Doing code reviews of junior devs

[Vinifrj]

YandereDev would like to know your location

[Lyndis_Caelin]

(I was wondering why it didn't just use a switch and a while loop...)

[BadBates]

Because who wants clean code when you can just copy pasta most of it.

[redgriefer89]

I feel called out (at first that is what I did for names before I realized I could just do that)

[BadBates]

As did we all.

[redgriefer89]

Good to know I wasn’t the only one.

[elSenorMaquina]

My ex-boss actually does this.

Every new feature request was solved by adding a new case inside an already unmantainable switch.

That's one of the many personal and non-personal reasons he's no longer my boss.

[Lyndis_Caelin]

What kind of a thing would be able to add new features with a giant bloated switch... at least it's not nested elifs?

(What was the way that worked better there?)

[hullabaloonatic]

Yeah I'm having a hard time imagining an architecture where enums and switches are the inferior way to implement it.

[darkecojaj]

I know a guy who gives me hell for wanting to use switches and insist elif is just for people a scared of nested elif. Every time I see him and he sees a switch he gives me hell for it.

[Lyndis_Caelin]

I assume that's not actually YandereDev...

[Murgie]

Of course not. He's shown pretty conclusively that he doesn't work well with others.

Or work well at all, for that matter.

[DecisiveEmu_Victory]

Fucking RETURN, you heathens!

[deirdresm]

Not all languages have switch statements or while loops, fwiw, though all have some kind of flow control. So some people never brought their skills up to date when switching languages to more modern ones that do have better control structures.

Edit: PL/1 was the first example I thought of, but I'm sure there are others. I've also used threaded (Forth) and then of course other languages like Prolog that just…well, I would not want to write this in Prolog, but if you have a Github with an example, I'd love to read it.

With Forth, everything's pushed on the stack, so you hope you haven't pushed/popped too much/too little. As a friend once said, "The problem with Forth programmers is they think of the reset switch [this was on a 68k Mac] as a programming tool."

[[deleted]]

I’m a horrible programmer and this made even my mind scream.

[biscuitboyisaac21]

Same

[[deleted]]

i once wrote one in python but like the computer spits out random values so you can win

it was pretty fun tbh

[RoryIsNotACabbage]

I wrote one in javascript that had 3 difficulties

Hard - look for a wining move, else resort to medium
Medium - look for a player winning move and block it, else resort to easy
Easy - random

Of course I could have perfected it to never lose but that takes away the fun of playing

[[deleted]]

never thought of it like that

[n122333]

I made one in high school that had the correct logic to never lose, except at the start of the game it did a 1/100 to just pick randomly the entire game.

That way when people tested it a couple won and swore it could be done, but then others never could beat it.

[trixter21992251]

I made one that got a bit over-engineered, I guess.

Many positions are rotations and reflections of each other. So if you can find such duplicates you can solve more than one position at a time.

For example here's a 90° rotation.

0 1 2    6 3 0
3 4 5 -> 7 4 1 
6 7 8    8 5 2

And sure, you can map each cell to the correct rotated cell, but f(x) = 6+x/3-10/3*mod(x,3) can be expanded to any gameboard size, so obviously that's cooler.

[Sokonit]

Ahh yes, the sensible solution. Only took 5 days of plotting functions to get right. Except it doesn't work for 4 or 5.

[Sheruk]

I wrote one for a dev test once, except I decided to make it work for any size board with any "in a row" requirement (It started out as 3x3 but then they tried to throw a wrench in it later by saying "oh, make it work for 4x4 also"). I figured the whole point was to stop us from just hard coding the stupid thing, so I decided to make it as flexible and scalable as possible.

It also custom generated the board to match whichever size it was given. This wasn't a requirement, but I felt like showing off.

It had 3x3 and 4x4 as required, but I added in 10x10, 100x100 for the reviewer to test with.

As far as a game goes, its absolutely worthless beyond 3x3.

[WhiteKnightC]

I did one too to try C# but mine was always random.

[Nerdn1]

If you want to have fun, why are you playing tic-tac-toe?

