Prototype devRant rubber duck. Depending on my craft skills, might have a variety of dev themed capes too

One company i applied for never wanted to give me the job because they where building a prototype and they wanted someone familiar with their stack to get things up in a short time span.

*Fast forward 7 months*

The company i work currently with has been developing prototypes for startups to help validate their ideas and guess what, the bunch above came to our company unknowing that i work here and i have been put on the project as a lead.

Lol man, you cant write this stuff

Worst Hackathon ? When you have coded so hard during 48 hours to have a functional prototype and the winners get trophee with a static PowerPoint, full of bullshit buzzwords...

!rant
Saw many people share their setups, so here's mine right now.

Before you're hired:
1. A binary tree?
2. Currying?
3. Higher-order function?
4. How does event loop work?
5. What is prototype?
6. What is encapsulation?
7. Can you draw an algorithm?

After you're hired:
1. Hey, can you add auth token and login to our app?

Developed an android app for the client. It was going great. Prototype for the initial (and static) content to show to the client was on the way. All until...

*goes back in time to when we were developing the prototype*

The asshole boss: "Wow this is good, just remove the login after the splash screen. Redirect it to the dashboard immediately."

Me: "What? Why?"

TAB: "He (the CEO of our company) said that the client doesn't need to see the login."

Me: "Well, alright." (Orders are orders, better remove it)

*A few days later, we present the prototype to the CEO. He'll be the one talking to the client. TAB isn't in this meeting.*

CEO: "Where is the login screen?"

Me: *dumbfounded and confused, in silence, and pressure rising*

The Good Boss: *whispers* "Where is the login screen? I thought I told you guys it should be there."

Me: *whispers* "TAB told us to remove it."

TGB: *Looks toward CEO* "TAB told us to remove it."

CEO: "Ugh. TAB is sick."

A little giggle. Nonetheless the meeting continued. He was displeased. I was a little guilty. The login screen's code was already there. Just couldn't show it since the app doesn't redirect there anymore.

*A discussion after the meeting*

TGB: "Why'd you guys remove the login?"

Me: "You and TAB had a meeting with the CEO the other day. After the discussion TAB went to us and told us to change it."

TGB: "But the CEO said no such thing! Anyway, let's go back to the office and straighten this out tomorrow."

*The next day, TAB was in the office*

TGB: *Chatting on messenger with me* "He is completely denying it."

Me: "WHAT?"

TGB: "He said he never told you guys anything. And he is persistent. I kept telling him it was his fault, but he denies all of it. He never approached you guys to change anything."

Me: "Well yeah. I guess we magically thought to ourselves and said, 'Hey, let's remove the login screen for fun. Let's show them less content because that's how we please our clients!' -_-"

Seriously, what kind of assholefuckery is this. This shit is a whole new level. I am so TRIGGERED.

I don't really care that the meeting didn't go as planned. Just MAN UP AND ADMIT YOUR MISTAKE YOU FILTHY SON OF A GOOSE. Never listening to this asshole again. Thought he could be trusted. I will always ask my good boss next time.

Pm: Can you make a prototype in 3 weeks?

Me: Sure, but just for the sake of demoing something to the customer. It will take more time for production ready code.

(3 weeks later)

PM (to customer): We can sign you up today and you can use it tomorrow.

Me: 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

When you show people a working prototype of what they asked for and they immediately start point out flaws.

IT'S A FUCKING PROTOTYPE, DIPSHIT!

TL;DR
Deadline means shit for management and they can't fucking understand wtf a prototype is for.

Hahahahaha so we are gonna present this prototype tomorrow ( 2018-03-08 ) at a meeting with investors and our management practically demanded a landing page to be at this presentation.

The landing page is gonna be made by a 3rd party, they asked for directions on the content about the landing page with a deadline set for Friday ( 2018-03-02 ) .

Management sent an email yesterday with the following content:
- Changes on the prototype ( A LOT OF CHANGES )
- The landing page content: a fucked up confusing as fuck word document with crossed over text, red text. A lot of noise that meas nothing and only makes the reader confused as fuck

Why am I laughing you may ask?
Our front ender took the prototyping role out of my hands and the landing page is a third party responsibility.

None of this is my work, I'm here watching the world burn for the first time and boy its funny and warm.

:)

!rant
Because dual monitor setups are too mainstream... here's my dual mouse setup.

Yesterday: Dear Diary, today the client changed their mind on a critical part of the project.

Today: Dear Diary, (see yesterday).

So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.

Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.

I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:

$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"

$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."

$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"

$me: "What...What new thruster?"

$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"

WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!

Participated in an IEEE Hackathon where we built a line following robot. We were the slowest, but we had the most accuracy.

The image is our first attempt at getting it to work, consequently, we were the first team to actually get a prototype finished and working. Other people were trying to cram as many sensors as possible. We stuck with one, and 47 lines of code to make it work. Everyone else had more than 2 sensors and I can only imagine how much code they had.

- We need an android app. Can you do this?
+ Never done that, but I can try.
- Do you even know Java?
+ Not really, but I'll learn fast!
- Any OOP experience?
+ Well...I know CPP.
- 😐

- Will you give me a prototype tonight?
+ Don't know. How about tomorrow?
- Ok.
...

+ *makes a prototype in couple of hours, becomes a Java developer*

Just like that.

So the company I work for decides there's money for installing a Jacuzzi on the roof but won't buy our new dev a PC? Where's he supposed to work? In the fecking hot tub?

This is the prototype of my "Build Button". I press the button and it executes a build process. Keyboard shortcuts weren't good enough for me.

After 10 months of development we bring the first prototype of our awesome new product to show it to the board of directors. Whereupon the chairman of the board angrily shouts at us "has nobody told you we cancelled this project a month ago?!"

I left two months later, they went bankrupt a year later.

When you see what is clearly a hacked together prototype running as production code.

I made a web app that utilizes the GeoLocation API, that is used by search and rescue services in a couple of countries, to located missing and/or injured people “in the wild”. Over a few years, hundreds of people has been found due to this tool, some of them would probably not have survived without it! Made the first prototype myself, then two other devs joined in.

