Dysfunctional Programming account #1. Senior SWE. I write C++ for money. ex-Haskell, ex-OCaml. All opinions are my own.
London, UK
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And because you endured all my shitposts, you get a generous 40% discount. I reward your loyalty.
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It's time to git gud. #ad
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Today I submitted my resignation at Netflix.
They rejected it.
Apparently, you can’t resign from a company you don’t work at.
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I had been using Ubuntu for 10 years.
Last year, I applied to Canonical for a job to develop Ubuntu itself in Rust. Before the interview, they asked me to write a 20-page essay about my life, aspirations, philosophy and whatnot.
Anyway, this is my desktop now.
ALT The best Linux distribution
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Computers have insanely better CPUs and much more RAM nowadays, yet they feel slower than 20 years ago.
I used to think it happens because computers do more useful work.
Turns out, better hardware is more forgiving to crappy coding practices.
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Software Engineers are not paid for writing code.
They’re paid for solving problems.
The faster you accept this, the better your life and career will be.
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You won't believe how much my life has changed in the last 24 hours after publishing this clip
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Strong men create C++
C++ creates good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create Python
Python creates hard times
Hard times create strong men
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I’m on a Zoom call with a developer.
They decide it’s better to show the code to explain their point.
They open Emacs with the default theme and no syntax highlighting.
It was at this moment I realised that I’m talking to a tech wizard.
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It's crazy how after 23 years, devs haven't created anything better than JSON for the human-readable serialisation/config format
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After working as an SWE for 10 years, I learned that irreplaceable engineers do exist.
What I also learned is that companies are perfectly fine letting irreplaceable engineers go.
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Docker is stupid.
“Sorry, we can’t deploy a single statically linked executable of size 10 MB, so
LET’S JUST SHIP GIGABYTES OF DATA CONTAINING AN ENTIRE OS WITH ALL DEPENDENCIES FOR EVERY SINGLE SERVICE”
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Y’all complain about LeetCode interviews but omg have you seen Quant interview questions??
Wth is this bro 😭
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Wait, do people actually memorise hundreds of LeetCode solutions instead of like 20 algorithms, 10 data structures and 5 approaches?
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Python devs made the smartest marketing move humanity ever knew by saying
“You can prototype in Python, and then rewrite to whatever you want”
They knew economics of software way too well, prototypes are never getting rewritten, it’s too costly.
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I’ve been programming for 16 years.
It still annoys me that restarting a service weekly is an industry-wide accepted solution to fixing memory leaks.
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The worst feeling during coding,
Is when you’re smart enough to realise your code is shit,
But not smart enough to fix it.
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Quant interview question:
You press a button that gives your randomly uniformly distributed number between $0 and $100K
Each time you press, you have two choices:
1. Stop and take this amount of money
2. Try again
You can try 10 times total.
When do you stop?
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As a Software Engineer who deeply cares about my craft and the quality of code I produce,
It’s incredibly hard to cope with the fact that shit software almost always wins.
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Apparently, Software Engineers can be highly productive if you just leave them alone
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Game developers are a different breed
ALT https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/transforming-colors-with-matrices.html
A new blog post! I've realized that the idea of applying matrices to RGBA color vectors is not as well-known as I've thought, so I've wrote a comprehensive list of operations that can be represented this way, together with some motivation for doing so:
lisyarus.github.io/blog/post…
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It’s a good feature indeed.
But when I open a PDF, I want to open the document instantly and view it easily without loading all the 74 tabs from my last browser window.
Just kinda annoyed that browser became a separate OS 😮💨
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I’ve been programming for 14 years, and it still bothers me that sorting algorithms don’t sort.
They order.
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A Junior at my team voluntarily takes all the unpleasant and hard tasks nobody else wants to do.
I can’t even fathom the rate at which he’s growing.
In a few years, he’ll be smarter than everyone else.
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Best place I worked in terms of code quality was JetBrains.