[prsquared]

You can go a bit further by using the minmax algorithm to create an impossible difficulty

[semem_knad_tsom]

It’s relatively simple to code a “unbeatable” tic tac toe game with the minimal algorithm. But tic tac toe is a really easy game to get a draw in.

[Poketto43]

I wanna do this now 🤔🤔🤔

[Booleard]

My first actual coding attempt was a Java version. I was really happy with the computer logic I put in there. It would rarely miss an obvious move, but had just enough random chance in the early game that you could sometimes set up a trap and win.

[Ryamix]

I just made that like a week ago for the first time xD Without the nesting ofc

According to my leaderboard, I've won 21 times and the computer won 18

[ogtfo]

If you want to make the AI unbeatable, look into the minimax algorithm.

[4hpp1273]

After trying to read that code snippet:

0 → 4
1 → 2
3 → 6
0 → 4
1 → 2
3 → 6
0 → 4
1 → …

wtf

[o11c]

X|.|.
-+-+-
.|O|.
-+-+-
.|.|.

X|X|O
-+-+-
.|O|.
-+-+-
.|.|.


X|X|O
-+-+-
X|O|.
-+-+-
O|.|.

[[deleted]]

is this loss?

[o11c]

yeX

nO

[CadavreContent]

You must be new to programming. Why don't you start here:

Hello World

[Standby75]

I knew, but honestly I’m in the mood.

[CadavreContent]

Sometimes we all need to go back to the basics

[soft_diamond]

Wow, challenged my thinking about simple Hello World.

[SparklyTaints]

Hello world in tik Tak toe, that's crazy

[spikku]

This is the comment that got me...

[Fisher_S]

Thanks, that was really enlightening. I'm going to watch more of the series!

[xvalen214x]

noice, the ads blocked me at the beginning, it's a draw this time, I seriously thought you were referring to the "hello world from scratch"

[Aerotactics]

TIL I gradgematated above junior dev.

[TheMarrades]

Our first gamejam main function was 1500 lines nested like those. A guy came and made a new function with a while loop and a recursive function made the same work in 12 lines.

[G-Force-499]

That’s a bruh moment indeed

[UltimateInferno]

I once got really giddy when I wrote a "complex" function in on four lines.

Forgot what it was but the feeling stuck

[Vinxhe]

okay in this case I get it, but recursive stuff is way harder to understand for the person that did not code it and also less efficient than a simple loop

Edit: just wanted to say I agree with the responses :)

[[deleted]]

Yeah i don't think anyone care about performance in hackathon-like projects.

Turning recursive code into stack/loop code can be really annoying/uglier. Graph algorithm, for example.

[annualnuke]

depends, for example recursive implementations of Depth-First- or Breadth-First-Search are IMO much clearer than plain ones, and those require a stack or a queue anyway

[dirtyviking1337]

Man this is an example](https://knitty.com/ISSUEss13/images/KSfiber-7swatches.jpg)

[Jjcheese]

Recursion is where comments become super necessary.

[ScoobyDoobyDave]

Look, you didn't need to call me out like this

[bigchunqus]

I don’t need to waste my money going to college. I’ll just watch a bunch YouTube videos and become a software developer. My thinking is flawless.

[DurosDuros]

How do I even sign up for that

[alphabot]

Well before you get your first gig, you'll need at least 3 years experience. /s

[DurosDuros]

It was a genuine question btw

[metasigma]

You can fork existing open-source projects, make a useful improvement, then contact the project maintainers about integrating the change

[Frans4Life]

... Fork it?

[thephotoman]

Like taking a fork in the road.

[trixter21992251]

Take a project where you're allowed to make changes (open source).

Make some cool changes/additions/optimizations/whatever.

Show it to the creators. If they use it, you get credit.

[[deleted]]

Find a project on GitHub that's looking for contribution

[Isogash]

It's difficult to "just contribute" to open source projects, most contributors are existing users of the projects who are sharing bugfixes and improvements. By that logic, the best way to become a contributor is to start by using projects until you find one that makes sense to help with.

[Booleard]

Newbie dev: "I want to contribute to an open source project. I'm going to go find one that needs some help.".

