Coders Just Want To Rant and Confess

Last month I wrote about the new devRant community -- which lets developers publicly rant about coding issues -- when it provided a list of the most annoying programming languages.

Now comes a new app on Apple's App Store titled Coding Confessional - Anonymous Confessions from Programmers, by Pokeo Inc.

Apparently, coders just want to rant and confess in public forums.

The store entry describes the app, released last Wednesday, thusly:

Developers, confess your sins!

Coding Confessional is a place where software developers can anonymously share their thoughts, opinions and secrets.

Get absolution or condemnation from the community. Discuss best (and worst) practices. Learn from other engineer's horror stories. Find out what other programmers are really thinking. Become a better developer [results not typical].

With the app -- or the Android equivalent, or its Web site -- developers can post their confessions and readers can vote to Absolve or Condemn them for their voiced transgressions.

Those include confessions ranging from barely commenting code to the most-condemned post on the site: "I think Web developers are sissies" (1,308 absolutions, 2,273 condemnations).

Conversely, the post receiving the most absolutions (1,964 vs. only 84 condemnations) was: "I use printf functions to debug my code. I'm going to burn in hell."

Even though the store apps are fairly new, the Web site has apparently been running since 2013, which accounts for those relatively high numbers.

Readers can also search for new posts, hot posts, random posts and the most controversial posts. In the hotness category, the post confessing "I wouldn't have a job if it wasn't for Stack Overflow" is No. 1, with 365 people voting to absolve the wayward coder and 39 voting to condemn the person.

To me, the "most controversial" post doesn't seem that controversial, but here it is: "I like writing code in PHP" (799 votes to absolve, 889 to condemn).

Note that, like any open forum, some readers' posts contain profanity and lewdness. Also, a lot of the "confessions" are actually statements or observations.

Nevertheless, it can serve as a time-killer (for all that downtime when developers have nothing to do) or as a place to reaffirm that your coding sins aren't really that bad -- or are they?

Come on, what's the worst you've done? Comment here or drop me a line.

Posted by David Ramel on September 13, 2016