Open source and SaaS is offered free of charge to the rescue services. :)

User: I can't access the system, it keeps asking me to change my password!
Me: ....
Me: Tried changing your password?
User: Not yet

How to be a Dev:

Step 1: have a great idea
Step 2: start work on great idea
Step 3: read a blog about someone who also has a great idea and finishes it quicker than you prototype it
Step 4: check back daily and see them gloat about how much money, fame and shit they got from said idea
Step 4: rant about it on Dev rant to vent anger

Showing prototype to client

I joined based on a friend invitation, then he didn’t attend...
It was two days hackathon...
Spent the first day trying to find any thing to do... but didn’t!
Slept in the place chatting and socializing...
In the second day, I found interesting JavaScript library, and decided to invest my time trying it...
Built a prototype in two hours, photoshop a presentation in two hours... waited 3 hours to the end of the event... present my Working POC...
Won second place and qualified to the world wide competition!

Seeing someone prototype a 3D game with complex lighting using OpenGL in a 15 minute video (It was sped up about 4x but, still, fuck me)

Using c. Not c++.

He also did 3D graphics in BASIC from scratch to explain how they work, generally.

I remember my first software engineer internship, the boss was terrible. He was cheap and only hired interns we had 0 guidance. This mother fucker would say shit in meetings like "hey we should start providing DBAAS, similar to DynamoDB start researching it I want a prototype by Wednesday" Wtf this guy is nuts. The overall product was suppose to be a fucking virtual machine hosting platform to compete with AWS, Digital Ocean, RackSpace etc designed by BS computer science interns lol. This guy tells us in a meeting one day "You know what's the difference between those guys (the competitors) and us?" We all looked around lost. This pompous ass hole says "Me , that's the difference you guys have me " 😂 what a fucking joke , not to mention all he has is a shitty math degree from a bullshit no name college in India, no developing experience what so ever. Man o man I never met anyone that was so fucking stupid but thought they were so fucking smart

I think one difficult thing about being a developer is having all your business friends tell you they have this idea that would make millions but you have to build a prototype (for free) for them to pitch. They don't seem to understand that this is a full time job.

This morning I saw the announcement about new avatars... but I was a bit disappointed because I feel it was missing something... something that I have recently requested a few times....

So I've taken the initiative to create a prototype what I would like.

Anyone else want this?

VueJS FTW!

Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.

All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.

I WAS AN IDIOT.

The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.

If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.

3 people for developing the prototype including me.

One person knows unity. He started modeling the terrain in that.

Another person knows 3D modelling. He started designing the bots.

I don't know unity or C#. I started implementing the logic :/

It was the worst experience but learned shitloads from it in 2 days.

My first Dev job involved password resets. Quickly created a GUI for that shit and passed it off to IT support.

One Man's Prototype is Another Manager's Product

Shit, I need to prototype a layout real quick...

*Opens MS Paint*

The best part of dev life is when I create a prototype and the client immedietly says: "Excellent!"

Think of an idea that can really benefit others.
Start working on the project and come up with a working prototype.
Complete the project 98%
Get bored of the project.
Move on to another project.

Soooo, i'm assigned to finish a half made prototype of a production line functional test platform.

1 - Some wires were faulty so someone decided to change them.

2 - wild shortcut appears *music fades, screen goes black*

3 - now i have to fix the prototype

4 - Devil's voice whispers on my ear *welcome to heeeeellllllll*

Boss: Can you modify the prototype, so that I can show it off to the customers who will visit?
Me: Sure, when do you need it?
Boss: In two hours.
Lesson learned: Always have a branch in your git with a working demo.

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

I used to think Electron apps were gonna do great and make it more accessible for companies to produce high quality programs with ease.

Oh boy I was wrong. All it did is enable big companies with the ability to refactor all of their software to run 5 times slower, consume 10 times more memory and kill your battery 20 times faster.

I fucking hate all of this prototype fast optimize later bullshit. Can I get some value for my dollar? How come technology is just being degraded for the same of "ease of programming".

You save programming time but sacrifice end user time, cus our time just doesn't fucking matter.

Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.

It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/

!rant
Just finished my CNC.
Lots of problems but it works... More or less.
Need better steppers and other drivers. But I did it, learned a lot, did lots of mistakes, and don't get me started on debugging hardware...
Z axis unfortunaly can't even pull the motor up lol.

Client: "We want you to build us a quick prototype / proof of concept. Don't make it too neat, we'll rebuild it before we go live."
Also client: "We already have a working version, why would we rebuild it?"

Hired three months ago.

Trying to implement a feature the heads were long waiting to have. It involves a part of codebase so messy and complex that even senior devs were afraid to touch.

Made a prototype, finalized related stuff, merged to develop. Got praises at the demo meeting.

Feeling like Frodo after his quest 😳

Sometimes I feel really bad becouse i am incapable of coding faster.
I saw someone coding a prototype of pong in 5 minutes.
It took me 30 minutes just to make the constructor function of the paddles

Finnaly....
Look who's back.
CNC Machine V3.0

Some absolute cock-monkey fuck-nugget of a marketing director asked me the other week if I could implement a discount voucher system into a new side project / prototype we’re building.

I said ‘yeah sure but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, i’ll have a look’

He said ‘you just let someone enter a code and that takes £10 off the total order value’

REALLY?!

IS THAT HOW IT WORKS?!!

THANKS FOR EXPLAINING THAT TO ME YOU FUCKING ASS-CUNT. BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW HOW A FUCKING DISCOUNT VOUCHER WORKED, YOU ABSOLUTE MOUTH BREATHING WASTE OF FUCKING ORGANS.

I’LL JUST GO TYPE THAT INTO MICROSOFT WORD AND SAVE THE FILE TO THE MAGICAL CLOUD SHALL I?

“dear computer, take a voucher code from a user and take £10 off of there order value”

THERE YOU GO YOU PRICK; JOB DONE. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IS EASY, EH?!

Wank.

I'd been constantly working on another prototype for the past 63 hours straight without sleeping and this was the best thing I could've asked for to make my day.

Thanks @dfox and @trogus for the lovely stickers!

We all have that one prototype/test app in our phone

Yesterday I completed a transactions module that used an external payment processor, similar to PayPal. It was hard, but after few hours of trying out different options I finally managed to get it to work.