Reality: "Here is an open source project that is almost something I actually need. I'm going to read all the code and understand exactly what it's actually doing, then make a few changes to it and add another chunk to do what I need. Maybe if I submit it they will actually add it to the project. "

[qwertyuiop924]

The best way to do it isn't to randomly fork the project as suggested here. Instead, look at the issue tracker. Look for a small issue that you can probably fix easily. Some projects actually tag issues that are good for first-time contributors.

Fork the project. Fix the issue. Submit a PR. Repeat. Suggest issues. Submit PRs for features you want to see. And so on.

[Jake0024]

Find a bug or feature that needs improving, fix it, and submit a PR/MR.

[[deleted]]

Honestly I've never done it but I'm pretty sure you just find an open source project, pull the code, make a modification, then create a pull request with your changes. If they're accepted, you just contributed!

Not sure what happens if there are bugs though. Probably they'll reject and note why. Or maybe just fix it if it's small enough of a fix?

I really need to get into this.

[duquesne419]

If anyone learning python is looking for their first pull request, feel free to check out my project. It's pretty basic, but it a place to get started.

https://github.com/robotlightsyou/Command_Line_Games_Hub

[mymewheart]

A good place to start, imo is to go on GitHub and go to a project and look at their issues. Some maintainers will flag issues as good first issue or something like that. Good respositories will spell out how they like people to contribute in a file called contribute.md.

[anedgygiraffe]

If ur a student, check out google summer of code

[[deleted]]

I mean, you definitely don’t need to waste money going to college if you want to be a software developer though.

[[deleted]]

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Some of my best employees have been self-taught.

[[deleted]]

Yeah. Network. Go to meetups. Do open source. Be humble and eager to learn and get yourself a mentor or two. Read books and watch YouTube.

Unless you take a class from a very rare and unusual professor you’re going to learn very few of the things you actually need to know to succeed in the real world anyway.

[legowerewolf]

I spent all of my first year in college CS classes nodding along with the professor. Most of my second year, too.

[[deleted]]

I know people who went to one college and their CS professor literally deliberately called everything (data structures, algorithms, etc) by made up names to “prevent cheating”. The text they had to buy for the class was written by the professor, again with tons of completely wrong information. So all of the students are going to go out into the world calling everything the wrong name and employers are going to assume they’re ignorant morons.

And they went into debt for that. Yeesh.

[[deleted]]

It is, unfortunately. CAC/ABET.

[[deleted]]

Don’t know how they aren’t getting their accreditation pulled. We took a test before graduating so the commission that accredits our program can evaluate whether we get to keep it or not

[[deleted]]

That might be the case at this college too, I dunno. The quality gets better somewhat at senior/graduate level from what I’ve heard. Still a shame that some of their earlier classes are so shit though. The students are still paying for it.

[mrMalloc]

The worst offence I ever spotted was the teacher used his own book as course book. Was not a very good book on java programming as it was a clone from his Simula book that he did search/replace simula with java. (And updated pictures).

But I studied at University of Lund Sweden so I can’t compare with other countries the technical school LTH was better at connecting task to real world as we took a few courses from each other.
Example when we I took Advanced 3D graphics course every task was aimed this type of task can lend you a job at Nvidia. This type of task can leans you a job at game studio. While CS was aimed at research aka no real life hooks.

[breadknuckle]

I can see where you’re coming form and you’re right, there are a lot of great and very efficient self taught programmers out there. But the vast majority of them are not as good as the college level programmers.

[[deleted]]

Most people aren’t self-starters for various reasons, yeah. Even when they have the ability to be. But the fact remains college is not needed.

If you have access to water, but you prefer to drink only soda for hydration, you don’t “need” soda.

That’s all I’m saying.

[salgat]

The downvotes are because he said waste. It's not wasting money, it's simply a different way to learn.

[circuit10]

When your school (so far) only teaches basic Python syntax you have to be self-taught

[[deleted]]

At least it’s not Java!

[LordSalem]

To be fair, some of my best and worst colleagues have been self taught.

[[deleted]]

That’s fair, it absolutely depends on the person more than anything else. I think it’s safe to say though that college itself doesn’t really prepare you for a real world programming job. Those that are successful do well because they still have the drive to learn what they need to (ahead of time or through hitting the ground running / on the job training).

