!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

Pro tip - Infect your computer with small viruses to build its immune system.
Kinda shitty tip

"sudo !!" Will rerun your last command with sudo privileges in a Linux environment.

You're welcome.

Pro Tip: You can drastically reduce keystrokes in any editor by using your brain before typing.

First date tip: Don't tell her that you prefer back-end over front-end. Programming is apparently "the most perverted thing in the world"...

Pro tip:
Decorate your room like a lecture hall so you fall asleep faster

Pro tip: code in binary so it takes less time to compile

Quick linux tip:

If you want to elevate the last terminal command to sudo,

Use:
sudo !!

"!!" copies your last command and places it after sudo

Example in comment.

Little Hack
It annoys me whenever I encounter a website like quora which hides the real content with a overlay and a pop up to sign in. Little do they know I just delete the overlay element from the Dom 😁😁.
Who else does this?

Pro tip: use smaller font in text editor, then the code size is smaller and more optimized.

Random tip:

A Decrementing loop that compares against a zero is faster (even though insignificant on current hardwares)
than an Incrementing loop that compares against a constant/variable.

For example:

for( i = num; i != 0; i -- )

is faster than

for( i = 0; i != num; i ++ )

The difference shows up significantly on resource constrained hardwares such as 8-bit microcontrollers.

More details in comment.

CS teacher tip of the day:

server side input checks and sanitization are always useless. because nowdays all browsers have javascript enabled by default and nobody disables it. so client-side checks are safe.

me: ***WTF!?!***

Startup tip...

Me: double-taps rant to like it
DevRant: "Pro tip: You can double-tap rants to like them"

So as new user I used devrant straight for 6 hours and this happened.
Am I the only one who thinks this helpful tip should be given at 3rd upvote and not 80th?

There's no greater waste of time than laying in bed with your significant other and waiting on them to fall asleep so you can tip toe back to your computer in order to hit a deadline.

Literally my ritual every night.

Pro tip to error messages #1: keep them simple and short

Pro tip to error messages #2: make them make FUCKING SENSE

By playing with Facebook source code in browser, you can enable GIF and Markdown, Tip Jar & many more options in comments.

Happy Holidays!

Pro tip:

Although 'hmm either kill it or if that doesn't work, sacrifice some of its children' is a perfectly valid sentence in the sysadmin world, it's not in public.

😅

Pro tip: stop scrolling on devRant and get back to coding.

We build a backup infrastructure at work to make sure that clients can restore their files and databases themselves when something gets fucked up.

We also have step by step tutorial on how to do this.

Every fucking day we get requests to restore backups.

Mostly used reason is "I'm a technical so I won't understand it".
With all due respect, if you don't understand this and keep asking without even trying, please don't host with us.
Because, if you did as I asked and actually read through the entire article, you would.
In case you're wondering, anytime one of us asks what part they don't understand, that question is simply ignored and they pushing for us restoring it anyways continues.

Sometimes they get angry and want to talk to someone higher up or start complaining that they're paying loads of money already and that it would just take us a second anyways.

If you would read the fucking tutorial/manual instead of trying to eat out your mother's badly shaved pussy and hopefully choke on it while you're at it, you wouldn't come asking us for it.
If you genuinely don't understand this article, feel free to ask but also provide us with cocksucking feedback.

Why do you think you have the right anyways to ask us to do it for free? We maintain the backup infrastructure which definitely isn't cheap but we do it so that you, pubic sniffing weazel, can do this shit on your fucking own.

You're entitled to ask us for help but not for asking us to restore your bullshit for free every freaking time.

Tip: give your parents some condoms. Because that way they hopefully won't reproduce again, we don't need more of you in this universe.

Tip of the day ;-)

Highschool:
Friend asks if he can copy homework, gets a no, steals it and copies anyway.

Uni:
Asks for help, I give a tip or 2, and say that it's on my Github if he wants to look at it. Replies "No thank you, I really want to get this myself".

!rant
WK119
Hey guys.
For you guys that are getting depressed looking for such nice setups, please remember something...
The Facebook effect:
You only see the tip of the Iceberg, the nice things, you can't see all the shit that other people won't show.
Yes, a few have some dream setups, but most of us are lucky to have two monitors or decent hardware...
What counts is that you can work in your machine... And take the posts as Ideas for your own dream setup, when you can afford it.
Mine (Ill show when I clean this shit up) is good enough and took me 2 years to get the minimum when I could afford it.

A lot of people don’t realize low motivation is often the direct result of gratification.

If you’re having motivation issues, start with the following and just see where it gets you:

-Don’t buy things online, go to the store.
-stop watching porn and masturbating (seriously, does whacky shit to your brain)
-start cooking for yourself rather than ordering food.
-walk at least one place a day instead of driving
-only eat when you’re hungry, not just because
-get off social media and leave your phone at home once a day.

