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Ben Halpern
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Tell me a coding confession

What’s a habit or behavior you probably wouldn’t put on your resumé?

Oldest comments (101)

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Ben Halpern

I’ll start:

  • I still kind of suck at git
  • I tend to ignore my linters

Things I continue to work on, but not my best coding qualities. 😋

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Ondrej • Edited
  • I do not do git rebase as often as I should
  • I do not commit often enough (usually once for big chunk of work)
  • I tend to find every minor security issue (i.e. possible attack vector) and have a long discussions about it with my team
  • Sometimes I am "It works on my machine" guy and require more evidence / documentation about potential bugs
  • And in the end....I could really be a better developer :/
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Ben Halpern

I’m a safe and cautious git user and I tend not to mess things up too badly. But I rarely have a good idea of how to get out of a mess without too much collateral damage.

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Ondrej

I sometimes have tendencies to push to origin/master...which is, sadly, locked.... but by me, haha, so when I'm on the roll, nothing will stop me!

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

I'm with you linters. I tend to get annoyed by them. They often lead devs to focus on really pedantic problems. With linter indoctrination, you'll be looking at another dev's code and think "Oh they used an if statement to assign a nullable value instead of a ternary statement. They should fix that." Instead of "the overall maintainability of this code looks good."

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Kasey Speakman

I spend way too much time thinking of every edge case and how things will scale. That tends to slow down my coding tasks. And I have a lot of coding work on my plate.

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Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez
  1. I hate the whole Javascript tooling (the fact I'm doing a lot contract work as a Fullstack Developer doesn't help).
  2. Sometimes I miss Java.
  3. I don't like Bootstrap.
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David J Eddy

Swap #2 for a language everyone likes to hate and I'm right with you. :)

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Jack Harner 🚀

COBOL?

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Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez

If you hate Perl too then we should create a Foundation or something

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mkenzo_8
  • I started coding on the CMD
  • I am a noob, big noob in Git
  • I don't like to use CSS frameworks
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Jesse M. Holmes

I console.log() things more often than setting a breakpoint and hitting the debugger. Working on it.

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Casey Brooks • Edited

There's nothing wrong with println debugging! While breakpoint debuggers are a great tool, it is really hard to use them well in async code, which is where good logging is an absolute must! And sometimes, it's just faster and easier to print logs instead of stepping through line-by-line

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Gregor Gonzalez

the old reliable!

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Abraham Williams

I Google almost everything because I don't remember the APIs, just that there is a way to do it.

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Anil Das • Edited

Hah. Everybody does this, so much so that Google actually put in a recruitment ad for people searching certain programming related queries.

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Terry Keeney

I'm with you on this one...
I've been working in a particular platform so long that I've recently began to wonder if I actually still know how to code or whether I've just become particularly skilled at rearranging various snippets of code.
Whatever it is - the one thing I know for sure - I'm reasonably gifted at articulating my problem in a way that I can (usually) find the StackOverflow answer to solve the problem

not sure i know how to code

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rhymes • Edited

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Sung M. Kim

Seems to work out for many React ⚛ devs.
And that's what's recommended by Dan Abramov 😛

click on the link in Dan's tweet

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Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez

That's why I have like a ton of docsets in Zeal

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Yury

I rely on my IDE autocomplete so much I sometimes forget the standard library

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Gregor Gonzalez

Same! Google driven development

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tom hermans

That's not per se bad. Knowing a solution exists and looking it up is way better than solving a problem you shoudn't have to

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Casey Brooks • Edited

I'm pretty bad at asking questions. I'm definitely more comfortable digging through the mire of docs and source code than reaching out for help.

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Ben Halpern

I used to be reaaaaallly bad this way. I’ve become more comfortable asking questions over time.

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Molly Struve (she/her)

I still feel like my dev lingo knowledge is 2 years behind my actual knowledge and every time I am talking to someone I will never stop and ask what a word or abbreviation means. Instead I make a mental note, then after the conversation sit on google for 5 min figuring out what they just said and having ah-ha moments 😂

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Mårk Phoenix

I do this. I worry about whether not knowing an acronym will make me look stupid.

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Gregor Gonzalez

I think "I could ask but I need to do this by myself" and then I waste hours searching. I don't want to bother others when they are busy

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Sdu

I'm scared of contributing. I'm afraid of finding out that I'm incompetent so when I challenge myself to find a project to contribute to, I end up scrolling on github until I run away. Dare try to talk me into any, I have more excuses than gifs in @ben 's portfolio 🤣

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Ben Halpern

That was me for years, and now all my code is out there for the world to see. 😳

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Molly Struve (she/her)

This was totally me a year ago then I found some things I REALLY needed fixed in a few gems and that is what pushed me to finally do it. That first PR was SO stressful but I did survive and it has gotten a lot easier 😊

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rhymes

Stop scrolling, contribute to dev.to! :-)

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Sdu

Do I need ruby to do so? I'd need to brush up on it a lot

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rhymes

The backend is in Ruby and Rails, the frontend is in HTML/CSS/JavaScript/React/Preact. The documentation is in English :P

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Andrew Bone

You could submitting a bug report, submit a feature requests or reading over other pull requests to make sure they make sense and that still counts as contributing 🙂

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Sdu

I think with also this approach, I'll understand the 'why' . The 'how' is always the easiest

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

Happens with me a lot 😅😅

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David J Eddy

I don't understand functional programming.

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Jason Steinhauser

I've been preaching functional programming for several years now, and I still don't even grasp all the concepts.

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rhymes

FP is hard!

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rhymes

I think if you go down the rabbit hole of CSP, monads, combinators than it really gets trick but the basics are simpler than some people make them to.

You don't need to have a "pure" functional language to take advantage of it.

Use functions without side effects, pass functions as arguments (you do this all the time if you work with JavaScript and callbacks), envision your code as a series of composable operations instead of telling something to change state.

It's perfectly fine if you don't do it all time, or ever :D

Chances are you're already doing without knowing it.

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Kasey Speakman

We (FP programmers) are great at making it not very understandable.

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George • Edited

When someone asks me for help and I can't figure it out I use stackoverflow solutions

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