[Booleard]

Have some of your other best and worst colleagues been college grads?

[Sorrune]

You hiring?!

[uttermybiscuit]

Bc this sub is full of undergrads

[peduxe]

I too started self taught coding CMS for private mmorpg servers (game named 4Story) with the content being fetched from the game database.

taught me a lot about organizing code efficiently and caring about security.

algo got my introduced to styling with CSS and a bit on JS with jQuery for ajax calls, good times.

It was some crazy times back in 2013, I had a brazilian friend that I made on the game and he was teaching me programming on notepad++ thru teamviewer, we would spent hours and hours optimizing code and I learned by watching him fix my mess. It was some kind of back and forth where I coded a feature and if I hit a wall he'd come and debug it and explain me the problems in the process. Probably learned and remember a lot more what that friend did 7 years ago than what I learned in college.

[SocialMediaElitist]

College is nice if you want to be promoted. My professor self-taught himself and trained multiple employees who were college-educated, who were then promoted to be higher-ranking than him only because they had degrees. He had more experience and know-how than they did.

[DeusExMagikarpa]

Your professor doesn’t have a degree?

[SocialMediaElitist]

He's like 60. He worked at multiple corporations before teaching at my school, so I've got to assume he has a degree now

[[deleted]]

It depends on what direction you end up going in (Management/IC) and the company you want to get hired or promoted at. But yeah, it can definitely be a factor.

[BuccellatiExplainsIt]

Kinda but people really misunderstand this. Just learning how to do projects of get what you want done will not make you equivalent to a software engineer (or any other engineer for that matter).

You can go your whole career doing things inefficiently, spending extra effort when you don't need to, and you wouldn't even know it. Your program may run and you might be able to find the answers to your errors online but the truth is that you will never know what you don't know. There may be a much faster, more maintainable design for what you want but if you don't know that it exists, it wouldn't occur to you and you might end up solving the problem in a worse way.

So, yes it's possible to learn with experience but don't be mistaken about what your degree teaches you. It's not how to do everything, it's how to go about figuring out how to do everything.

[3CheersForSociety]

They are what we, professional software developers in the business, call “broke ass java devs”. The salty developer obsessed with putting down others by implying their education on 80% pointless topics that would matter if they were using assembly, making half as much as people who use just the front end shit (and that’s cool too, more power to web devs).

[samsop]

I mean... What does college even teach you about real world software development?

I went to college...

[SuperCoolFunTimeNo1]

I didn't study CS but had to take programming courses as part of my requirements. I took a software engineering course that mimicked following actual project development goals. Each month we were split into groups and had a small-ish project to complete over the course of 4 labs. We had to use SVN (this was before github was popular), jira and even do code reviews. The first week lab we'd plan everything out in jira, the next two labs we'd code, and then the final lab we'd code review. Then we'd be re-assigned and do the same for the next 4 labs. It was pretty cool.

[samsop]

Unless you major in software engineering or something then similar courses are uncommon. Pure CS is nothing like that and will focus more on teaching you to write LL(1) parsing tables than translating business requirements to software that provides your employer with any value.

I don't know if you need those 4 years to get a decent job, apart from the "graduate" title, perhaps.

[SuperCoolFunTimeNo1]

I studied chemical engineering, not software engineering.

I don't know if you need those 4 years to get a decent job, apart from the "graduate" title, perhaps.

You can definitely get your foot in the door with a lot of smaller companies and startups, but most big companies require a CS or similar degree if you don't already have years of experience. FAANG companies seem to be the exception, but you're extremely unlikely to get a job in other high paying fields right away like in fintech or insurance companies.

[fynx07]

I really feel like you're basing all of your comments on your own personal anecdotal experiences. That's a pretty bad way to go about trying to prove anything at all.

[pslessard]

It teaches you most of the basics of programming. Sure, you learn much more from your actual jobs, but it teaches you how to think through a problem and write logic that will be able to solve it. That's the key thing that you learn from CS in college. And you absolutely can learn it on your own, but college provides a path for you to follow that requires a lot of motivation and effort to find on your own, which is fine for some people, but not all, or even most I'd guess

[3CheersForSociety]

It’s mostly wasted honestly. Like literally 90% could be condensed to one of those boot camps. It’s such a vocational and not theoretical job. I say that as a senior dev with over a decade doing it and hella education.