I decided to create a simple prototype UI without any styling just to show my progress to the manager and let him know that it's working.

His response? "yeah, that seems to work, but that UI is terrible and not appealing at all. Change that immediately and try to add more thought into your design"

I guess I won't be making prototypes any time soon

When 3/4 of my team gave up and left halfway through. I still don't understand how we ended up with a working prototype in the end.

Friend of mine: so I wonder how do you test your applications in the startup?

Me: testing? *grabs his coffee laughing*

Actually we have a complete build pipeline from commit/pull-request to dev and production environments. No tests. Really. We are in rapid product development / research state.

We change technologies and approaches like our underwear (and yeah, this is frequently). If we settled some day and understood the basic problems of the whole feature palette, we'll talk about tests again.

I will be pitching my startup idea for the first time in my life to potential investors one on one after qualifying for a second round in a business competition.
I am nervous 😬, desperately need to get the fund, and haven't been a good presenter.
Background: the business is still on prototype stage.
I stutter by default if I am slightly nervous.
From feedback my prototype is great- but my pitching might not be too great.
Damn I just have less than 6 hours to pitch.
Fuck this nervous mess.
Dev wish me good luck😶

So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.

I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.

But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.

Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."

His response was:

"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.

You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."

So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.

Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.

Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍

That nice feeling in a cold morning of booting up your code editor / ide of choice and making a brand spanking new prototype project with a language you love. All accompanied by your hot beverage of choice, a warm blanket, and a pet or two.

"Disregard what you're doing now. We need a FUNCTIONAL prototype (which will become the main app because refactoring is a waste of time huehuehuehue) with these features our POSSIBLE client MIGHT potentially need for TOMORROW's presentation."

"What do you mean that thing you were working on yesterday isn't done? Those are the times we estimated, right? By the way, our (still not confirmed) client thinks he'll choose us over that other company if we do changes A, B, C and D. Need it for yesterday."

Make a prototype, no where near ready for customer and sales team sells it!
😢

To her friend: "I downloaded myself a lot more RAM last night, my laptop is so much faster!"
...
No, person on the bus, you did not download extra RAM. Sorry.

Well two days ago, i was in a sap codin g camp (ranted about that)
The challenge: moke a robot that avoid collisions and 6inds a black mm spot on tha floor
We marginally had enough time te implement sth but well i tried to do an algo.
10 mins before deadline i realized that it wouldnt work. So i took an old prototype (without algo) from the trash bin, fixed compilation errors and went to the competition without testing. Because we had to do a little explanation for the parents about arduinos, we all were shaky. A friend of mine even failed to remember his text xD

Asso, because of Fortuna wanting to beat us down, we were the last team driving in the arena. Everybody got pretty fast times. (with a random algo). At the end, we took our robot with the untestet thrash bin program.
It drove pretty well, avoided collisions and then it happened: it reached (only robot not to collide) the black spot in 1:09!!! 😁

Interviewing a potential candidate...

Me: So, how would you rate your JavaScript knowledge?

Him: Pretty good, although I still don't really understand prototypal inheritance.

Me: Yeah, it's hard to understand something which doesn't exist.

...let the flaming begin 😈

Our UX guy today presented a prototype of a new UI where users can declare an order.

Under the categorie "measuring unit" used to give the specification of mass or volume. He gave the following options

- kg
- litres
- m^3
- m^2
- others (which would allow the user to input anything)

Wtf why do you give the user the option to input anything. So we had to explain to him what SI units are...

(Joke || Rant)

This guy came with this joke.
Ok, funny.
Then months later you realise he pushed this tweaked prototype to master, and now this code is shipped in production and it actually prints some idiotic sentence about flat earth on console output.
Ok, idiot.

It's not my project, but sometimes I'm wondering what people have in their minds when using version control and ship crap...

That time you think you found your dream dev job...

But they really just needed a content entry person so the other dev could add 'senior' to his title and work on all the new fun projects, while you're stuck fixing IE7 bugs in his code from 3 years ago.

He used prototype instead of jQuery.

You try to tell them about responsive design, but they think everything needs a separate mobile version.

You spend half the day learning his custom functions to a cms he built 2 years ago, and he's in the process of rebuilding a new cms from the ground up, so you have to learn the new version too.

Was fired 3 days before my birthday, and didn't get my company gift, even though I contributed to every one else's gifts.

Fired 2 months before birth of my child so lost my insurance.

After my time there... They now build responsive, they now use jQuery for everything. I also showed them how to do IE testing with virtual box, instead of them using the secretary's computer.

1) Built an entire SoC around a MIPS CPU. Fixed bugs in the CPU. Created hardware, busses, firmware, wrote Linux drivers, ported Linux.

2) Still working on a C++ abstraction framework for heterogenous computations for 4 years. About to solve / create a prototype for GPGPU and maybe even HDL code generation. Utilizes dynamic dispatch for scalar, SSE, AVX and other targets. I started this only because I did not like the performance of procedural noise algorithms utilized in a game prototype I started in 2015.

3) Created a game in 5 months to drag myself out of depression. Feeling success while your job sucks is soooo goooodd...

Prototype

My second prototype of the studio equalizer. It’s not even close to being done. It’s barely even started.

Client: "Let's code a prototype to show our intents to the customer. We have 96 screens to implement as a native app in 6 weeks"
~Prototype delivered in 6 weeks, despite some changes in the design on-the-go. Few months later~
Client: "The customer likes the prototype a lot. They would like to see some changes (another set of > 40 screens). It's still a prototype and the changes should be implemented in a month, but this time it has to use real data from external apis. We don't know which APIs yet, but it should also go live on the app store"

Like, seriously?

My new toy. RC prototype :-D

I’m saving money to buy sketch, but guess what...

Adobe XD is free now 👌🏼

My girlfriend dumped me coz I named a js prototype on her, she said I treated her as classless.

Was venting to my sister about the BS I'm dealing with one of my projects at work. Specifically the convoluted way we're building a prototype and the way all the revision requests are just going in circles.

Sister: Your job sounds annoying.

Me: Only when other people get involved.

Truer words have never been spoken.

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

I missed a week of school while I was sick, and in that week my teammates made a deal with the client to have a prototype for him in 3 weeks, AFTER asking me (teamleader) how long it would take (4 weeks min.). Why don't they FUCKING listen to their teamleader!! They're gonna have a bad time in the future...

