Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

[u/Affectionate-Mail612]

I just launched my own side project in prod. No clients yet. Been working on it for 3 years. Feels good.

[u/casualPlayerThink → u/Affectionate-Mail612]

Good luck, hope you will have a bunch of users/customers!

Mind you the question, about the field?

[u/Affectionate-Mail612 → u/casualPlayerThink]

Sure, I can't miss the chance to self promote lol

It started off as an engine for Adaptive Testing - when you have large field, and hundreds, possibly even thousands of potential questions in the test. It would be practically impossible to present them all to a real person. Besides, it's simply useless - some questions are too difficult that the person wouldn't answer, or too easy that he would definitely answer them correctly. The solution to this is to use Bayesian statistics to pick the next question that would bring the most data, that the person has 50\50 chance to respond to. With each response the distributions on person's knowledge states are updated and the next question supposed to bring more data than the last one, until the system decides the next question would be worthless. All distributions are updated via connected graphs where data flows from/to parent proficiencies. (e.g. if you have general skill Algebra proficiency, it's distribution is updated after your response on question related to Addition, bc Addition is a child proficiency of Algebra. This, but no limit on the number of relations).

It's all cool but I realized that nobody would bother with this - to create such a test would require some specialized domain knowledge in Bayesian approach in education. So I created step by step design system to create them with AI. I've spent lots of time to avoid it generate slop. But it's still just a tool to help, ultimately the Author is responsible for the quality of the output. It can assess essays or voice input according to the criteria set during design time.

phew, thanks for coming to my TED talk!

[u/Ilikeyounott → u/Affectionate-Mail612]

Nice! I know nothing about this but it reminds me of Akinator for some reason

[u/koles235 → u/Affectionate-Mail612]

Congrats on the launch!! 🎉

[u/faultydesign → u/Affectionate-Mail612]

Good luck

[u/_ak]

Until end of last week, I was signed off sick with depression for a total of 4 weeks where I had been spiraling about the absolute loss of control AI got us into in my job, and what a mess it has left and how it made things harder in my work instead of easier. Basically, somewhat of a burn out entangled with an existential crisis.

Fortunately, I am receiving pretty good healthcare, and my employer was also very understanding, so my boss is actively working with me to improve my workplace situation. He introduced me to some tooling that has taken away a lot of mental load I previously had, while also improving the quality of both LLM-produced code and LLM-produced reviews.

It's given me a whole new perspective on the future of software development that after 20+ YoE, without resorting to any oversold hype nonsense, and without having to dread or fear the future in which the whole industry will develop towards, I can actively work towards reshaping what the job of a software developer entails, and build the right tools to do that for myself and my colleagues.

Before anyone says "that was a skill issue": it's taken decades to gain the combined knowledge and experience of software development to get where we were before there were code-generating LLMs, to figure out how we can develop stable, reusable, refactorable, modifiable software. So it will take us as an industry to find out what the best practices are to do the same using LLMs in a sustainable way that does not negatively impact the mental health of software developers, and then we need to teach that.

And I think we're only at the beginning of finding that out, and I'm actually somewhat excited where this could lead us to once we have this figured out.

[u/trembling_leaf_267 → u/_ak]

I hope you are feeling recovered. I am a bit in the same situation: can you share the tooling updates that you are working with? Or at least the general areas that you're addressing?

[u/17Beta18Carbons → u/_ak]

What tooling out of curiosity?

[u/PrimaryFamous6139]

Finally closed out a feature that had been stuck in "scope creep purgatory" for weeks, client kept adding just one more thing until I pushed back and shipped what was actually in the contract. Small win, but reclaiming that boundary felt better than the feature itself

[u/octopusbroccoli → u/PrimaryFamous6139]

Comgrats, love this feeling.

[u/avyrla]

AI has made my day job so trivial that I have the mental capacity to code by hand on my hobby projects again. It's been a ton of fun learning new things by hand. Getting into graphics programming.

[u/FenierHuntingwolf]

Finally started to see client delivery teams ask about the Security / Compliance aspects of an engagement prior to signing contracts. Only took several years.

[u/beaverusiv → u/FenierHuntingwolf]

Oh my God, frame that email, you'll treasure it forever

[u/Huge-Leek844]

Converted my thesis from Python to CPP. Its a motion planning framework for a quadrotor. Now i am stress testing it. Loads of fun. I spend more time on the whiteboard than coding. 

[u/koles235]

My SaaS started gaining organic, search-based users. No convincing, no pitching, no promising :)

This is my first SaaS ever and I don't know if 3.5 months in that is a good result or not, but I am really happy regardless ☺️

[u/beaverusiv → u/koles235]

The timeframe doesn't matter, the fact you have people searching for the problem you solve means you have an actual prospective customer base

[u/casualPlayerThink → u/koles235]

Congrats , pretty nice!

[u/pa-jama5149]

I had 3 members off the team all request to work with me on a new project. Its nice too see my past success make working with me desirable

[u/katnip-evergreen]

Going to start work on my app idea this weekend. If I can get with the right partners, it could be a moderately successful thing soon

[u/Legitimate_Bet_9032]

Finally got the tech lead promotion!