I’m not saying these have to become a permanent way of life, but you should try these if you’re having motivation issues to see what happens. All of these things have one thing in common, and that’s that you do very little for a hit of dopamine. By training yourself that dopamine needs work, you will have more energy.

I tried these things and the difference was unbelievable. I perked up significantly in like a week.

I don’t now follow these guidelines like they are the Ten Commandments, but it’s an important thing to learn if shit like this is putting you down. Then when you do some of these things you can appreciate that they are more luxury/indulgence than something to take for granted or without its drawbacks, and practice some level of moderation. They are all addictions, and low motivation is the main way addictions show. Worse, these are addictions that everyone in society is in denial are addictions. Everyone insists that it’s normal to masturbate three times a day. Maybe they’re right, who’s to say? But I would recommend not doing that. It’s an addiction and rattles your brain the same way heroin does.

Think about it. In my company people are very conscious of things like this because that’s what it takes to come to work in tip top shape every day. You have to manage lifestyle and diet if you want your brain to be in shape.

Pro Tip: Act like you know what you're doing even if you have no idea.

There’s a fundamental difference between development and other jobs.

Doctor: Hey! My left arm is hurting and has been swollen for a while, I think it might be sprained. *pays $100*

Taxi Driver: Hey! Can you ride me over to this exact address? Thanks. *pays $20 + tip*

Construction Worker: I’m going to need this exact item in the blueprint built here with these materials. *pays $1000*

Mechanic: This part of my car isn’t working correct and it displays this exact warning. *pays $100*

Developer: Yo I need a cool free website that looks pretty awesome with like rainbows and stuff by tomorrow.

Pro tip: preserve your job by not documenting it.

New rant = Rant.type(['non-dev', 'public transportation']).init()

So i am taking the bus now to see a friend, and this fucking whale woman comes on board with a baby caddy, except, it wasn't for a baby, but for a fucking dog the size of a brick. That already in itself makes me grumble because dogs have fucking legs and there is no fucking real need to carry them around like newborns.... Anyways this woman sits and takes up a lot of space for the 'handicapped' persons for her fucking baby dog... So far no real issue there since people with disabilities hardly get on this bus line. A fzw bus stops later an equally whale black woman gets on the bus, obviously struggling with her size and her caddy filled with groceries...

There is enough room to accomodate the baby caddy and her groceries.
That fucking white whale says to her 'there is no room there, move someplace else'... The black woman stands there in disbelief, and this is the first time i look up, giving the 'the fuck you just say bitch' look to the white whale. I mention there is enough room and the black whale sits carefully next to the dog caddy.

Now the bus takes a sharp turn, the dog caddy tips over due to the g-forces it causes...and inmediately this white whale shouts to the black whale 'fucking retard, don't tip my dog over!' this while the black woman apologises for the fall of the caddy not even being her fault...

This angered me so puch that i rantzd to this woman: 'madam, thzre is such a thing called physics, the bus made a sharp turn and your stupud useless space-wasting dog caddy tipped over bzcause of that. Don't just go accusing people for your own degenerate racist lifestyle. I suggest you hold on to it and apologise to the lady'

She then murmles incomprehensibly and gives a butthurt look, rhe black woman thanks me and tries to remain very quiet on her seat, eventually she gets off

This fucking thing makes me angry to a level i wanna toeturz that whale by peeling off her skin with garden fence metal wiri g, suck the fat out of her body and brain with an industrial vacuum cleaner and put her in the fucking oven baking in her own fat, of course without any anesthetics...

Damnit all to hell!

Also, why on earth do dogs need caddy's? They got perfectly fine legs!

I know, sadist inside

Pro tip: NEVER work when you’re tired, and if you absolutely HAVE to, make sure you do it in your TIRED branch.

Tip: pretty print json file using:

cat file.json | python -m json.tool

Pro Tip: You can also charge your laptop faster by placing it carefully in the microwave and setting the timer for 10 minutes.

If all else fails; jumping off a bridge is also another natural way of preventing you from getting your devices infected

Pro tip: if you encrypt your message with ROT13 twice, the security is also doubled

Quick tip.
Source: FB

Pro tip: when taking a picture of your computer screen, make sure to turn the flash on

New phone, after using double-tap to upvote a rant devRant told me that I can upvote rants by double-tapping. No shit sherlock

I got it tip from someone to download "Enki". And I can only suggest to everyone here to do the same!

*burp* Me..Merry Christmas

I made a thing. It's called Claymore.

It's like lastPass, but with a bomb attached to it.

Its *burp* like, if you're like really paranoid about your passwords, you can just, you can just blow it all up.

Pro-Tip, if you run it on port 1337, it's extra sec-*burp*-ure.

Am I kidding? Maybe. I made this w/ booze, so.

Actual pro tip: don't push only when you are done with code. Always push when you are done with coding session. Minimize the possibility of data loss and always have your code on the server.

