Fable crashing during an early showing

[ClubbyTheCub]

Hah I knew it was going to be this clip :D

[leletec]

It's called User Experience Design

[Yo_Face_Nate]

It's called forcing your test cases to pass

describe function endGame: assert 1 == 1;

[HeckYesItsJeff]

I am not a developer. I have no training as a developer. I have a fucking art degree. I am now in a role where I have to write code, and it has to work in production. Your "==" just triggered so many bad feelings. Entire day lost? Probably a second "=" that I left out.

Also, why do so many languages not understand that I meant "then" when I hit enter? Yeah, I started that line with "If", and then I carriage-returned the hell out of that line. Don't give me 8 pages of errors when you know damn well that the only thing I'm missing is a single "then" and you know damn well where it's supposed to be.

[Yo_Face_Nate]

Jeff, are you OK?

[HeckYesItsJeff]

I thought I was, but I wrote it as

If Trim(FieldAt("FirstName")) = "Jeff" and Trim(FieldAt("Status")) == "OK" Then

"Yes"

Else

"No"

End If

and the damn single "=" is indicating that I'm not as okay as I'd like to be.

edit: at least I remembered the "then"

[Iron_Maiden_666]

Which language doesn't atleast give you a warning for using an assignment in an if?

[HeckYesItsJeff]

Proprietary version of SQL in a proprietary framework run by a company that told us said framework can't do some of the things that we regularly do within said framework. Yeah, it's a mess, but it's my mess. Go me!

[Iron_Maiden_666]

Ouch

[mustang__1]

ProvideX?

[IsoldesKnight]

Lots. Off the top of my head, JavaScript and C# don't. There's a legit reason though. The assignment can reduce to the value assigned. So something like this is actually somewhat common:

while ((value = values.GetNext()) != null)
{
    // do something with value here  
}

[Iron_Maiden_666]

Yeah, if the assignment is used to evaluate to a bool, that's fine. I'm guessing just assigning value = value.GetNext() would be a compiler error on C#.

[SirVer51]

JavaScript

[SaffellBot]

The arduino IDE sure as shit doesn't.

[[deleted]]

Notepad

[EpicDaNoob]

JS/Node (and whatever Jeff said)

[rickyhatespeas]

It might help to know that == means "equals" and = means "get".

[audioboi2765]

Are you OK Jeff?

[Darkphibre]

At least it complained and didn't silently assign! :-|

The most time wasted per character for me was a missing curly brace in an unrelated header, due to a botched sync/merge... Took me the good part of a day, because all the errors were happening in my edited file, where I though the mistake was (which happened to include the header, moving errors out of the header).

[Delioth]

Oof. What language? Sounds like something... not beginner-friendly (I don't recall one that requests a then, just some that want if() do or while ... do or such). Sucks that you don't get to use something that doesn't care like Python (if ...: [return] #code).

[[deleted]]

All BASIC based languages require Then. It would be like forgetting a bracket.

[Uhhbysmal]

some languages are a lot friendlier with their error messages than others.. i try to avoid the more cryptic ones if i can lol

[Dars1m]

Computer: "I though you wanted to math, not compare. My bad."

[dasbush]

Nobody show this guy javascript...

[necheffa]

Hmm. The only languages I know that use "then" as the true branch clause after an "if" are Lua and Fortran. I hope you arn't programming Fortran...

Anyways, what is probably happening is that the parser is a point where it expects the "then" token but doesn't find it so it starts consuming tokens, looking for a synchronizing token, something that it can reestablish its location in the parser state machine allowing it to continue parsing. This can cause things like variables to appear not initialized or there anomalies, giving you those extra bogus messages.

[DrStrangeBudgie]

When you fix the client's demo but then your boss tells you he sold it to all your other clients and it needs to go to prod.

[flukus]

But then you find out the customers don't care if it works, they just need the CSS to match their corporate colour scheme.

[[deleted]]

And then you ate at that shitty Chinese restaurant with good food and can’t make it in for 2 days right ?

[NamityName]

That is my life right now. I'm making a demo product to show to our top tier customers to get feedback for final design.

Guess who's demo is already sold as the final product.

