Get ready for the first ever devRant live stream event! @trogus and I will be making an exciting announcement/launch live on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/devrantapp) this Wednesday (October 4th) at 9pm EDT. After the announcement we will also take some questions from devRant users who are watching. The questions can be about the announcement or anything devRant-related in general. We hope to get some fun questions so feel free to ask anything you want.

We look forward to having some fun with our first live stream! If you can't make it, don't worry, the replay will be available on YouTube and we'll likely do some more streams in the future. Please let me know if you have any questions and we hope many of you can join us!

Edit: the stream will be available here once it begins tomorrow: https://youtube.com/watch/... I will also post another announcement rant when we go live!

(Interview for sde-3 position)
(continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/2132431/... )

Interviewer - *opens laptop. Gives a question.* solve this.

Me - *a bit surprised that such questions were being asked on a sde-3 level*
this is the 4th or 5th question from geeksforgeeks, isn't it? I know the answer to this. Do u still want me to solve it?

Interviewer - *not believing me* Yes

Me - okay. Well this *writing down the original solution mentioned on the site* is the verbatim code mentioned on the website, with complexity O(n^2).
However I feel this is not the optimal solution. Let me write a better solution.
*I provide a better solution*
This has a complexity of O(n log n) . What do you think?

Interviewer - Nope. This could be a lot better.

Me - okay. Let me see. Did some minor changes, added some caching (obviously this will have no effect on the base algorithm) etc
How about now?

Interviewer - nope. Still not good.

Me - okay. Can you tell me how to improve it?

Interviewer - no we are not allowed to solve problems for you. It is not our interview, it is yours.

Me - that makes no sense. Interviews are a two way street. I'd very much like to know the optimal answer to this.

Interviewer - okay
*copies down the answer from geeksforgeeks*
This is good

Me - *at first I thought this was a prank or something. *
I just mentioned this answer here.
Then I spent the next 10 minutes providing a BETTER solution.
May I know how yours is better?

Interviewer - this solution has 2-3 loops. Yours has a function calling itself.

Me - that's called divide and conquer using recursion mf!
Anyways let's take an example and do a dry run.

Interviewer - okay

*we do dry run*

Interviewer - oh yes. Yours ran faster. But it will run fast only sometimes.

Me - yes. Each time the algorithm rolls a dice to decide if it should run fast or slow. You have one goddamn awesome weed dealer man.
I got to go. Thank you for meeting me.

I KNEW IT!
(source: https://imgur.com/gallery/1z3yc)

Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".

We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.

It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]

It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.

It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.

And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.

What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.

Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.

1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.

I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.

Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.

First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?

But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.

"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.

Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.

!rant
Fewd! on devrant meetup Nijmegen Jan 4th '20
Referring to https://devrant.com/rants/2341210/...

Been scouting restaurants and cafés last sunday. Nine candidates, from collab spaces, bars to restaurants.

We have a city centre at hand.

Whereas three collab spaces been closed (Sunday) and won't open within our desired times. The 'coffee lovers' is a minimalistic bar at the city's public library, not explicitly offering space for meet ups. And the Honigs' house coffee bar does only serve business hours.

Three remain on my short list:
- Cafe Jos meesterschenkereij
Snacks, beer ( 80+++ brands) and whiskey, very cosy, 15min simple public transports.
- eetcafe goed volk
Vegan food, wine, classy, 15min simple public transports.
- Cafe Faber
Rustical, beer n standards, built for tall peoplere, total city centre.

All three can specially accommodate us that evening.

Anyways. The city is full of bars n stuff.
I'd like to side our choice with a survey (scientifically personal data friendly) :
https://terminplaner4.dfn.de/AMGaFX...

https://codingame.com/leaderboards/...
i got 409th place from 2347 participants total, 12th place from my country and 4th place in selected language (pascal)