Every PR I submitted had like 50+ comments from my mentor on how to improve my code.
Some might say it’s a toxic culture. But the key point is those comments weren’t rude. I really felt like my IQ grows two points every second.
Code quality was unmatched there. The only place where the code was really close to being self-documented.
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After programming for 16 years, I noticed that Software Engineer mentality slowly shifted from “produce great code” to “tolerate shit code”
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Isn’t it amazing that fundamental Unix tools like ls, head, tail, grep, xargs and others were written in C like 40 years ago and they still run the world without bugs
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Many Software Engineers probably never created a new project from scratch.
You enter a legacy codebase.
You patch it.
You leave before it dies.
From a CTO at a startup:
"We interview devs by giving them a task to build an app on the spot, from scratch (2x BE endpoints, some frontend.) They can use AI, ofc - and we dig into why they did this or that.
What is surprising: 14/15 devs from Meta failed this screening."
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Me at 21:
Life is so easy, lol
Me at 31, to my past self:
We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had CS, we had an internship at FAANG, we had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork! You could have shut your mouth, use C++, and made as much money as you ever needed! It was perfect! But no! You just had to blow it up! You, and your pride and your ego! You just had to write Haskell and open-source! If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now!
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Do competitive programming.
It’s the best investment of your time to get a great job in tech.
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As promised, top algorithms to know.
Sorted by usefulness.
1. Binary search
2. KMP (string search, not call to action)
3. Quick Sort
4. Merge Sort
5. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)
6. Depth-First Search (DFS)
7. Breadth-First Search (BFS)
8. Topological Sort
9. Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA)
10. A* Search
11. Dijkstra Shortest Path
12. Minimum Spanning Tree (Prim or Kruskal)
13. Binary Power
14. Knapsack Problem
15. Longest Common Subsequence (LCS)
16. Greatest Common Divisor (GCD)
Since this is trending, here’s a complete list of Data Structures to implement from my CS curriculum:
1. Linked List
2. Dynamic Array
3. Stack
4. Ring-buffer Queue
5. Deque
6. Binary Heap
7. Binomial Heap
8. HashMap with Open Addressing
9. HashMap with Separate Chaining
10. Binary Search Tree
11. AVL Tree
12. Red-Black Tree
13. B-Tree
14. Splay Tree
15. Treap
16. Segment Tree/Range Tree
17. Sparse Table
18. Heavy-Light Decomposition
19. Link-Cut Tree
20. Disjoint-Set Union (DSU)
21. Suffix Array
22. Suffix Tree
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Just finished watching a podcast with @durov by @lexfridman.
It's refreshing to see a billionaire with strong technical skills.
Pavel explaining database sharding, end-to-end encryption and scaling to 1B+ users felt like a proper System Design interview tutorial.
I always felt that billionaires are people from another detached reality. I never felt more relatable to someone who grew up in a poor family, but through hardship and following strong ethical principles, achieved this incredible success.
Zero envy. Huge respect.
Here's my 4+ hour conversation with Pavel Durov (@durov), founder and CEO of Telegram. This was one of the most fascinating and powerful conversations I've ever had in my life.
We discuss everything from his philosophy on freedom to government bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, human nature, mathematics, encryption, great engineering & design, education, family, and his philosophy on life.
It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). It is translated and dubbed into Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
3:07 - Philosophy of freedom
6:15 - No alcohol
14:20 - No phone
20:16 - Discipline
41:28 - Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics
56:50 - Arrest in France
1:13:01 - Romanian elections
1:23:56 - Power and corruption
1:33:29 - Intense education
1:45:29 - Nikolai Durov
1:49:58 - Programming and video games
1:54:11 - VK origins & engineering
2:11:24 - Hiring a great team
2:20:40 - Telegram engineering & design
2:39:42 - Encryption
2:44:39 - Open source
2:49:26 - Edward Snowden
2:51:58 - Intelligence agencies
2:53:10 - Iran and Russia government pressure
2:56:19 - Apple
3:03:16 - Poisoning
3:29:28 - Elon Musk
3:35:31 - Money
3:44:23 - TON
3:54:13 - Bitcoin
3:57:12 - Two chairs dilemma
4:03:52 - Children
4:15:02 - Father
4:19:33 - Quantum immortality
4:26:05 - Kafka
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Software Engineering is one those industries where it’s impossible to argue with people who have less experience.
