The Student Room Group

I am Dez, lead developer. Ask me anything

Today marks exactly 10 years since I first joined the site. So, as is the current style, I thought I'd make a thread about it. Ask me anything, and I'll answer as best as I can. :smile: :blah:

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Have you ever managed to break the site?

Is the app ever actually going to be redeveloped? :tongue:


Posted from TSR Mobile
Any plans to improve badges or search function?

Was there a particular development to TSR you're personally proud of?
Reply 3
What's it like developing lead? It sounds like a fun job to have!
Hi. I speak for the people of TSR.

Please make a nicer app for us! Also please allow bigger file sizes for our avatars. I wanna put a cool gif on mine.
Original post by Dez
Today marks exactly 10 years since I first joined the site. So, as is the current style, I thought I'd make a thread about it. Ask me anything, and I'll answer as best as I can. :smile: :blah:


On valentine's day, instead of rep being green can we change it to pink and little hearts float up the screen when you rep someone?! :excited:

Congratualtions on 10 years :woo:
Reply 6
How do you manage or ensure that your codes are developed properly?
Do you have a dedicated QA team with you?
For a development work, how many defects do you think you may have once released? :wink:
What do you want in a developer?
What kind of major mistakes have you seen so far whilst doing development work?
Reply 7
Original post by furryface12
Have you ever managed to break the site?

Is the app ever actually going to be redeveloped? :tongue:


Posted from TSR Mobile


Yes, on many occasions. Usually by accident though. :shifty:

I expect so, but I don't know exactly when. Personally I hate developing apps.

Original post by Kvothe the arcane
Any plans to improve badges or search function?

Was there a particular development to TSR you're personally proud of?


I'd like to see more badges. There's quite a few that could be added with no dev work. But that isn't my call. Search, yes. It's happening. Watch this space. :wink:

Notifications is probably one of my better projects. Actually was my idea to begin with, as nobody could really work out what to do for mobile users who wouldn't see any sidebar widgets.

Original post by lustawny
What's it like developing lead? It sounds like a fun job to have!


It's pretty cool. :yep: A very busy job, but we're getting a lot of very state-of-the-art tech to play with now and some big projects to work on. :sly:
What Latex distro does this site use? And are there any plans to improve/update it?
Original post by Dez
Today marks exactly 10 years since I first joined the site. So, as is the current style, I thought I'd make a thread about it. Ask me anything, and I'll answer as best as I can. :smile: :blah:


Who has been your favourite Eurovision act in the last 10 years?
Original post by Dez
Today marks exactly 10 years since I first joined the site. So, as is the current style, I thought I'd make a thread about it. Ask me anything, and I'll answer as best as I can. :smile: :blah:


I would swear you made a similar thread not that long ago. Anyway:

1. Skills and work experience you had when you left uni
2. How did you get your first dev job?
3. What did your first dev job involve?
4. Why did you leave that job?
5. What's TSR's tech stack?
6. Did you choose it? if not, who did?
7. NET vs Rails vs Node. Which one would you choose for work (if you had a choice) and why?
8. Related to point 2 and 3: tips for someone looking for a first dev job?

Thanks :smile:

Original post by Kvothe the arcane
What Latex distro does this site use? And are there any plans to improve/update it?


You are a member of the Clowns. :0
Reply 11
Who is the most annoying CT :ninja:?

Or... If your prefer if you didn't work for TSR where woudl you work?
Reply 12
Original post by High Stakes
Hi. I speak for the people of TSR.

Please make a nicer app for us! Also please allow bigger file sizes for our avatars. I wanna put a cool gif on mine.


As above I personally can't stand working with mobile apps, they're a pain to develop for. But it may well happen at some point, it's been talked about on and off for years.

As for avatars, I wouldn't say it's a good idea to increase the size limit, as it ends up slowing down those poor users stuck on 3G connections. Avatars are one of the bloatiest parts of thread pages.

Original post by Puddles the Monkey
On valentine's day, instead of rep being green can we change it to pink and little hearts float up the screen when you rep someone?! :excited:

Congratualtions on 10 years :woo:


You'll have to convince LJ to design a button for that. Probably won't be too tough. :p: And thanks, it's been a real crazy decade. :woo:

Original post by kka25
How do you manage or ensure that your codes are developed properly?
Do you have a dedicated QA team with you?
For a development work, how many defects do you think you may have once released? :wink:
What do you want in a developer?
What kind of major mistakes have you seen so far whilst doing development work?


We have three QA people at the moment, although one (@jemlou9090) is leaving this week. :sad: Everything going live onto TSR gets examined with a fine-toothed comb, but with the size of the dev team it can be tricky sometimes to keep tabs on everything.