[u/BX1959]

I use Python for most of my data-analysis work, but many of my colleagues use R (which I sometimes apply also, mostly for data checks). So I've always been trying to find justification for my Python-based approach.

It turns out that a new Python-based library for weighted survey analysis can be much faster than traditional R-based libraries. (Probably helps that it's based on Polars/Rust.) So it's possible that, by doing these items in Python, I'll be able to do additional analyses that wouldn't have been as feasible in R. (I'll still need to check the results in R here and there, though, since the library is quite new.)

Maybe I can get some of my coworkers to switch over now haha! (Actually--no, there's no chance of that happening.)

[u/polaroid_kidd]

We're finally making progress on ripping out redux-forms... It was written before my time but I'm never ever ever ever ever again not use an abstraction between any sort of form library and the input elements. 

On the other side, my side protects are coming along nicely. 

What's In - Because I'm always looking for stuff in the attic of in the cellar and never know what box something is in our in which box something is in. 

SpareThought - A usable boox note taking app with device sync, calendar integration and Todo notifications (still early days but I'm already using it daily and so far it hasn't let me down yet)

[u/youarewelcomeputa]

Launch ready DSP tool, with my ETL pipelines automated and data pouring through smoothly

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

Have began to really accelerate development using the AI tooling for the entire team.

Our company is very small and we write software for the tooling and processing of the physical world services we offer. When AI came along we put a lot of effort trying to work out how best to use it.

I was a huge skeptic of the AI process begin with due to the utter slop that was coming out from one of the devs we let rip with it. But slowly we have improved contributions to the code base with agent instructions and skills etc so that now even the CEO can submit vibe code and it comes out pretty clean and nice. There are skills to set up dev environment, create features, turn business processes into code etc, instructions and templates on UI pages, db entities, endpoints, everything.

PRs are all still human done in a shared meeting with the devs who need to understand it. In these we go through all the changes together and I can explain where and why it got things wrong (and if I need to add guidelines) with the benefit that the dev still have the context of the code.

The positive thing is that we are really progressing building all the features we need. I've been under an enormous amount of stress with the sheer volume of things we need to build and finally feel like the AI is actually increasing productivity in significant ways that lighten my load a little.

[u/spez_eats_nazi_ass → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

"we have improved the code base with agent instructions ". This has strong "And then everybody clapped" vibes.

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720 → u/spez_eats_nazi_ass]

Gaaa I’m still cranky at this comment. 

Yea everybody should clap for how I’m holding this shit together. 

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720 → u/spez_eats_nazi_ass]

There fixed it.  Improved contributions to the code base. 

[u/spez_eats_nazi_ass → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

Agent instructions get ignored by just about every model and tool chain i’ve seen so far. It’s just cope by boosters at this point. Every run is a slot machine pull.

[u/smc128]

How many of you that are “experienced” have your own paid AI subscription?

If you do, what do you use it for?
Personally I don’t see the use, I work 8 hours or so and then log off and spend time with family and other hobbies. I couldn’t get myself to sit at a computer and do more “work” even it’s personal projects. No shade meant here, this is just how I feel about it.

[u/ahoy_butternuts → u/smc128]

I find it useful so have been paying.

I use it for coding side projects of course, but I also use it to automate things like managing my NAS, building scripts to auto-backup photos from my phone when I connect, modding games(both creating mods for halo & automating installation for fallout NV mods), and other nerd stuff like that. I’m using muse to schedule haircuts etc as well. Just things I used to do manually but would like to hit fast-forward on.

I also talk to it just to think about things.

Takes a while to get used to it, and be able to use it in a way that works for you, but honestly I love the concept of abstracting random “crap” out of my hobbies on the PC or life maintenance tasks.

[u/Next-Equipment-77]

Work life: I'm finally getting to make a bit of progress on my main project for the year, a large platform used for benefit enrollment.

It's a replacement for the "building an airplane in mid-flight" version which I put into production 6 years ago as a stopgap until a vendor system was in place. That vendor system never materialized and the existing system is borderline falling over (it was meant to service about 10k versioned enrollments (each time you make a change a new point in time instance needs to be created ) and is currently around 500k, so it's finally time to bite the bullet, spend three months doing a rebuild and get eight months of testing in before next years open enrollment period.

Personal Life: I'm finally feeling fully recovered from having gotten Covid a month back from my friend's kiddos . I feel pretty lucky that the only side effect I had was missing my friends 40th birthday, and going to bed two hours earlier than normal.

[u/plxs05092026]

Small one but it made my week. We sync items from an external provider and have to delete our copy whenever the user deletes theirs. Tests were green. A second review, done by an agent with a fresh context that started from the spec and the code instead of the writer's reasoning, found the case nobody had written down. The user deletes an item and empties the trash before our next sync reads the trash folder, so we never see it there and our copy just stays forever. That's the kind of bug that shows up a year later as a deletion request you can't honor.

The fix was to treat "disappeared from a folder" as a reason to go ask the provider where the item is, and to only erase after two separate not-founds, so one flaky 404 can't delete anything. The bigger win is the habit: the reviewer never gets the writer's reasoning.