My biggest tip to new developers? Embrace your ignorance, don't be embarrassed by it. Let it inspire you to learn as much as you can, let it humble you into asking questions when you're stuck, let it prepare you to change within an industry that is anything but static. Admitting you don't know something isn't a weakness, it's an opportunity 😃

Cool tip.

Tip: Don't reinvent the wheel.

Use APIs

Yes devRant, I know I can double tap to upvote a post, no need to show me the tip the one time I decide to click on the ++ instead!

Git tip: Do not chop the branch you are sitting on.

Pro tip: It is faster and easier to say 'World Wide Web' than it is to say 'WWW'.
You're Welcome!

Kudos to the devrant team for epic response time!
<50min from bug report on Twitter to workaround on prod!

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

I didn’t know there existed a helpful tip #1 😱😱😱

Yaay!! Achievement unlocked: devRant stage 1

Okay, I was relatively long a member on DevRant. I upvotes 449 posts. At about my 150. upvote I accidentally double clicked the rant and I realized that you can upvote by just double clicking. Now on my 450. upvote I get this message. I thought you fixed it?

When designers get the praise for a well running app, it's like waiters and waitresses getting the tip for a very good meal.

Pro tip for all you who struggle to complete your side projects:

Reduce both global warming and global variables.

Tip for devs (esp front end):

Sublime text (and few other inferior editors) has a plugin called "transparency" that allows your editor to be transparent.

Windows 10 powershell consoles can be made transparent.

1) Open browser
2) Open command prompt over it with 75% transparency
3) Open editor over both with 50% transparency.
4) Set editor to fullscreen, no-distraction mode to center the text (Shift+F11 in sublime)

Enjoy coding while constantly viewing the code, the browser and monitoring the cmd prompt at the same time, without having to click Alt+Tab a zillion times.

Christmas.
The only time where computer scientists and other people agree how trees are shaped.
Now we only need to convince them that the tip is in fact the root.

Pro Tip: If you have the opportunity to move out, don't. I am moving out for university and it's the actual worst..

Pro tip: As great as your product is, it's 1000x harder to pitch to my boss when it has a goofy-ass name.

Me: Hey boss, I came across some new software that'll help manage our mission critical database system.
Boss: Oh yeah, what's it called?
Me: WoolySocksDB Enterprise Edition
Boss: 😐... No.

Anyone waiting for tip #1..

All right lad, I'm going to give you a tip, if you want to try and hack someone's cloud account, please, learn how to spell cloud

Prooooo gamer tip!!!

If your computer is overheating and you need to piss, just kill two stones with one bird and piss on the computer.

Brought to you by PBS kids, which is made possible by viewers like you.

Life tip: everything looks good... Until you get it 😇

Pro-Tip: Debugging/Logging with emojis is so much more fun

Pro tip when working on colleague's dirty computer! Even touchpad works!

Pro tip: if you want to day dream at work just open a complicated XML file in your IDE and stare at it intensely any time someone walks past your desk.

Pro tip: never set custom script stuff related to dns server forcing things in a root firewall app if you don't know what you're doing.

How would I know? There's a slight chance that I just went offline for a few days (mobile only) to figure this shit out 😅

All fixed now, though!

Top Tip: Formatting your brain with alcohol regularly helps you clear out unused information.

I once explained to my teacher that i had trouble getting started with programming after a longer break and wondered if he had any smart ways to get into programming again. He smiled and explained that:

"There are no great ways to get into programming, the trick is to never really get out of it".

Best tip I've ever gotten.

CSS tip: Want to make sure something is centered horizontally?

.center{
position:relative;
left:50%;
transform: translate(50%,0);
}

Pro-tip #526:
Do NOT short your power supply.

Pro-tip #2: wear a suit to work twice a week if you want people to take you seriously.

Pro-tip #3: get some sort of hosting and learn to DIY with Linux and no docker. If you know how to properly run your own version control, email, and web server you will be a step ahead of other developers in terms of secondary skills and resume and you’ll have a website and an email address to prove it.

Pro tip: never start a client project for free...

Tip #4 Use a magnet to keep your harddrive clean!

Quick linux tip:

To copy/move multiple files via terminal, use:

cp source/{file1.txt, random.jpg ..} destination/

This comes in handy when your file names do not follow a common naming convention, i.e. when asterisk (*) is not usable.

FOR FUCKS SAKE, CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD!

Today we had some presentations on a class, I was near the projector, so I volunteered to control the presentation flow.

Fast forward three teams, arrives this guy, lets his laptop and and I open it... SMELLS, FUCKING SMELLS BAD. Add to that grease and dirt all over the keyboard... I just pressed the right arrow key with the bare tip of my finger...

It's not that hard to keep your workstation clean. Most of all, odourless.

