Malachite

I hate Android Studio I hate Android Studio I hate Android Studio all I want to do is put some buttons and a number on a screen but I can't fucking figure out how to arrange the buttons on the screen and I can't find the piece of documentation that tells me how to do that because apparently dragging and dropping them on the visual representation of what the screen will look like is allowed but doesn't actually move anything and I can't figure out which file to edit to reposition the buttons and shit myself

I dislike the fact that the only smidgen of GUI-related programming I actually have any experience with is using Swing (part of Java), because it means that I have no fucking clue how to wrangle the GUI for my portion of the Android app I have to make as a semester group project.

I also dislike the fact that not a single student in this class had any experience using Android Studio prior to starting this project, yet most of my classmates seem to be figuring it out a lot faster than I am. Fuck knows the official documentation isn’t helping, especially since it’s all geared towards using Kotlin (which none of my group is familiar with, so we’re using Java because we all know Java and Android Studio theoretically supports it). It doesn’t help that only my group’s leader communicates with any regularity about the project, and usually only when I ask a question in our group chat. I have no idea if the rest of my group is silently making progress or completely ignoring the project.

I also dislike the fact that I just stayed up past midnight writing a Swing mock-up of the GUI for my portion of the app, knowing that I almost certainly won’t be able to use that code for anything related to the actual Android app we’re making (unless Android supports Swing which I doubt) and that I am probably the only member of the team it will be useful to even on a conceptual level.

If anyone knows of a good Android Studio tutorial that’ll teach me how to put buttons and input fields on a screen and make them do things, please, let me know. I have the code for what I want the buttons and input fields to do, I just don’t know how to do GUI shit in Android Studio. I played around with the views editor whatever thing for over an hour today and couldn’t figure out how to make the single button I created show up anywhere that wasn’t the upper left corner of the screen, nor could I figure out how to make it do things when pressed.

We (humanity) know how to make reliable software. This is knowledge that exists. It is even put into practice, in a few places. Mostly aviation and medical equipment, fields where work must be Certified before it can be sold.

Building codes are ubiquitous. Pretty much all construction that happens in a city must meet building codes.

Do you know who writes building codes?

Insurance companies

Under capitalism, the solution to making buildings safe (to the extent that they are) is something called "liability," a system by which fuck-ups are converted into negative money. And "insurance," a system by which potential future negative money ("risk") is turned into fixed immediate negative money.

There is basically no liability for bad software. Oh you fucked up and lost approximately EVERY social security number from a simple, avoidable bug? The then-current¹ framing of liability was not able to stick any "harm" other than the cost of credit monitoring for a year. The software you paid for sucks ass? Actually just not a fuckin' problem at all. The software you paid for starts sucking ass after you bought it? Meh.

It's simple: writing good software takes more time, which means more money. There are building codes for software, they absolutely will not get used if they cost more than not using them. And they do cost more. Review, documentation, tests, static checks, whatever, it takes times.

On the other hand, scrum and agile are free. So that's what you get instead, the management equivalent of healing crystals.

1. Since the Equifax breach, California passed CCPA which among other things, proclaims an explicit liability of $150-$1,000 per person for a data breach.

yes but i also was implying software inspectors, and I suppose, actual software liability.

it wouldn't be pretty but construction wasn't either

Every black or white hat hacker is a software inspector

Also: I love this bit from the original reply, because... yeah

On the other hand, scrum and agile are free. So that's what you get instead, the management equivalent of healing crystals.

I’m literally taking a class called Fundamentals of Software Engineering this semester for my computer science degree, and the prof has spent the entire semester so far hyping up agile and telling us why it’s so great and how to do it, and then he got to the part where he was like (paraphrasing) “documentation is bad, it’s too expensive to maintain in large and complicated projects, therefore it should be minimized or even eliminated” and I was (internally) like hold up what

Like, yeah, as a project grows the documentation work (and the time your salaried employees spend working on that instead of working on deliverables, which I understand is a problem for capitalists) grows even faster, but the bigger and more complex a system is, the more important it is to document how it works, right??? Or am I insane? Surely a better solution would be to find more efficient ways to keep documentation up to date, like maybe writing tools to auto-generate some of it? We have tools to auto-generate tests to make sure we wrote the code right and wrote the right code, surely we can find a way to automate documentation within a reasonable margin of error.

Like, he gave an example of a project he was on where the (physical, printed) documentation for the project’s code was enough to fill a whole room with stacks of paper, and yeah I agree that’s unreasonable. But surely there’s a middle ground between that shit and “ok we’ve gotta choose between maintaining our documentation and maintaining our project and the correct answer is the latter one,” surely there’s a middle ground where you can reduce it to manageable levels without minimizing or eliminating it?

Large software companies for whom this is an Issue™️ make a much fucking money, surely they can afford to reduce their massive profits a bit to make everyone’s jobs easier in the future? Because I guarantee—my prof has even acknowledged this—eventually a time comes that the original creators of a software are not the ones maintaining it, and if the code isn’t documented at all then maintaining it becomes much harder…and more expensive! And my prof has also said that a majority of all software work done today is maintaining existing systems, not creating new ones! So wouldn’t it be smarter and more cost-effective to incur some extra up-front costs now in order to reduce the long-term costs down the line, over the rest of your software’s lifespan?

insert “I want more software with more documentation that’s released less frequently and is written by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” meme here

In general my prof has spent a lot of time talking about things in terms of how costly or cost-effective they are. He seems to consider cost to be the primary metric for how good or bad of an idea something is for a software development team to do. The textbook also has extremely “here’s how to be the most efficient money printer for your organization that you can possibly be” vibes. It’s very jarring and makes the material hard to read/take seriously for me.

Am I too leftist for this career??? Have I spent too much time in anti-capitalist echo-chambers to be able to comprehend business decisions? All I want to do with this degree is write code and get paid well enough for it that my family isn’t living paycheck-to-paycheck and has a good padding of money saved up for emergencies… I like coding, that’s why I changed to this major, but I’m literally just trying to provide for my loved ones. I just wanna be a decently-paid code monkey, I don’t want to be a high-powered exec or even a project manager. I’m not ambitious unless you count “wanting to be financially stable” as an ambition. I don’t grok the capitalist mindset and I’m legitimately starting to worry that that will cause Problems™️ for me later down the line.

This post is really two separate groups questions, but I'm putting them in the same post for the sake of having everything in one place. I apologize for how verbose this is. To make reading it easier, I've put the meat of each section in bold, i.e. the actual questions I'm seeking answers for; the rest is background info explaining my specific needs. Putting it under a cut since it's so long. This post is also on my Tumblr.

Edit: I use Windows and have an iPhone, if that helps with specific software recommendations, though both of those might change in the future.