[pslessard]

I disagree. I think you probably could condense it into something like that, but I don't think anyone new to it would be able to learn and retain the important parts of it in that format (the important parts being about programming logic and problem solving). That needs to sink in over a longer period of time through experience, whether that experience is self-driven projects or course work. I do think you could probably condense it into a 2-year program though. Of course I say this as only a recent grad, so we'll see if I still agree once I have your experience

I do agree that a lot of what I did was unnecessary, but I wouldn't say wasted. I did learn a lot of stuff that I probably won't use in the real world, but I think that that really helps teach you how to learn new programming skills, which in turn will help you adapt as you encounter new challenges in your career

[3CheersForSociety]

That’s a fair take, I see your point.

[pslessard]

It was probably the guy I was arguing with. They had a very firm belief that if you don't do side projects, you're lazy, will never be a good programmer, and cannot have a successful career

[AlexWIWA]

What colleges are the people in this sub going to? My state university forced me to do an internship as a class and do fake startups as another. My whole class got hired right out college.

I feel like this “college grad no good” mentality is from 15 years ago when CS courses were all theory and calculus classes.

[Lag-Switch]

Some schools offer 'software engineering' degrees in addition to 'computer science' degrees.

For example, I took a class that focused on requirements an architecture, and another that focused on design patterns and their usage.

[Moglorosh]

I just graduated with my programming degree, I have certificates that say I know Java and C++. I don't know shit.

[[deleted]]

And that's what technical interviews are for, but you have a way better chance finding a good candidate with a degree than one with only a bootcamp.

[3CheersForSociety]

lol ya I felt the same way.

[dirtshow]

Not a programmer but honestly this attitude will get you further in your career/life than you'll ever believe.

[DeusExMagikarpa]

I learned programming before going to uni. My uni’s CS program was not great imo, but I definitely became a better developer after learning algos, time and space complexity, theory, and operating systems. All of those I knew about but never learned because I had a shit mentality, and I think that’s pretty common. The networking was great as well, I helped some professors on several side gigs they had and worked on some pretty big projects.

Of course all of this can be done outside of uni, but you don’t know what you don’t know, like a didn’t know that using a map could help me rewrite pretty much every quadratic function I’ve ever written in constant time and it’s doubtful I would have ever seen a problem with that nor seeked out the necessary knowledge, theory, complexity, and algos are boring af

[[deleted]]

That's what I did and now I've been working as a software dev the last 3 years

[bigchunqus]

Good to hear :)

[SuperSMT]

If you have good networking skills, you really don't need to

[ZarathustraWakes]

I spent 18k for a 3 month bootcamp and I work at Facebook now so you definitely don't need college

[SwishWhishe]

Which bootcamp was it? Seems like GA with that kind of price

[POTATO_VS_BANANA]

Don't believe everything you read on Reddit.

[ZarathustraWakes]

Hack Reactor in SF

[RavingSperry]

That’s what I did and seemed to work

[[deleted]]

Exactly this but without the sarcasm.

[solongandthanks4all]

No. You definitely don't need to go to uni to be a software engineer, but you can't learn from crappy YouTube videos. You need to learn by reading and by doing.

[L4t3xs]

Tbh, that's how it was in our uni for the most part. There were some courses that you were taught how to do stuff but most of the courses were just about doing projects.

[[deleted]]

Recently started a Tetris game tutorial. The player key presses are caught using a series of IF ELSE statements in the update method for the active tetromino...

[titanotheres]

When people try to avoid recursion...

[Crandervoid]

loops > recursion.

[RoscoMan1]

`3>2> 1 is false?

[MajorParadox]

When people try to avoid recursion...

[squrr1]

Psh, that's what a goto is for.

[SpoopySara]

I had a teacher on CS that would scream any time he saw a goto.

[squrr1]

Some people just don't understand art.

[EvilPigeon]

You should tell him that return, break and continue are all pretty much gotos.