Fuck you, you motherfucking fuck. How DARE you have the capacity to sell fake fucking chips on Amazon and make me fucking waste hours of my god damn fucking nights trying to program your shitty, lazy-ass implementation of an EEPROM.

I followed the datasheet specs down to the fucking microsecond just to find that nothing would write to the chip, and then spent hours of my goddamn life trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, making myself feel like a fucking failure for not being able to write 1s and 0s to a few pins. Fuck you, fuck you with a giant horse cock with needles on the tip

@dfox

the only thing i really miss on DevRant is a loading bar/circle on images and gifs.
im always there guessing how long it will take to load.

Tip for typing quickly, trust your fingers.

Pro security tip:
Use a very simple password because h4x0rs expect a difficult one so they can't cr4ck yours

Pro tip of the decade found on quora:
How to beat procrastination?
Start by this :" I will start my work in 5...4...3...2...1" and just jump of the place and go to work

Pro Tip: if you're building a developer REST API, don't forget to add a sample response to each endpoint. I don't want to have to test each one when I'm building my integration, I'd rather build my model in one go with the documentation displayed on a second monitor.

FUCK MY IDIOCY!
On the plane,I was bored, so I decided to write an extremely simple program to generate and display a Pascal Triangle. Made the login in under 5 minutes, but for some reason the padding was incorrect for 1 digit numbers.
__I was sitting at an awkward angle relative to my screen and not looking to closely or concentrating__
I debugged for 30 min, ubtil I found the problem:
one of the variables was called "io"
and I accidentally wrote "10".
FUCK ME!

Pro tip: don't confuse variables (or variables with values)!

Database tip of the day:

Spent hours on Amazon's DynamoDB and ultimately found it couldn't do what I wanted, not without a complicated workaround.

Switched to Mongo and had it working in literally under 5 minutes.

Hooray for Mongo 😀

Helpful tip to all you freelancers or those with the authority:

Never let a client dictate anything in how you do your job, no matter how simple.

Even if they ask you to make yourself available at a specific time, don't. Instead, tell them times you have available so they have to work with you.

If you give a client an inch, they will always take a mile.

Pro tip to scrum masters: bringing a scrum suitcase to your sprint meetings is more useful than bringing scrumbags.

Python tip: some python functions have **kwarts (key-word) arguments, that means you can construct your parameter dictionary like so:

kwargs = { 'a':1, 'b':2}

And pass those arguments like so:

function(**kwargs)

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

Office survival tip #1: When in a new office with no kitchen, heat your food with the office heater.

How @JacoKotze and I are heating our food in our new office (no kitchen equipment or microwave yet)

Pro tip for job candidates:
If you push a code challenge to a live hosting service like github pages or S3, don’t give the reviewers a link to the repo!! Instead put the link into the home page and send the reviewer only a link to the live hosted page.

Why?

Because, if you host with github pages, you’re required to use the project path as the domain root. If the reviewer pulls your project and doesn’t bother to read your readme file with the link at the top, he’ll complain that he couldn’t figure out why your project isn’t hosted from the root domain, and he’ll pass on your application.

True story.

Tip for implementing scrum in non-software development teams:

1. Cry

Quick tip for naming stuff: learn some Dutch. Any random word is good for naming an app/website/project/whatever. Examples:
Turtle ----> Schildpad
Beach ---> Strand
Tonight ---> Vanavond
Tasty ---> Lekker
Sandwich ---> Boterham

Music tip for all you nerds out there

Pro tip #1: Get a black and white laser printer with generic ip postscript printing support and never have a printer issue again as long as you live. You can literally not turn it on for a year and then when you do it just works no fuss. True story.

Pro tip #2: “ink jet” is what the devil calls himself when he wants to trick us in to spending our $$ on trash.

Interview tip #420

If you are asked to code a small app @ home, ffs, don't send the interviewer the node_modules folder!

Doing a distribution center job right now just to pay the bills and had to do voice order picking (with a headset and voice commands etc) today. Well, that didn't go ideal:
*girl walks by and gives me a tip/hint*
Me: *puts headset back on*
Headset voice: you've logged off. Truck could not be located by provided ID.

😓😮

I said "fair enough, thanks!" 😐

My personal AWS account just got suspended and it was the most terrifying thing ever.

It's back up now and reactivated once I paid up. Just a bounced payment on an old account caused it but for any of you out there who have this fear this what happens:

1. Amazon email you with reminders every few days.

2. The emails change to give a shut off date.

3. Your account is then locked after that date.

4. If you want imminent attention you have to pay $49 to talk to them.

Bonus tip : go to their billing page on your account, this isn't locked and allows you to pay up without paying the support fee.

Good luck!

Pro-tip to self: Getting syntax errors on your If-Than statements? Try using If-Then instead!

*facepalms at own stupidity*

Pro devRant tip:

Search for "client". Those are some of the best rants.