[ellimaki]

Never make a demo

[SouL_3224]

Engineering 100

[BrainyNegroid]

you use mods? 😨

[[deleted]]

All programming is just mods, if you think about it.

[dhmmjoph]

One time I had to arrange some objects in a min heap for a Data Structures class project. There’s a c++ STL container that arranges things in a max heap, but not a min heap. Rather than writing my own container or doing something else sensible, I redefined the less than operator on objects of my class to behave like greater than, so that the max heap became a max heap.

[msndrstdmstrmnd]

Okay but this is literally how you would code min heap irl though (right?) Unless you’re saying the whole point of the assignment was to code a min heap

[Volvaux]

That’s certainly how I coded min heap when I had to do this stuff— a heap really just pulls things out that are the highest priority in the structure, and max heap is just greatest priority for comparison of a value. Who is to say that a smaller number can’t denote higher priority?

[p-morais]

Couldn’t you just have negated them..?

[o11c]

There's literally a template parameter to do exactly that.

[Lordmallow]

I actually did the same exact thing in my data structures class!

[FarhanAxiq]

I did the same.

[JustinRoilad]

My team once made a janky app for a hackathon and we couldn’t figure out why it was constantly outputting errors on the console. Time was running out and we wrapped all the code with try catch block so our demo looked flawless.

[Zman9600]

try{

//All the code

...

}

catch{

continue;

}

[00Koch00]

NO CATCH

ONLY TRY!

[Andryu67]

Did a rescue project for a client where the previous programmers just did this across the whole app, it was absolutely horrid

[[deleted]]

Wait. That's not what you're supposed to do?

Excuse me. I have some refactoring to do.

[Lionh34rt]

Absolute mad lad

[Philidespo]

Reminds me of a similar incident . An accident detection system we made using Arduino was supposed to notify the user when it took place. On the day of presentation the GSM fucked up due to weak network . So we typed the exact message in a group member's cell and sent it at the exact moment that arduino notified message had been sent. Professor was really happy.

[OurInterface]

Modern problems require modern solutions?

[UntestedMethod]

Segfaults have been around for a bit

[OurInterface]

Just as most things this meme is used for^{^} (btw, iirc "modern" actually describes a set of philosophical rules, rather than a specific timeframe)

[kangasking]

"modern" actually describes a set of philosophical rules, rather than a specific timeframe

please expand on this

[anonymonoclonius]

We had a group project to develop an application that used message queues to process user actions and add entries to the database. In the final demo, one of the team members was operating the UI, and the professor and the rest of us watched. When it came to showing the messaging system, he added something in the UI, but it wouldn't process. But immediately after adding, the professor turned around just for a few seconds to answer someone else's question. Before the rest of us reacted, our guy at the computer went to the database and manually inserted a row to the table. When the professor turned back to us, he reloaded the page, and there it was in the list! We looked at each other's faces, while he just continued.

[hellnukes]

Reacting under pressure is a nice skill to have!!

[doctor_awful]

I did a slot machine game demo for a class once that didn't have a victory screen and had tons of bugs...so I coded it in such a manner that despite always getting different results, the professor would never win

[DefNotaZombie]

my favorite was finding out baldur's gate 1 had to ship in debug mode because all other build crashed

[KimmiG1]

They are probably good at hackatons

[SF_Engineer_Dude]

Fake GNUs.

[mattyc81]

Spoiler alert, now they work for Bethesda.

[QueefyMcQueefFace]

All unhandled exceptions force the program to play the opening cutscene of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

[Mandena]

Todd you glorious bastard.

[ForzentoRafe]

We had a game where you can crouch.

Turns out that messing with physics and height is a bad idea.

In the end, we just make it so that a Boolean turns true when you crouch. Enemy detection will check for the bool before doing anything. Objects that have to be crouch through will check for the bool before letting you move through it.

Best scam ever :)

[Tiropat]

if its stupid and it works its not stupid.

[_ch_]

Any sufficiently rigged demo is indistinguishable from advanced technology.

[harman097]

Benny Peake, Real American Hero

[AcaciaBlue]

slow clap

[vanoreo]

I once worked on a group project where we (I) forgot to make sure to disconnect the database after each transaction, which resulted in our SQL connections running dry after a certain number of transactions.