I'm not sure which build we did had the most bugs in it, but I'd guess at one of the early forum redesigns we did. We took over the site from the Canadian company who we used to outsource to, but it was a pretty quick transition and so a lot of knowledge was pieced together by trial and error. :eek:

For a developer, the best thing to be is mindful of where you add code, and try not to add too many nasty hacks or dodgy workarounds. :p:

And probably the biggest mistakes I see regularly are when stuff gets added that doesn't scale properly. TSR's a big site with a lot of users, so it's important everything we build can handle 1000s of users at once. Which is definitely a lot easier said than done.
Original post by Dez


You'll have to convince LJ to design a button for that. Probably won't be too tough. :p: And thanks, it's been a real crazy decade. :woo:.


@LJ can we make this happen? :crazy:

Original post by Puddles the Monkey
On valentine's day, instead of rep being green can we change it to pink and little hearts float up the screen when you rep someone?! :excited:

Congratualtions on 10 years :woo:
Reply 14
Original post by Kvothe the arcane
What Latex distro does this site use? And are there any plans to improve/update it?


The file I looked at calls itself latexrender-ng. It's pretty old now, I don't think there are plans to update it unless there's a problem with the way it works, or any security issues that need fixing of course.

Original post by Captain Jack
Who has been your favourite Eurovision act in the last 10 years?


I would say maNga, who were Turkey's entry back in 2010. That's the only Eurovision act where I've gone on to buy the band's album.


Need to actually get some work done now, but I'll answer more when I get home. :smile:
Hi, Dez,

I use a VPN because I don't like major companies knowing everything about me. In doing so, I trigger a captcha very frequently. Is there any chance that you might implement a caveat to the captcha for accounts that have completed it more than once or that have confirmed their registration with an email, please? There are only so many photos of 'find the street sign' that I am capable of!
(edited 8 years ago)
Reply 16
Original post by Juichiro
I would swear you made a similar thread not that long ago. Anyway:

1. Skills and work experience you had when you left uni
2. How did you get your first dev job?
3. What did your first dev job involve?
4. Why did you leave that job?
5. What's TSR's tech stack?
6. Did you choose it? if not, who did?
7. NET vs Rails vs Node. Which one would you choose for work (if you had a choice) and why?
8. Related to point 2 and 3: tips for someone looking for a first dev job?

Thanks :smile:


1. I had a degree in Mathematics and a couple of small websites I'd built or contributed to, mainly for societies. And the knowedge I'd gotten from years of bedroom coding of course.
2. It was through an agency. They contacted me after I posted my CV somewhere online. Went for the interview and got the offer the next day. :smile:
3. Mainly frontend work. The site I worked on (Mumsnet) was mainly written in Java, which I don't know very much about. So I spruced up their desktop and mobile site and also did a bunch of IT support.
4. I got sick of commuting to London, and I didn't want to move there.
5. At the moment, CloudFlare, HAproxy, Varnish, Apache, PHP 5.5 and vBulletin plus a bundle of third party libraries. Ask me again in a couple months time though, and that list is going to look very different. :wink:
6. Most of the old stack was in place already when we inherited the site from the old outsourcing company. We've made a number of changes and improvements though, and the new stuff we're working on has been chosen very carefully by the team.
7. I've only ever coded in one of those (Node) so I can't really give a useful answer, but I'd probably choose .NET since it's the most mature of the three.
8. It's important to be clear about what you can do, not just what you know. It's easy to pump your CV full of strange acronyms, but that doesn't mean much to the average recruiter. Showing/describing what you've done in past projects is generally more useful. Even if those projects aren't really work related.

Original post by Aph
Who is the most annoying CT :ninja:?

Or... If your prefer if you didn't work for TSR where woudl you work?


There are no annoying members of the CT. :angel: They will of course all be reading this thread attentively so I am definitely being completely truthful here. The tech support team, though, that's another story…

Not really sure where I'd work apart from TSR, unless I can pick something like Chocolate, alcohol and bed tester or President of the multiverse. Or Google, maybe that would be fun. I don't want to work in London again though.

Original post by The Arsonist
Hi, Dez,

I use a VPN because I don't like major companies knowing everything about me. In doing so, I trigger a captcha very frequently. Is there any chance that you might implement a caveat to the captcha for accounts that have completed it more than once or that have confirmed their registration with an email, please? There are only so many photos of 'find the street sign' that I am capable of!


Those CAPTCHAs come from CloudFlare, which doesn't know if you're logged in or not since we don't share any data beyond the HTTP request. Unfortunately I don't think we can help you here without compromising our security, sorry. :no:
Original post by Dez


Not really sure where I'd work apart from TSR, unless I can pick something like Chocolate, alcohol and bed tester or President of the multiverse. Or Google, maybe that would be fun. I don't want to work in London again though.


*Dez's boss reads the bolded line and smiles approvingly*
*Dez's colleagues laugh out loud because they know it's not 100% true*
When are we getting the new and improved TSR app? Improved being a misnomer since it was never good to begin with :smile:
Original post by Dez
Today marks exactly 10 years since I first joined the site. So, as is the current style, I thought I'd make a thread about it. Ask me anything, and I'll answer as best as I can. :smile: :blah:


Is there ever going to be like an Instant messaging feature or private chatroom thing on TSR?

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