And now I have to spend my whole night writing a prototype because THEY told a wrong estimate...

Team estimated a huge feature with 60 days. Made a prototype in a day, implemented it in the project the next day. Code looks a lot cleaner than a previous similar solution.

Now it’s 90% done. Should have worked with 2 other people. Oh well, sorry not sorry for that teamwork.

If you are programming in C++ please always return a type from a function as the function prototype return type.

I had to debug some old code that failed to return a boolean on one of its flow paths. It would work on linux in release and debug, would work on windows in debug, and fail on windows in release.

The failure was NOT straightforward at ALL. It would return exit code 3. Then if I added a debug print to the function it would segfault.

Why the hell would popping something extra off the return/call stack not crash more readily? Wth is the point of debug compile if it won't catch shit like this?

! Rant
Today's project...
Target for airsoft.
The prototype bullseye didn't survive the trials but it works. Just need to upgrade to wood.

Fucking great.

A fucking nightmare for one month to present a near-finished functioning web-app instead of a prototype.

Web-app presented in a prototipe-ish manner because it was actually being FUCKING TESTED WITH INVESTORS?!??!!??!
OMFG IM SOOOOO PISSED IM JUST GONNA ASK FOR VACATION AND DISAPEAR
WTF

After getting stuck in the shower this morning; I am starting a petition to get shampoo manufacturers to wrap their instructions in a do-while loop. Telling a developer to "lather, rinse, repeat" is a recipe for disaster...

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

Scrum. And agile. And people over-communicating. And estimating work complexity on a prototype. And people in general. I like nights, when all annoying people just shut the fuck up and sleep.

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!

So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".

Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.

Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.

But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!

"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!

"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".

WTF!

We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!

Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?

I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!

Instead of spending time to configure the billions of things for React, I have decided to start my new project with the good ol’ Jquery. Some might disagree, but I want to get a working prototype first.

ARRGH!!
That moment when your laptop crashes just before you save the changes to that working prototype... lost for ever.

Makes a joke about my work laptop im getting that we should all invest in some game development so we need some new laptops (we develop prototype apps to validate ideas for startups and i never work on proper projects). I get to work and see this.. Omw im so happy..

"Don't worry we only need the prototype"

Who needs proper UI design tools like Figma or XD when you have PowerPoint

(context: I'm not a designer and I needed to prototype a simple UI really fast. It looks great tbh)

I decided to create this so that my head would not need to look down. I noticed when just putting laptop on my knees my head has to look down and it causes headaches when looking down. So this "desk" make me no need to look down.

The desk has wheels so you can relatively easily move away from bed.

So prototype is done, now this could be improved to look better. Idea for furniture makers - you could do this and sell :)

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

I gave my project manager a prototype of the ocr app we're developing to play with, just for fun. The next morning, I enter the office to see this along with a well structure spreadsheet with some 40 columns.

Never underestimate the seriousness of a project manager.

Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.

Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.

I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.

And there is no unit test or spec doc.

Fuck me dead

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

On a scale of 1-10, how lazy are you when it comes to prototype code?

Me, well I'm a 'fuck it lets just wildcard anything that is a child of a GLib objects'

Don't be like me kids...

EDIT: Yes i know it should have been an override void

11 hours. I helped my girlfriend with an app prototype she planned :)

The loop of having an idea, building a prototype over 3 months, deploying it and realizing there has been a better alternative in the market on day 1.

made a prototype and showed the demo to clients. They asked me where it was stored and how to access to the code. Told them where it was stored was was a trial and it has expired. Asked me why I didn't pay the subscription. Also asked me if I could send them the code, for them to "try using it" and "implement it in their office". Told them if they wanted to use the program, it needs to be done again (since this is a prototype). 3 days now, no sounds from the client.

Lately I've noticed a lot of people complaining about webview apps (electron and so on)... While I see their arguments for resource hungry apps, slow and unreliable - I strongly think that it's just complaining for no reason....

It's slow - yes
It's stupid to make web work in native - yes
But guys, isn't it awesome that technologies allows us to do such things? Even a simple web developer can quickly prototype an application on mac/windows/linux/android/iphones - even if it's not a great one, you still don't need to learn all the corks and quacks of the languages... You just need to get it out there!

So, I'd like to say that we should actually appreciate things we have more, even if it's as stupid as emoji coding language :)

ps. I really admire the emoji language as it's amazing on the spectre of what is possible.... :D

Being a Dev has its perks.

Started working a couple hours ago (yep, on a Saturday night) to get some code working for a demonstration of a system prototype on Monday.

The code in question was some recursive directory traversal tied in with some file generation in NodeJS. 2 hours later I nailed it, and the feeling of satisfaction of having that code working on all of your tests is overwhelming.

It's a different kind of excitement compared to sitting behind your desk at the office.

Einstein supposedly has a quote attributed to him: "Perfection isn't achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."

I find that I aggressively refactor code where I can to only what is absolutely required. It does also have the knock on effect of reducing scope of bugs, when the code is smaller there's only so many places bugs can be.

Tesla claimed to have the ability to create designs in his head and only built things once he was satisfied that it worked in theory first, now it's rare I can do that, but I will use a repl to prototype or test modules in isolation before just hacking on the actual code.

Jobs, I mean, I know he didn't code but he was always insisting on designs that looked good and was generally uncompromising in his design centric view.

My friend, she was my Starbucks barista for a while but I've slowly been teaching her code and she's taught me a lot about how to teach others to code, she also happens to be my favourite student.

When I am asked to do something and the next day same person asks to change what was changed the day before.
For fuck sake do a prototype and fucking change that and not the actual fucking code 😒😒😒

There was a team meeting where something controversial was being discussed. A team mate was sharing their screen showing the controversial prototype. Meanwhile, me and another team mate started texting parallely on Teams. After a while, people were just listening to each other arguing and doing their own thing. And the guy who was arguing at that moment was being very sarcastic and passive aggressive and it was hilarious. I texted my teammate some inside joke about the the team mate. I heard the Teams notification go off and it was not mine. Oh yeah, I texted the teammate whose screen was being shared 🙇

So just got email from my potential investors - saying they are not interested. This is my second major failure this year.... I spent my every dim on developing the prototype.
Now I am dead broke and unemployed.
I have sent 10 job applications - gotten no reply.
Open Freelancer account (fiveer, upwork, guru).
Yet no gig.
I am slowly going into depression.
Please can someone help me and give me a damn gig or job.
I still believe in my entrepreneurship pursuit but right now, with zero money to do anything, I just want a job damn.