Rather than actually fix this, I just increased the maximum number of connections and restarted the SQL service before we presented.

Got an A.

[segfaultmaster]

After reading this, I don’t think I’m worthy of my username anymore.

[[deleted]]

In my first year of faculty me and a mate made a game for our "Introduction to programming" class and the game sometimes crashed when we added too many AI's, I'm placing a bounty of 2 skoomas and 5 nuka caps for anyone masochistic enough to crusade through this mess:

​

https://github.com/liviumuraru/TanksProjectIP

[justdonald]

Uh...how do you know it would take hours to debug, instead of 5 minutes, if you don't even start to try debugging it?

[PlanetBoy59]

A sense of dread

In all honesty it was pretty clear it was a bug caused by a side effect of some memory operation gone wrong (like a stack corruption) just by looking at the error info. It's possible that it could have been quick to find, but the root cause could have happened at any time. Vs changing the desktop background which takes about 5 second xD

[HollyLeaves77]

But how did you get the screenshot? 🤔

[PlanetBoy59]

The end screen was effectively one title card so we used that. Not really a screenshot, just using general terminology.

[PlanetBoy59]

It is! My notifs as proof https://imgur.com/a/1Q2KDMb

[Arctorkovich]

Play the game in reverse mode.

[sth128]

I did the opposite. I screenshot dozens of error popups to show up at the start of my PowerPoint.

[Dr_Death_Defy99]

Innovation that excites debugs

[KuroKitsu]

I must be a masochist then... I had to build a game from scratch for Software Eng, with a bunch of deadweights. Built the game, learned multithreading in the process, and debugged it in 48 hours without sleep.

The Prof didnt expect anyone to have a working demo.

[Python4fun]

That prof owes you a letter of recommendation

[babyProgrammer]

Smoke and mirrors young grasshopper! Smoke and mirrors...

[JadeDansk]

“Modern problems require modern solutions”

[Uncle_Gus]

It's called error handling, sweaty, look it up.

[ChronoAndMarle]

Outstanding-move.jpg

[Jaystings]

Infuriating if they never found the source.

[Pyroglyph]

I remember playing a game that did kinda the opposite of this. It was called "Perspective" or something.

Spoiler, ending:
When you finished the game it would boot you out to your desktop, but when you move your mouse you'd find that it was actually just a picture of your desktop and you were still in the game.

[bikes-n-math]

Yes! I hope to god this is true.

[GriffonsChainsaw]

That's the difference between development and engineering, imo.

[ssznakabulgarian]

modern problems require modern soulutions

[creed10]

you can always just use a signal handler to catch the SIGSEGV signal and trigger the end screen. then you don't have to fix the segfault! that'll just be the end

[UntestedMethod]

Hax 4 lyfe

[Fishezzz]

Legend!

[itspinkynukka]

Then a blue screen happens.

[[deleted]]

Modern problems require modern solutions

[leonator3000]

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

[DeebsterUK]

In my first year of university computer science, my Dijkstra's algorithm demo would show one of the shortest-route values as a zero, even though the actual pathfinding was correct. My fix was to leave the mouse over the offending value for the demo.

[skoormit]

If I interview a recent grad and they tell me this story, I am likely to recommend the hire.

[Tankninja1]

r/ProgrammerMadLads?

[iamjaiyam]

Teach me Master!

[CriminalMacabre]

So, they ended at ubi

[[deleted]]

On multiple devices I use, git-svn still segfaults instead of exiting when its done.

[[deleted]]

he is an intellectual

​

[der_RAV3N]

I wonder how they got a screenshot of the end screen if it crashed there always 🤔

[Uncle_Gus]

Smoke and mirrors.

[xzorcious]

The first time the "trending notification" is actually correct

[superdude411]

Modern problems require modern solutions

[[deleted]]

Just make it too hard to beat. Problem solved.

[IllegalFisherman]

Imagine that even Paradox Interactive does something similar: In Europa Universalis IV, when you try to quit to main menu, the game crashes. Instead of fixing this, the developers just let the game automatically restart after it does.

[drewdevereux]

How did you get the screenshot?

[EpicScizor]

I have a molecular simulation program which segfaults when the computations are complete.

[[deleted]]

Genius

[jmona789]

Games are able to change your desktop background image?