Pro tip:

Make sure you can RECOVER from your backups.

It's all well and good backing this and that up, but make sure that when the shit really hits the fan you can recover.

I've now 4 days into recovering a raspberry pi that ran:
Pi-hole
Snort
DHCP
VSFTP
Logwatch
Splunk forwarder
Grafana

And serveral other things... I've learnt my lesson

Microsoft seriously hates security, first they do enforce an numer, upper and lowercase combined with a special character.
But then they allow no passwords longer than 16 characters....
After that they complain that "FuckMicrosoft!1" is a password they've seen to often, gee thanks for the brute force tips.

To add insult to injury the first displayed "tip" take a look at the attached image.

Tip: Find the email of a github user.
Github user page > choose a repository > view code > click commits > click on a commit > add .patch at the end of the url.
This shows email adres of github user who did the commit.
Note: does not work with forked repo’s.

Source : Twitter

Even if you unplug the router when Verizon tech support says they are going to run a test on it, they will say everything looks good and is running perfectly anyways.

Also, a tip. They will also try to sell you their newest router. Say you have that one already in every room and the speed is even lower than it was before, and then demand a refund because they sold you defective product. 9 times out of 10 they will unthrottle you instantly.

Coder life pro tip : do not open terminal in public. As people may think you are a terrorist trying to hack the airport. 👍

Tip of monday:

Test your restores, not your backups.

Just got f#@ed by trusting the log, not the restore folder size

Interviewing tip #2: If you're going to lie about what you do at your current job on your resume, remember what lies you put...

Here's a life hack for you.

If you're ever in need of a whiteboard for drawing/sketching, grab a few white a4 paper sheets, a roll of transparent duct tape, tape both sheets together side-by-side. Cover both sheets with tape

et voila! You have yourself a portable & foldable whiteboard!
The more sheets you involve, the bigger the whiteboard will be :)

P.S. It's very handy!!

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

Tip: If you try to show LaTeX to someone and you want to show them examples, don't use the images of your search engine of choice for the examples unless you put "formula" next to it.

My teacher at least understood, lul.

FUCK ADVERTISEMENTS!
NOT JUST ONLINE(there I can use an adblocker), IRL TOO!

GET YOUR SHIT OUT OF MY FACE!
LISTEN TO ME YOU LITTLE MARKETING COCKSUCKERS, IF ANYTHING YOUR ANNOYING BULLSHIT AD MAKES ME AVOID YOUR BURNING PILE OF CRAP YOU PROUDLY CALL "PRODUCT" MORE!
PRO TIP: ANNOYING PEOPLE BY PUSHING AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THEIR FACE IS NOT THE WAY TO MAKE THEM LIKE YOUR COMPANY/PRODUCT!

IF YOU WANT TO CONVINCE ME, DON'T MAKE AN ANNOYING IN YOUR FACE AD(like a fullscreen ad, popup, or giant billboard on a building or beside the road) FULL OF STUPID SHIT YOU DARE TO CALL "MARKETING MATERIAL". Instead how about an unobtrusive ad that shows convincing FACTS(or tech specs) and ARGUMENTS. BUT YOU CAN'T AND WON'T DO THAT BECAUSE YOUR PRODUCT IS A PIECE OF MOIST HORSE SHIT!

I HOPE YOU GO TO HELL, WHERE EVERY SINGLE DAY OF ETERNITY YOU'LL SPEND BEING EXPOSED TO YOUR OWN SHIT MARKETING WHILE BEING FUCKED IN THE ASS BY SATAN WITH A CACTUS!

A few years ago I was working in a startup where the designer was given way too much decisional power (he was friends with the owner).

He had a tendency to keep editing parts of the design during the development phases, so when we had to work on a new big section of the application, before starting the tront-end development, I asked him to confirm that the mockups were final.

He confirmed the design was final and was not going to change.

10 days later, of couse, he sent a new, completely different, set of mockups. The startup owner expected the new design to be implemented without moving the deadline.

(I left that startup shortly after. The issues with the designer were just the tip of the iceberg.
The owner tried to keep a payment hostage to "force" me to sign a new 1 year contract. He backtracked when he thought I was recording the call. I got my payment and left.)

I lost all my data from a terrible accident. By using recovery software over the course of a week (because the computer I had to use to recover it was less than adequate), I managed to recover most data. Upon restoring the data to the SSD, there was numerous corruption issues, strange glitches, etc. I tried running many system recovery tools, repairing the registry, disk check, everything. Today, I could not install Visual Studio Community updates because... it couldn't. It just popped up a blank window and that's it. I tried everything. Eventually, that combined with every other issue I've had, apps not working because of corrupt files and having to reinstall basically everything I've tried to use anyway, I decided to do a clean install.

So I'm waiting for many many many installers, right now. Nanite was only the tip of the ice berg. I guess what I'm trying to say is...