Fuck. The entire day to do this shit.
The screen was my first experiment, but because of a bad module (i2c) it didn't worked.
Today I finnaly got it to work.
Starting making everything almost like in the picture, everything mounted (and lots of black hot glue, no wires showing...
Didn't work.
One hour breaking everything apart without damaging the screen... Was a loose wire.
Started again... Didn't work...
The pot is also damaged, sometimes it works, others need to turn it hard.
New pot.
New set of wires.
Soldering everything right, testing all wires so no mistakes this time... But it takes so longgggg... Making everything in modules this time (to reuse without having to sordering again. And finally... It works.
By this time I should have 3 or 4 learning projects finish (I really wanted the screen to adapt all output in text, no serial, no blinking less, everything in modules, code prepared so, when I get my 40+ packages from China I already have a prototype tester ready.
10 hours... Fuck I'm really addicted, or else I would just solder everything together :D

So I've been doing work for a big ass real estate firm. Managing work of their 12 websites. A month ago they sent a prototype built with React.js which their design agency did. What we did was creating a backend API and an administration area and hooked the prototype to make it dynamic.
Everything was working quite great but around 2-3 days ago their guy who had been looking over the work of this React.js website came up and said that it isn't working in Internet Explorer 11. Bastard didn't mention this earlier throughout the whole month when we had provided him access to a staging server. I coldly replied that the prototype was provided by their design agency. But today the fucker put it all on us and said that it is something we implemented that caused this issue. I had to do some research but I finally managed to run the website in IE11. Bastard tried to steal my weekend.
Fuck IE11, fuck such pig clients, fuck Microsoft. IE, just DIE already you syphilis infected piece of whore's ass!

Last week: Resigned from my current job as a front end dev, mostly due to incompetence in upper middle management.

Yesterday: knowledge transfer to backend dev who aspires to become full stack.
"
- So how does the designer deliver the CSS to the code ?
- He doesn't, he just sends the prototype, we make it work...
- The manager told me that the front end team did not touch CSS.
*fuzzy find ". styles"*
- So these are the 40 some files that appeared here magically.'
"

Today:
New git flow policy's in place. Pull requests are now outside the flow and are entirely optional.

This is gonna be the tits...

We founded a 3 man startup.
I am on holiday for two weeks and my mates paid 50k to someone so he programs a prototype app without any specifications. They told him about what the app should display without any mockups or images via Skype. Returned Monday, found out about it, and on the following Monday we will see the current status..
Oh boy, dog help me. I expect a clickdummy made with Adobesomething, and we paid 50k for that. Why didn't they wait for 2 weeks?!

Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...

So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together

So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.

Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?

After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.

Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.

The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.

Lockdown started.

There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.

A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.

Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!

It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.

The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.

Suddenly my manager is fired.

Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.

The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.

Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.

...
...

Fuck

"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.

...

It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.

I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.

But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.

It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling.

That moment when you make a suggestion. But client ignores you, and you end up building what they want.

Then an asshole comes along and presents the thing that you suggested, and has the balls to say they made it. When you can clearly see that it's the prototype you made!

At least it's Friday...

hehe..

My oldies, they take me back. It's actually amazing I got my hands on a prototype for an LG phone from way back. It was never released to public. Android is in my roots...

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

PM: Zip up the prototype and push it to a temporary folder on the master git repo.
Me: *twitch*

You make a platformer game and prototype open source and someone uses it and people assume i must be upset because they "stole" my idea. Wtf, i made it fpr the community to make something cool and thats it!

I am back after 5 years

It's been a long time

After working for a shitty company, I ended up working for a startup for an interesting big project as a software architect

It was a good experience just for some stuff, but I hated every moment we needed to build some demo or prototype for potential customers or allies

I was tired... 2 years of demoing is too much. And finally I got a Senior Devops in this company working in Kubernetes

I finally discovered my role and my position, I want to solve problems for other devs and myself. I help anyway in the final product, because fast and reliable build and release cycle need to be a must

I wish everybody could find their main role. I took 12 years to find mine lol

Since a few days I have my first dev job in a small it company. At my first day I directly stared to implement a rest api for managing dns servers.

Today I completed the prototype and all works well. What a feeling :)

When i made a little web prototype platformer game using js and then wanted to show my friends as they all wanted to play.

1. Setup all the files on my phone.
2. Made a web server on my phone with relevant file permissions.
3. Setup a web server on my phone and joined the network
4. Smile as it worked when they all connected through the browser to the relevant IP/port

This post just made me realise i need to get another phone lol

been a couple of years since I was last active here.

Source Engine still has its claws on me today - but Nii broke free and properly got into other engines and made some cool projects! We both study different stuff now.

I tried to get into Unity a couple of times now, even made a small VR grappling hook prototype once (def not nauseating). But it's hell. It's kinda sad that modern engines don't understand the needs of level designers as well as Source's Hammer. Even though Source is outdated af.

Thing is, I am more and more starting to doubt that this is what I wanna do in life. Game industry sucks. Ad industry sucks even more. I might just become a tree and produce oxygen.

Started off with a prototype with about 20 backend data points per hour and 10 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in the 10,000s.

Now about 5 backend data points per second and 500 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in excess of 20,000,000.

Weee both projects from yesterday went perfect...
Usual most of my projects end up fucked up because I want to do stuff I don't know how to... (well, I'm learning so I don't get frustrated, just pick up another idea).
Air cooler for power people V 1.1 works perfect. Today we will get almost 40 C and I feel the cold air in my face.

I was once asked to create a fully secure chat system prototype (the ui didn't matter) in 2 days. We ended up building a client in python (which I wrote) and it kinda worked and a c# backend that didn't really work.

1 hour before we had to present the project to some high up management we decided that we couldn't fix the bugs in the system.