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OOP Design Patterns is a scam.
All you need is functions.
ALT "How men and women see colours" meme converted into "How OOP programmers and FP see design patterns"
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The saddest part of Software Engineering is realising you spent multiple years learning not so valuable skills
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You delete one line of code
You build
You wait 40 minutes
It failed
You return it back and delete another line
You build
You wait 57 minutes
It failed
Congratulations, this is your SWE job now.
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Python is a great first programming language.
Its main problem, it’s a toy language.
Too bad many people didn’t realise that, and started using it in production seriously. And now we all suffer.
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If you want to level up your DSA knowledge, I highly recommend this series of lectures by @pmavrin.
A competitive programming world champion took time to record *checks notes* ~90 hours of video content in the most accessible way you'll ever see!
Link in replies
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Many devs don’t understand that you’re supposed to use exceptions only for exceptional cases.
Exceptions are NOT for error handling.
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stop wasting time on docker, redis, queues, auth, load balancers, and how to debug prod.
learn leetcode.
you’ll be 10x more hireable than someone who read 500 tutorials.
stop wasting time on leetcode.
learn docker, redis, queues, auth, load balancers, and how to debug prod.
you’ll be 10x more hireable than someone who solved 500 dp questions.
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Learning how to use ls, grep, xargs, sed, and curl will save you months of Python script writing
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Today I saw an image of how autistic people walk.
I didn’t know people actually have a name for this behavioural pattern which is “Continuous Dijkstra”
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I noticed people who become SWE after another profession (cooking, building, nursing, etc.) are generally happier at job than passionate coders who wanted to make video games but got crushed by corporate management
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I found a comment in a work project saying
“Hardcoding this for now”
It’s been there for 9 years 🫠
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C++ is actually more secure than Rust.
There’s no C++ package manager.
Therefore no supply-chain attacks.
Checkmate.
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Microservices in Python:
"10 milliseconds response time is blazing fast!"
Meanwhile, in C++
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I’m confused.
Haven’t y’all already done all that during your CS curriculum?
Every programmer should spend time building all the fundamental data structures from scratch (dynamically resizable array, hashmap, linked list)
Actually learning how they work and the specific implementation tricks is 10x more valuable than just knowing their Big O complexity
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Every software engineer has a moment where they learned a soul crushing fact about programming.
Like when you first learned that a Boolean actually occupies 1 byte, and not 1 bit.
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As a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience, you should know:
MySQL
PostgreSQL
SQLite
MongoDB
DynamoDB
Cassandra
LevelDB
RabbitMQ
Kafka
Redis
Docker
K8S
Nix
Linux
C
Python
Bash
JS
HTML
CSS
JIRA
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Btw, this is a trivial coding problem.
If you can't instantly solve it in your head, you have some studying to do.
i have a very simple question i ask during phone screens: print each level of a tree on a separate line.
90% of CS grad candidates just can't do it. someone needs to investigate these universities.
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People who think that AI will replace developers severely underestimate the complexity of the real world
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Here’s a proper 1-hour SWE interview question to filter out people who don’t have basic coding skills:
Implement a pure function from scratch to calculate the day of the week by year, month and day.
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I’m a Senior SWE and I still don’t understand the difference between a library and a framework
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If you’re a Junior Software Engineer,
The worst thing you could do for your career
Is just execute the tasks you’re assigned at your job.