How's everyone doing? :)

First rant.
How do I know the email is from twitter?
Easy, just check for https and if the links *contain* twitter.com. and the browser shows a padlock, its legit!
😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒
I don't like these type of security tips.

Do they don't know SSL can be obtained for free
And twitter.com.somedomain.com can trick people too.

I think Twitter should update there security *tip* in the world where SSL is free and anybody can make a twitter.com sub domain. This can cause some trouble.

So yesterday there was an interesting news story in my country. A man was fined for posession of two pictures containing pornographic depictions of children.
Now that's all great. The interesting part, however, is how the man was caught.
A tip was given from foreign agencies to the law enforcement of my country that the man was storing the pictures on his OneDrive. Not sharing them or anything, simply storing them there.
How the FUCK did the know? Do they monitor everything you put in a fucking private cloud repository? I've never used OneDrive, and now I'll make sure to never use it in the future. Fucking spyware.

Life Hack: don't use alcohol or chemicals, rub off glue residue easily with olive oil / baby oil

Works like a charm and also doesn't break cardboard videogame boxes/ book covers

For the past month my phone has been unlocking really slow. I thought it was just software or the hardware starting to fail.

I finally decided to put my Professional Googling (read: Computer Science) degree to work and instantly found out it was because I had a slow 128gb SD card in it.

Removed it and everything is tip top now.

The brand new tip#1 . Awaiting next any guesses ???

TIP:

1.1.1.1: the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service

I switched to faster DNS,
And believe it or not, it improved my internet speed.

Just add this DNS and you're gonna experience faster browsing

DNS1: 1.1.1.1
DNS2: 1.0.0.1

comment below if you experience it.

Lost half the tip of my thumb to a motorbike chain. Can't code for a month. :(

The boredom is killing me.

Why isn't there a swipe keyboard/decent voice input for programming?

Top tip back for beginners, make sure your dev and live environments are identical.

And do your testing in dev!

Pro tip: comic sans is the most favourite in the web. Always use it!

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

Pro Tip: If you spent all day debugging and shit's still not working, go get yourself an oversized, fully functional enter-key-pillow. Your code will probably still not work, but now you can at least spare your keyboard and smash that enter-key with all your built up rage

Pro tip: make float numbers constant, they might sail away when you're away.

So the football world-cup tip app I'm using with some mates got hit by a DDoS attack yesterday.
The only question I have is who the FUCK DDoS'es a motherfucking tip-app?! What the hell is there to gain?! It doesn't even involve money, just tipping for the hell of it!

There was an issue whilst you were away, we had to make a small css change.. We pushed it into master but it said something about the branch being behind the tip by 50 commits or something. It's okay, we forced it up though and force pushed it to production as well but the site went down.. In the end we had to ftp it up manually but the customer is saying things that were there before now aren't there any more?

I thought you put this "release process" in so things like this wouldn't happen! I think we need to review it as it clearly isn't working.

Quick tip: ! means NOT. So !rant is a post which isn't a rant. !question doesn't indicate that the post is a question, but rather the opposite (and therefore there isn't really a need for that tag). You might also see something like !!rant which is the same as writing rant (that tag is also unnecessary, considering the name of the app)

sudo !!
You're welcome.

Pro Tip: If you're working Tier 1 tech support, before you start reading your script to the caller, be sure to let the caller complete at least one sentence to tell you what steps he's performed and what the error message is vs. what you're thinking it is. That'll save you from a lot of grief with your boss who will ask you why the customer was screaming at you on the call recording to SHUT UP FOR A SECOND SO I CAN FINISH TELLING YOU WHAT THE PROBLEM IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pro Tip: Add a technology that you want to learn to your resume and send it in order to stop procrastinating learning it

Pro tip:
Check your fucking grounds.

(Yet another fried board...)

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

Imagine updating a legacy web app and the code is so bad it physically makes you sick every time you look at it. Tables with over 400 columns, . And don't even get me started on the security issues. Apparently writing "Confidential" on the top of the page is enough security. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. People should get licenced before being allowed to code.

In case you didn't knew:

Devrant doesn't support split screen.
Therefore you can select YouTube as the first split screen app and devRant as second, which sends YouTube to continue playing in background with devRant as a full screen app.

Been listening to music/podcasts while browsing devrant for a while now.

Random Tip (since ppl don't seem to know)

Dark Reader chrome extension
turns everything to dark theme
works on devrant too, although their native dt is better

not sure about firefox

Just a tip I read today :
Don't deploy anything to production this week. So u don't endup debugging during the holiday and abandoning ur friends and family. ..
Happy holidays 🎉

Chef is objectively the best programming language ever
Prove me wrong
Pro tip:
You can't

All of it's code is tasty

Our team talking with a Mr. KnowItAll...