So I came up with a cool idea. Why not use ssh?
So I set up a bash script that writes to a file and tail -f that reads from the file. That way you could chat securely with another person.
I made it 15 minutes before the presentation with no Internet working :) they said it was hacky but a cool solution they saw that day :p I felt happy and that I had to thank Linux for being there for me

Probably the most JavScript line I've written in awhile

I talk to clients. I prepare the requirements. I design the database structure. I design prototype frontend. I do documentation. I code. I debug. I update change log.

I die.

First day of vacation, on a remote village cause of covid, after months of doing nothing special I made this :D
It's a keyboard to do combinations of keys (prototype) ...
Well, I made it to play sound effects in games (on voice chat)....
Ya, having a burn out fucks your motivation. At least I did something

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

So I showed a prototype of a new feature to my colleague and guess what !! He took the entire idea and implemented it. 😡

// Define this isn't a rant.
this.isRant = false;

So just curious if there are any dev stroke artists on here that might be willing to lend me a hand with some prototype art...

Just need some character sprites made into modular pieces and a few edits.

Didn't know anywhere else to post this :-(

When you're demoing a prototype and the guy who always introduces himself by saying he's "not the coding type," proceeds to try and tell you how he would have done it.

When somebody demos a new app to the CIO as a functional product but turns out to be a concept prototype made with Origami without any proper code... literally a glorified PowerPoint with animations....

That feeling when you've been at home for 20 minutes and already want to go back to work. Wait, no. Reverse that.

"X Æ A-12" started crying in the morning. So I just used a neuralink prototype and now am able to understand what he wants.

*Relaxed*

Just me, or am I the only one who loves using (Android) swipe keyboard to spell out "prototype"?

I just finished my first prototype of a wallpaper engine for mac and i couldn't be happier.

I'm done fighting with my professor over my thesis project. They want me to go slower in building my project and we only have 7 weeks to deployment. Well screw you how in the hell do you expect me to prototype, build, bug fix and deploy all this and go SLOWER. YOU AREN'T AIMING TO BE A CAREER DEVELOPER ARE YOU?

I feel really sick this morning. Between the anxiety of graduating soon and my debt...

I just want live for myself. Not the sake of a school or some corporate entity. When this is over I want to work overseas in Europe. Do something for myself for once.

So a guy made us develop a website, an Android app and an iOS app prototype under contract for a really low amount. We had initially agreed as it would be a learning experience.

3 months later we are still doing bug fixes for end-to-end deployment. For some reason we are responsible for publishing and deploying the whole system. He hasn't paid us anything yet and has given a shitty LOR which has been taken off the net.

-- Senior Colleague: You're always slow to reply your slack messages... Seems like your brain is running on iOS 2.0 with 2mb ram
-- Other colleague: Yeah... It's better than yours which is still on prototype.
-- Me: Cortana... Do Jellyfishes have brain?
-- Cortana: No, they don't but they're really pretty.
-- Boss: **walks in**
-- Everybody: 👩‍💻👩‍💻👩‍💻👩‍💻

Fuck me, I lost my motivation AGAIN!
I mean, yea, this is a big project and I alone am obviously not enough workforce to do it, but I at least hoped for a prototype. And instead of writing anything like that, I end up writing all sorts of unnecessary modules and wrappers for game engine functions. Grrr.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a mobile app development company to make a clone of the current contacts app. 3 points from 10 mins conversations;

1. They offered me for a working prototype in just 35% of actual app development cost. They'll take 15 days to work on that. ( Me: "Do you mean the prototype that I created in 40 mins using invision and sent you its video recording?" after a little argument they agreed that they meant the same.)

2. They said they will have to embed the complete search engine in the app. (Really!! we never name searching in DB as "search engine")

3. They said they'll take approx 15 days in UI and UX. (Me: "will you change the designs I shared?" They: "It is our internal process, we can't give much detail on that")

Yay, I inherited a project with no documentation that is soon to be out of the prototype phase in a tech stack where I have no experience. It is already sold to customers and they expect it soon.

There are so many bugs, never been code reviewed but the main functionality semi-works :(

"Oh, netbook is on low energy. Naaah, it should be enough for an hour."
- me, hours ago

One hour delay for the flight.

Suicide in front of the train.

Now I stand over two hours in the train and we cannot leave the train. All I want is finish my grot damn prototype...

Every general meeting with a CEO who has never tried the freaking product or prototype and has zero technical knowledge.

As well, just about two out of three meetings with a HR person.

I've had meetings with a CTO too where it legit could be a boring handbook or email used for inducing sleep at night.

We had a meeting with our customer and showed them our prototype. The prototype had a fancy GUI.

The customer looked at the prototype and said: well, it looks nice but I don't know. In some kind the Gui don't flashes me. Make it so that it flashes me.

I've been working for 6 months now, and the boss tells me he's not satisfied with my work compared to someone that has 15+ years experience. He clearly states that for him - it's more important lines of code, than planning and defining the architecture which he don't like because that doesn't provide anything...

Of course, I can just jump into the code if that is whats important. I've seen the code produced by the other guy, and its shit.

The guy is a talker, and knows how to talk. I'm more like, hey lets create a simple design prototype or do some UML diagrams to get a better visualization of what we need.

Anyway, its just annoying to be compared to someone with many years of experience, its not that I can achieve it overnight...

So I'm working on this prototype of indie game with two friends. Since we are only 3, I can't just stick to coding only... Problem is, I'm the only one realising that and I've ended up doing all the jobs that are missing... Texturing, a bit of modeling, organizing the whole team, shaders, animating and so on... And the two others just stick to their thing and are confident in the fact that I'll be able to handle all the problems. It pisses me off.
But I need the project to have some base experience, and alone, I would probably melt down under the stress. But every time a problem show up I'm basically alone, and my level of stress skyrocket... Not sure if I have the shoulders to finish it, but I have to. In fact I'm not even to the point of ranting anymore I'm just depressed >.>... At least when I'm working on the code and not the rest, I'm really enjoying myself.

Not sure if I should do something about it ._.