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Trees in programming are everywhere:
1. JSON
2. HTML
3. File system
4. Compilers (e.g. Abstract Syntax Tree)
5. Video gaming (e.g. behaviour trees)
6. ML (e.g decision trees)
If you say you never worked with trees, you’re telling on yourself.
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The hardest thing to do as a Software Engineer,
Is noticing shitty code and deciding to leave it shitty.
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In case you thought I was jesting
ALT Engineering experience What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which operating systems, development environments, languages, databases? Would you describe yourself as a strong coder? Why? Would you describe yourself as a strong architect? If so, why, and in which sorts of applications? What is your most senior role in a software engineering organisation? Describe your span of control, and the diversity of products, functions and teams you led. What is your proudest success as an engineering leader? Outline your thoughts on open source software development. What is important to get right in open source projects? What open source projects have you worked on? Have you been an open source maintainer, on which projects, and what was your role? Outline your overall understanding of either Python, Rust or Go ecosystem: What tools are part of its ecosystem? How much experience do you have with it? What makes your experience relevant to this position? How comprehensive woul
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Your brain on FP is believing that remembering ~50 functions is superior to learning a single language construct
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Many people think CS is just DSA.
It's not.
My CS curriculum had:
0. Data Structures and Algorithms
1. Calculus
2. Linear Algebra
3. Physics
4. Mathematical Physics
5. Differential Equations
6. Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable
7. Theory of Probability and Mathematical Statistics
8. Calculus of Approximations
9. Functional analysis
10. Numerical Methods
11. Optimisation Methods
12. Cryptography
13. Compression Algorithms
14. Game Theory
15. Algebra and Geometry
16. Discrete Mathematics
17. Automata-based Programming
18. Formal Language Theory
19. Compilers and Interpreters
20. Computational Complexity Theory
21. Math Logic
22. Type Theory
23. Lambda Calculus
24. Functional Programming
25. OOP Design Pattern
26. Machine Learning
27. AI
28. Hardware Architecture
29. Java
30. C++
31. C
32. Computational Geometry
33. Operating Systems
34. Computer Networks
35. Databases, Relational Algebra, and SQL
36. Parallel Programming
37. Economics
38. Organisation and management of business processes
39. History
40. Philosophy
41. English
42. Health and Safety Training Course
43. PE
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Junior SWE:
"If we rewrite the project, we'll have no tech debt!"
Senior SWE:
"If we rewrite the project, we'll get even more tech debt"
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After my recent news, many people have asked me:
"Why not Rust?"
Here's my answer:
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Your brain on Java is when comparing two strings REQUIRES A DNS LOOKUP
ALT https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base/java/net/URL.html#equals(java.lang.Object)
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Corporate tech survival tip #1:
If during code review someone asks you to do something you don't want,
Just tell them you'll make a JIRA for this and do it later to avoid blocking client deliveries on this ask.
The trick: this JIRA will never be done.
Because it'll never be prioritised.
Because there'll always be more important things.
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All 27 git commands I use:
git clone
git log
git status
git add .
git add <path>
git commit -m "Short description"
git commit -am "Short description"
git commit -a --amend
git push
git push -u origin chshersh/branch-name
git switch branch-name
git switch -c chshersh/branch-name
git branch -D chshersh/branch-name
git pull --ff-only origin <current-branch>
git fetch origin main
git reset --hard origin/main
git checkout -- .
git rebase origin/main
git rebase -i HEAD~<N>
git rebase --onto
git cherry-pick <hash>
git stash
git stash pop
git stash list
git remote add upstream <url>
git bisect
git reflog
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Girls, if you’re looking for a perfect New Year gift for your nerdy boyfriend, buy him a $75 monospace font.
Thank me later.
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Junior Engineer: Tech decisions have technical reasons behind them
Senior Engineer: Tech decisions have economical reasons behind them
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Devs love wasting time discussing new solutions to solved problems.