Mr. KIA: What concerns me about this huge system transference is that the devs won't give us the JS scripts files decompiled.
Mr. KIA again: I'm also concerned about Win XP end of support...

Us seeing each other: WTF is going on?!? Where are the hidden funny cameras...

A tip:
If you wanna pretend you know it all...you'll fail...

A humble dev never get humilliated

Pro tip. How to cut down on those pesky support emails? Break the only email link in your app I can find.

Genius.

So I am a restaurant and want a glass of water... But none of the waiters respond. I finally get someone they say OK n leave...

5 mins pass... I'm thinking how I'm not gonna tip bc bad service...

Then 3 ppl come all with a glass of water...

I had once an sql error that took me two days to resolve it.
The error message was a syntax error but I was using an ORM to write my queries (doctrine with php) .I didn't have too much to debug as the code was pretty simple and clear so I got to the point that I convinced myself that this a bug and I'm gonna try to mess around it to avoid it.

Second day late night, something popped up in my mind '' hey what about those reserved words? Could it be the reason? '' aaaaand BINGO the key '' option '' is a fucking reserved word for mysql.

Tip : always check that list before writing your data models (specially if you're a noob like me)

Linux server administration pro tip:
Don't exit visudo via Ctrl c

Heh

Every day I am reminded that some people just refuse to be helped. Today I saw an article in a prominent Facebook WordPress group I belong to. The author was sharing tips on how to improve presentation skills at WordPress conferences. One tip was to ensure no spelling errors exist in your slides. But the article itself, and the author’s bio, had five spelling errors. I pointed that out in the comments. Aaaaaand now I’ve been kicked out of the group.

Pro Tip #12:

If you boot of HDD buy one of the cheap 240 GB SSD and try yourself. Windows finally boots in less than 5000 min.

You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM.

One Pro Tip for all developers :

(in my experience - a short story)

Our team chose agile development. We have items to deliver each sprint.

I was the guy who would always slip in my tasks due to issues that would pop up.
It was due to my own faults, I was less careful and failed to concentrate on one single item when I was working.
I started slipping a lot and my manager started questioning me on my performance. I tried a lot of productivity apps and other methods. Nothing seemed to change my life.

One day, An experienced person in the team said to me,
"Start Going to the gym" and it'll change everything.

I enrolled to the nearest gym and started working out every morning. Had sore arms /legs in the first few days. Nothing seemed to change.

After one week, my work patterns changed. I automatically started to work with a lot of concentration. I still don't know how things changed.
After 2 weeks, everything was completely different.

I was able to complete my sprint tasks in the first few days and started contributing to others work. Got a lot of recognition. My work was recognized a lot and my manager appreciated me.

So this is a real life changer folks.

"start hitting the GYM", and it'll change your life.

Please try it out and tell me how your work patterns change.

Looking at some new dev tools I spotted this gem:

"If install fails, keep trying to install a few times."

Thanks for the tip!

Pro tip: change your password as same as your username, then you only have to remember 1 thing and save more space for your brain.

Never enable Prettier and Beautify at the same time. I wasted many hours on this a few days ago wondering why my formatting is getting fucked every time I save.

Tip #1... What all y'all been waiting for

Pro tip: using enums you can make a type that can be one of two values. Perfect for control structures! #codelikeapro

first off, i think this may be out of scope but either way.

i think along the rants, a tag seperated section for programmer tips could be pretty neat :)

i'll start off, my tip of today would be: if it seems too complex, it probably is.
consider refactoring by splitting into multiple smaller parts or even its own seperate API. :)

Don't forget to drink and eat something!

!Rant
I was just listening to a podcast and they mentioned patreon. Not sure if you two, @dfox and @trogus, thought about creating a patreon page. I would definitely support you guys for the work and time you two put into devrant. Would be awesome to have some method to tip you guys some dollar for a tea ;)

Those who make money off of side program/business/website, what is it and what is your best advice about side hustles?

One month ago I started rewriting some old spaghetti application (not even legacy because it’s not that old) from scratch.

Must admit that I kind of regret that decision. I just could take my time to learn that damn yii2 (that I really don’t like) and refactor all shit there, optimize queries and I would have been finished it by now already.

I am rewriting it in symfony, have everything designed quite well it just time consuming to implement, need to finish it till February and I am drained as fuck.

Even worse part is that I will be switching job soon, and my current company are looking for new developer to change me and of course they interviewing only juniors, who will have no one to guide them and ensure that code they write is good. So it seems quite pointless rewriting it, because after leaving someone will fuckup that codebase anyway.

But yeah, I guess that’s something you only learn in practice, so reminder for my future self (and tip for others): don’t rewrite it - refactor it instead and don’t allow your feelings interfere with your critical decisions.