We don't have a designer yet in the team so we had to learn Adobe XD on the side to prototype our ideas. After months of getting the hang of it thinking this semi-free tool will work for us to save some money, Adobe decides to change their pricing plans starting in April 2020 and it will no longer be free. It feels like Adobe trapped us to get used to their platform and then secretly slap us with a price tag halfway. We can't blame them since we're all trying to put food on the table here. We started exploring Figma today and oh boy was it a gift from the gods! The features are so much better. They make our workflow faster!

Working for blockchain companies is kind of funny. They get endless money from investors, while shoveling manure.

Like developing random useless prototype applications. Registering patents left and right. Spending money on pentesting demo apps. Organising random obligatory company wide lectures, for multiple days.

Lead: alright people what are your ideas and updates for this page refactor we've been talking about.

dipshit: Alright guys, I've done a quick awesome prototype that I really like...

dipshit: *starts to speak super fast* (I catch words about function composition, clean, no side effects, speed, efficiency. Basically a string of brogrammer buzzwords.)

me: what did you mean by that? How does it work?

dipshit: *basically repeats the same drivel*

me: uh..ok I don't quite understand

everyone else looks confused.

me: ok since you've done a prototype, we take a look at it later

*** After meeting, looks at code ***

It was COMPLETE GARBAGE. He used 1,500+ lines of js in 17 files to make what was essentially a simple 2 item list.

We were looking at a way to overhaul the entire page, he "refactored" maybe perhaps 5% of the page.

There was absolutely nothing clean / functional / composable about this monstrosity. It was as if he read chapter 1 of a book on functional programming and decided he understood enough to call himself an expert.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL HIRED?

HOW DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A DEVELOPER?

YOU ARE SELF TAUGHT, DISS PEOPLE WITH FORMAL CS/CE DEGREES AND YOU PRODUCE TRASH CODE?!

ARE YOU SO RETARDED THAT YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE HOW STUPID YOU ARE?

Please die in a fire, along with your jock attitude and unprofessionalism. Take this worthless junk unfit to be called code with you.

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Honestly idk but that one chapter from mythical man month, "Plan to Throw One Away", stuck with me:

"Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time."

In my current project I've seen this play out, initial development was very prototype-ish and just not well designed but when we got a somewhat decent state we had to continue with it instead of starting again and doing it properly. And now the consequences of that are hitting, progress for new features is incredibly slow, the software is very error prone, a bunch of dead code all around, ...

!rant

So this has probably been asked loads of times but I've never seen it. When working on solo projects for yourself do you still use source control like git or mercurial?

I usually don't because when I do personal projects its usually filthy and fast development to prototype quickly.

However, this current project I'm working on I am using git and I'm finding that slowing myself down just to follow good practice is actually improving my code quality and my understanding of my own project.

So this group of students (mostly girls) from university approached us to make them a prototype app for their semester's project, we had a first reunion to know about the idea and what they wanted us to do.

All they talked about was the color and some minor design stuff, we still don't exactly know what we're doing since it was difficult for us to get them to actually define the requirements and what the app should do.

We were supposed to have a second reunion for us to show them some ideas but the day of the meeting they didn't reply any of our messages.

I'm not the kind of guy who gets upset easily, but if you ask us for help and then let us hanging not really knowing what to do with your shitty project, fuck you.

a friend of mine has applied at a company who have sent them this task* to complete before the job interview.
They gave about 10 days to complete this.
*I rewrote it

Personally I think this is super overblown and way too much to complete as a test before the first interview.
They expect the applicant to configure an SQL database, a backend with a custom API and a UI.
It's like a fullstack prototype software, not a task.
Im not in web development and I wouldn't feel confident learning these technologies in my free time in just a few days.

I said that this felt like some HR manager writing up the test or that they want the applicant to create a prototype for free.
Am I being too extreme here? To me it feels overkill, what do you all think? Is this common?

Oh and I should mention, this is for an internship position for a bachelors student.

I just watched "Venom" in 3D.
That was awesome. I also loved the "Parasite" manga and anime reference. Plus, they made the labours and weapons of the aliens look like those from the game "Prototype" 1 and 2.
Would really watch the future movies of Venom and recommend everyone who did not watch this movie to watch it. It is a masterpiece.

Is it highly likely that, those at high position of management are more greedy of money and posses less ethics and values, than those who actually build the company ie engineers ?

I had seen, it's always the top management who get away from mistakes/ issues but generally it's those who develop the company at core i.e. engineers again, are sidelined or considered responsible for the mistake, when management don't know a shit about anything, or sometimes engineers just follow what management says and management fucks their asses wide even if the management did something wrong.

Who do you think actually build companies/product. Engineers or management or marketers/sales people, who eats fat cheques ??

I remember from silicon valley, when hooli reverse engineered Richards idea and developed their own prototype named Nucleus. Pushed their engineers to beat pipe Piper and when their product turns out to be awfully terrible and extremely fucked like a burned dick with broken balls, they just fired their entire nucleus division

Never add some actual features to a prototype, or you'll end up with a prototype in production...

Manager X: (logs a support ticket) "Agent is unable to access system using the password provided."

Me: "You're going to have to narrow it down a little, we have over 1000 active agents."

I hate the support side of my job...

Somewhere half of the project, after just placing a new version on staging I get an email from the customer:

" This is really going the wrom way! Everything is so big, and what happened to the original design? The one I agreed to! I really dont like this, please go back to the way it was!!!"

I replied asking him what exactly wasnt as the original design (We really followed the prototype we had showed him earlier)

So the next day I get this email:

"Whoops, turns out I was still zoomed at 150%. I guess it was a bit of an overreaction.."

Couldnt believe this :')

A colleague of mine had a 'great idea' and started a crowdfunding project on kickstarter;
A microblogging application to host on your own server. The max amount of characters per message was 140.
The prototype was even built on bootstrap!
Such a original idea!!

Manager said we need to use Queue. Several meetings after then I looked at prototype by 6 senior devs:

A QueueListener connects to RabbitMQ check for payload then *disconnects*;

A TaskProvider in ASP.Net.MVC.Core(whatever it is) listening http and dependency inject that QueuePoller;

A Visual Cron timer calls that http url every 5 minutes.

Wait for it: a set of database tables to store messages for another MessageProcessor.

It’s a XML to CSV file conversion project consists of 43 unique projects under a solution. I did it within 500 lines of Node with ElasticSearch and told we don’t use fancy new stuffs here.