These are solved, move on:
1. Don’t use ORM
2. Monolith first, microservices second
3. Monorepo first, split when it doesn’t scale
4. Never use mocks
5. LeetCode interviews are easy
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When I was studying the OS course, our professor forced us to:
1. Write in C
2. Read man pages
3. Use Vim
It was one of the best courses.
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I once worked on a microservice that took 1h45m to start.
There was a hard timeout of 2 hours on a K8S deployment, so my production release strategy was mostly praying.
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I only left the Haskell community for 2 years and I already don’t understand new memes.
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I’m tired of bs coding interview question.
Here’s a real question to filter for 10x devs:
Store a binary tree in an SQL table and fetch it with a single query.
Go.
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“man i wish I were better at C++”
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
“man i wish I knew how to draw”
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
*doesn't practice*
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List of Data Structures to know to pass LeetCode interviews:
1. HashMap
2. Array
3. Single Linked List
4. Doubly Linked List
5. Stack
6. Queue
7. Binary Search Tree
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At work, I just write raw SQL queries as strings and run them via a thin wrapper from a functional language.
I’ve been doing this for 6 years, and I never regretted.
I also saved a ton of time learning a dozen of ORMs that bring more problems than they solve.
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The fact that LLMs still hallucinate 2 years after the initial release means:
1. Nobody knows how they actually work to fix them
2. Nobody actually cares
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I used to think that Rust has really ugly syntax.
But then, I actually spent 8 months learning Rust and writing real OSS projects with it to fully understand the language.
Guess what, after using the language in anger, I realised that its syntax is indeed ugly.
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I just discovered the entire playlist of C++ lectures from the same teacher at ITMO University!
30 videos
~45 hours of content
My new fav playlist on YouTube now.
Topics:
1. Passing by Value, RVO, NRVO
2. Rvalue-references, Move Semantics, Xvalue, Copy Elision, Lifetime Extension
3. Intrusive Containers
4. shared_ptr
5. Perfect Forwarding, Universal References, Variadic Templates
6. Returning Values with Perfect Forwarding, decltype, auto, nullptr
7. Static and Dynamic Polymorphism, Anonymous Functions
8. Anonymous Functions (Continuation), std::function, Type Erasure
9. Signals, Reentrancy
10. Error Handling
11. optional, noexcept, Trivial Operations
12. SFINAE-friendly Functions, Conditionally explicit Constructors
13. constexpr
14. variant
15. Concepts
16. Encodings
17. Multithreading, std::thread, std::mutex
18. Multithreading, std::condition_variable
19. Multithreading, std::atomic
20. Multithreading, std::atomic (Continuation)
21. Multithreading, Relaxed Atomics
22. Multithreading, Cancellation, Asynchronous Operations
23. Introduction to Qt
24. Drawing the Mandelbrot Fractal in Qt
25. C++20 Modules
This is how I was taught C++ at ITMO University:
1. Implement my own 'printf' in pure Assembly
2. Implement Big Integer class with CoW and SOO
3. Implement the QuickHull algorithm
4. Learn Type Erasure and implement my own std::function
5. Implement Persistent Binary Search Tree (PBST) using std::shared_ptr
6. Implement a custom Hoard memory allocator, optimised for multithreaded programming
I learned C++ before C.
I never looked at C++ as "C with Classes".
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Why there’s so much focus on 20yo founders on social media?
Those people are dumb. Their only advantage is having a lot of energy and some luck.
I want to hear stories from my 40yo and 50yo fellows who decided to become founders after ascending to next levels of wisdom.
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Hiring a Junior SWE: risky investment.
Hiring a Senior SWE: guaranteed waste of money.
No surprise the job market is in depression.
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I never understood why versioning is so overcomplicated for no reason. A version should be just
MAJOR.MINOR
Increase MAJOR for breaking changes.
Increase MINOR for non-breaking changes.
That’s all.
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All places where I worked and used MongoDB, the companies were migrating from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
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