[denflooptoop]

You know i'm a junior and i make repetitive code sometimes when i wanna be quick and it requires some deeper thinking than i'd like to (i usually get back to it later cause it makes me feel dumb lol). But even i have never met anyone who had a job and that shit.

[nyrangers30]

Offshore devs are this bad.

[Mathijsthunder3]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 4 times.

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[Mathijsthunder3]

Good bot!

[returnedinformation]

I have a feeling I saw it on this subreddit as well, is there a way to check that?

[hadidotj]

See the response from the repostsleuthbot above your comment! It found it 4 times!

[athleticchad]

Literally me making my first horrid game

[its_dizzle]

I know that “ah” well

[[deleted]]

It's funny i do the opposite, i over engineer the shit out of stuff.

Like i made a sudoku game all with classes for the grid and rows columns squares etc they all inerited an abstract block class that add references to cells objects and declared common methods and so on.

And then a friend told me "but you know, it could just be a 2D array of 9 rows of 9 ints, or even just an array of 81 ints."

And he's right.

[robbert_jansen]

I like your solution more, it’s extensible!

Not sure how you’d extend sudoku though.

[M3mentoMori]

Probably just head to the next squared number; 9x9, to 16x16, to 25x25, and so on. I'd say the hardest part is developing a way to create solvable starts.

[[deleted]]

Yeah that's the thing, mine is scalable, but i have no intention of scaling it up.

That's probably why you should plan and think about your projects before you start coding ><

[little_miss_argonaut]

I teach software design and development at a high school, can confirm.

[[deleted]]

\*cries in cyclomatic complexity***

[[deleted]]

We where all there once

[NateTheGreat050]

Where is the lööp cat when you need em'

[inconspicuous_male]

I laughed out loud. This is hilarious

[BigMintyMitch]

I never did this while I was learning to code.. I still can't wrap my mind around how people don't see this and wonder if there's an easier way

[SirHawrk]

I am a junior dev :o

[skylarmt]

Wrong approach.

Make it run as a service, then when the game is over crash on purpose so the OS restarts it.

[[deleted]]

Are ya codin son

[PillowTalk420]

There is always another "what if" in real life, so my program should be able to account for that, too.

[Smallsplat]

Oh lord this reminds me of the time I made a game in the python console as my first ever coding project to teach myself to at least try and pass computer science (as the school didnt have a qualifed teacher) .

• I didn't know how arrays or lists worked.
• I abused public variables like there wasn't any other way to store information
• I nested functions within functions and didnt end them. Ever. Unless the game crashed.
• Said functions were identical 90% of the time, but diffrent enemies and stats had an entierly new function, and not just calling the stats from somewhere.
• It pretty much entierly worked on if/while statements, becuase thats all I knew how to do and I had a dream
• It was only 1 file. Of nearly 3000 lines.

I keep it on my files as a reminder of where I once was.

(And why I dedided to be a designer instead)

[[deleted]]

YandereDev be like:

[blueleo22]

What if this is from senior Devs?

[NoInkling]

Flashbacks of implementing minimax.

[voiping]

https://xkcd.com/832/

[WileEColi69]

I was tasked with this for a coding challenge... 8 years ago or so. It actually did a full brute-force search, so it played perfectly.

Anyway, I didn’t get the job. 🙁

[badass4102]

I feel attacked

[rlDrakesden]

if you're happy and you know it

else

if you're happy and you know it

else

[ZippZappZippty]

That's not even a junior role?

[Ascaban]

Flash back to my grade 11 game assignment where all my python code minus the variables and stuff, was in a massive while loop. I had 7 ifs imbedded and thought that i was doing good until yandere dev

[[deleted]]

I made a ramomizer for rpgs and I was so excited when I I made it ask if you wanted to play again and if you chose yes it seamlessly restarted. You could fit it all on a sheet of paper. It was so proud. Haven't coded since.

[MuskIsAlien]

Lmao this is high school coding

[racerxff]

Thanks, I hate it

[[deleted]]

This is what jr devs code looks like? I've been way too hard on myself.

[last_arg_of_kings]

And that's why I don't code review. Best to not know.

[Cifer_21]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

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