Finally leaving a job that I've been working at. All we did was maintain a codebase that was originally built as a prototype by an intern, with no hopes of getting a green light on refactoring or rewriting. So glad I'm no longer part of that mess. Don't know why I'm writing this but it's just like a weight has lifted off my shoulders.

ECMAScript is everywhere, so I thought: Let's do even more inappropriate and insane things with it ;)

...Like using Duktape (small ECMAScript engine) and exposing LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress along with some helper routines to describe the routine's argument types and return type, and finally providing a routine to invoke those routines.

It's a very rough prototype that can handle up to 4 arguments in a 64-bit Windows environment.

Next "todo" is structure handling which will initially be a case of stuffing data into a Buffer() object.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to do with it or why...

Craziest deadline: job processing system for a manufacturing company, Android app, live updating web interface, integration with 3 existing systems, custom/new database and workflow... 9 days from concept to prototype. I was the only dev on it.

Yes, the product sucked, and no, I didn't really sleep.

This is inspired from another rant I just commented on.

Would you rather build something that was technically pristine and something other coders would salivate over, but no-one used it

OR

build a hacky mess that was shit technically but became a “hit” with users.

This rant is about myself and anyone whos like me: using logs over a debugger

So, sometimes when I wanna quick check something or make sure, if and when something get's executed or I've ran into a Problem, I add a few log/print statements to check in console.

But I don't think about proper and helpful messages, since they aren't supposed to stay in code. So I often type what comes in my mind, like memes or song lyrics.

The last time this became a huge act, was Code review/ Prototype demonstration with Clients (which I didn't knew about, otherwise I would have removed them, I swear) and Boss and my Code printed "show bob and va...", "send nudes" and stuff... in loop... to stdout

When you explain thoroughly and in no uncertain terms that yes you can help your mate out at short notice by building a working prototype of his app, but that it won't even be MVP. It will be bare bones functionality with no design, almost no styling, no images, no color - but it will work in so much that it will do what it needs to do to show that it's possible.

Then he sees it and goes "it doesn't look great, can it not animate or at least have nice images and a color palette. Would it be possible to have filters on the search or I dunno, just make it look a bit more finished?"

Me: nope, but if you want I can delete the whole thing?

How do you make up new cool features for your platform?

well you don't because UX and PM think it best to look at competitors and implement whatever shit they come up with.

once, someone came up with a cool feature and some basic prototype for it and they ignored it. the competitor thought of it years later and did it. when they did it, suddenly its a priority at our company to do it as well.

sure, why be the first to do the feature. im sure being unique and creative is overrated not like our profit comes from user subscriptions.

Some recent PM decisions similar to the one above are driving me crazy, its not like u dont know what to do we literally have a ton of ideas so stop ignoring them and prioritizing being a knock off app of someone else. FUCK YOU.

Hey, I have a cool idea about a new way to solve a problem our users are having!
Type type type, now I have a working prototype! Show it to the team, everyone loves it. Polish it a little, it works really great!
Now let's test it on an iPad like the ones our users have... Nope, nothing works, undefined is not a function.

F*CK YOU SAFARI, you're why we can't have nice things. 😤

1. Keep my job
2. Keep my side job
3. Revive blogging at least 1 post a month
4. Keep focus on what’s important and what are priorities
5. Finish my notes / diary application cause my text files / html pages are now taking up to much space and using cat/grep to search trough them is painful ( it can also help with point 3 )
6. Maybe just maybe start writing prototype of table top rpg game scenario, I have a concept in my mind for a long time but it’s also connected to point 5 and 7 and 8
7. Spend twice more time to practice drawing than in this year
8. Read / listen to more than 1 book a month
I think that’s it from dev stuff

Might start asking monthly or weekly questions just for the hell of it so heres number 1...

If you have a prototyping/code naming convention, what is it and why?

I think my client have a gift, he always know exactly where not to go or not to click...
Man, let me show you the prototype with peace !

Boss: convinced the client to rewrite his ancient procedural PHP prototype to .NET MVC.
Next day:
Boss: Actually he decided to just retrofit it... again.

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

A prototype being used as production code written in procedural PHP with the code drawn using echo and MySQL (not MySQLi) all mixed together and the configuration with world readable database stored as config.inc.
All backed by a database with no foreign keys or data integrity of any kind.

PM: we have plenty of time to develop this app. The client is so slow in providing designs and specifications that it took them 2 months just to give me this lousy mockup where they copy/pasted UI element directly from Photoshop. Btw, i have a meeting this afternoon with them :)
ME: ok. since it's Friday, monday you will update me :)
[Fast forward the weekend]
PM: where the hell is the App ? the client told me we have less than one month to deliver it. why didn't you provide a fully functional pixel perfect prototype yet ? Why don't you communicate with me ?
ME: :|

Saw TV recently, just by accident, for about 5 secs. It was "Coming Up..." section of one channel. And the first title there was "PROTOTYPE THIS". As javascript dev, I shat pretty much after seeing these two words together, they are kinda following me.

Hey guys, hope you all have a great day.

I am not a professional developer yet because I still didn't have my first client. My goal is to become a freelance Web Developer.

At me moment I working on my own website because I can't hope to find a client if I don't even exist on the Internet.

I already have some kind of prototype but the problem is that it looks really bad in my eyes because I'm anything but a designer.

So my question is if you know any resources where I can learn web design, trends, good practices, theories, anything really.

How do you guy (think of) prototype UI?

I have used the pen and paper approach but when you add the interactions such as clicks and animation on the paper,it become messy.

I feel that coding up a full blown front end for prototyping is overkill. Because when you want to prototype the list , you also need to insert the dummy data in order for you see probably clicks and drag animation.

Coworker: "Hey, I have an idea. I think it will be much better if, one month before launch, we pivot this project from using 2D animation to using 3D Animation with Motion Capture! It will save us so much time!"

Me: I'd be happy to look into it for you, but those technologies are very labour intensive and we don't currently employ anyone who has any experience in those technologies. However, I absolutely agree and I believe we could look at this in 1-2 years after the prototype of the application is completed.

Coworker: I'm more optimistic than you.

Actual conversation. Coworker made an animation once in college, which is the entire basis of their argument.