It's not been my day. I have a laptop with dual boot set up, and wanted to get a bigger Ubuntu partition, next to my Windows 10 one. I kicked Ubuntu off without keeping in mind that yhe grub boot loader comes from there. Now I am being presented with "system bootorder not found" on boot, and whether I can choose an operating system at all seems a matter of chance. I tried to reinstall Ubuntu from a USB drive already, with temporary success - it worked until I rebooted into Windows and then back to Ubuntu again. Now it's back to square one. Does anyone have a tip how to permanently fix this?

A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.

Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}

Range of excuses

- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.

On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..

"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."

I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.

Pro tip: how to reply to more than one person
1) click reply
2) close the reply by pressing the x button in the upper left hand corner.
3) click reply button of another person. Their name should now be added
4) Reference a Null Pointer
5) Profit?

Damn devrant just gave me a "helpful tip" but my anti-ad reflexes kicked and before I realized it was closed. Does someone knows what does it say?

Pro tip: when recompiling code there are no miracles. If garbage goes in, garbage comes out.

I hate having no inspiration, no good ideas and just feeling unmotivated. I have not came up with anything good in 1 year now so i just sit around rehearsing the function s i already know. If anyone has a good tip for coming up with ideas. Please let me know :)

TLDR I never get good ideas. Plz help.

Top tip
Don't use two text editors at once.

Darkest client description.

With a gift since birth, if you answer this riddle: Who I be?
The fetus of a demon,
Semen from the tip.
Of the penis I'm the only thing
That you see when you're dreaming,
Armageddon and aftermath
This may blog in paragraphs.
Sit on a throne, full of X's and bones
Blowing smoke and I laugh.
Turning sinners like you,
Into my personal acid tabs.
Let me put you up on game,
I've been shot, burned, and stabbed, and still ain't deceased,
I carry the mark of the beast
Now can you tell me
Who the fuck I be?
Client, as the guyreplies
Wine, red wine was the color of his eyes
Coughing a lot of blood like Piru, but he slowly dies
As his eyes close shut, in prison was his eternal life

Realisation of the client being devil.

!rant
Someone got a tip how to start contributing to open source projects? I really want to spend some time to help out but I have some problems finding something small to begin with. It seems that everything i find needs some kind of specialist know how.
So my plan is to start with some small things to work myself up to bigger projects

Thanks :)

!rant
If you own an Android phone and use a Linux based distro on your laptop/PC then you should totally check out KDE Connect!

Having a complete front end and back end application where the frontend is designed to look as simple as possible.

A new potential customer wants to have our app and listens to a designer bragging that its just replacing 2 fields.

After a while our manager comes by and mentioned that everything needs to be done within a few weeks....

All devs lose their mind since in the backend we need to have like 8 external sources to connect and hundreds of business rules to implement.

How a single designer ruined the year for 7 devs....

I have three words for all of us who still use CDs/DVDs,
* paper towel
* toothpaste

I need to setup a Windows Server with an AD (and therefore an own domain) that can be reached from a Linux host for a test environment... Holy crap I totally forgot what a huge pain in the ass that crap is!

Pro Tip: If youre connected to a Server via VPN and RDP and you create a domain and subsequently get logged out from the server, you're fucked.

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉

Dark theme tip for windows users

Use magnifying glass set it to 100% then options invert colors. You'll get everything dark themed now but no missing stuff like you would get from a high contrast dark theme.

Tabs, or No Tabs? I did the same as this commentor 2 years ago. I can code so quick now because of this simple switch. Here's why:

(source, Laracasts.com)

Ben Smith
"I think the most beneficial tip was to do away with tabs. Although it took a while to get used to and on many occasions in the first few days I almost switched them back on, it has done wonders for my workflow.

I find it keeps my brain more engaged with the task at hand due to keeping the editor (and my mind) clutter free. Before when I had to refer to a class, I would have opened it in a new tab and then I might have left it open to make it easier to get to again. This would quickly result in a bar full of tabs and navigation around the editor would become slow and my brain would get bogged down keeping track of what was open and which tab it was in. With the removal of the tab bar I'm now able to keep only the key information in my mind and with the ability to quickly switch between recently opened files, I find I haven't lost any of the speed which I initially thought I might.

In fact this is something I have noticed in all areas of writing code, the more proficient I have become with an editor the better the code I have been writing. Any time spent actually writing your code is time in which your brain is disconnected from the problem you are trying to solve. The quicker you are able to implement your ideas in code, the smaller the disconnect becomes. For example, I have recently been learning how to do unit testing and to do so I have been rewriting an old project with tests included. The ability to so quickly refactor has meant that whereas before I might have taken 30 seconds shuffling code around, now I can spend maybe 5 seconds allowing my mind to focus much better on how best to refactor, not on the actual process of doing so."

jeff_way Mod
"Yeah - it takes a little while to get used to the idea of having no tabs. But, I wouldn't go back at this point. It's all about forcing yourself into a faster workflow. If you keep the tabs and the sidebar open, you won't use the keyboard."