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This happened at my previous job where I worked for a dating app. It was at a time where the CEO was trying to turn the dating app into “more than a dating app” by adding tons of social features. We always had “interests” which allowed users to see what interests they had in common with another person, but he wanted to take the social component even further.
So with that, he decided we needed an “activity feed.” The activity feed would show what various Facebook connected users were liking on Facebook, posting on Facebook, etc. On a dating app. Where the majority of the audience was > 50 years old. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and everyone but the CEO knew it was destined for failure before we started building it.
But that’s not the best part. The best part was when we launched the activity feed component. We launched it late on day and went home shortly after. The next morning, we came in, and checked on the activity feed to see what was doing. It was literally all spammers liking porn/sex related stuff on Facebook. It was a complete disaster. All garbage but not just boring garbage - completely obscene garbage.
And just like that, the activity feature came and went in the course of a few days.18 -
I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.
---------- warning long rant ----------
1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.
(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)
First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.
2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.
I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).
When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)
3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(
4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).
5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...
6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.
When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.
I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.
I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.
Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.51 -
I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).
He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.
The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).
Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.
You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.
Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:
- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?4 -
I am about to fire this client.
I can't take any more of this abject fucking stupidity.
I can't take any more sentence fragment responses to detailed questions and thorough responses.
I can't take any more expectations that I deliver consistent metadata and hundreds of pages of documentation, yet no one else has to do the same
I can't take any more rules only applying to/hamstringing me and my team
I can't take any more fucking gross incompetence and grossly undereducated shitfucks that get to send ridiculous bills and have 0 accountability while playing developer
I can't take any more obviously nepotistic and racist hiring that walks back every step of progress we've made in the last 50 years
I can't take not being able to call a spade a spade and being the villain when there's obvious graft occuring at every level
I can't take these old fucks padding their retirements while rendering everyone else contractors and cutting off opportunity for future generations
I can't take how absurdly, blisteringly stupid the business people are, or the fact that one average project managers with a recent PMI cert somehow bills what I do
I'm 100% going to drop dime on these fucks to every regulatory body they are beholden to, their investors, their corporate owners and USCIS, since I've already doxxed the shit out of all of my coworkers that don't remotely qualify for the positions they occupy.5 -
VueJS FTW!
Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.
All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.
I WAS AN IDIOT.
The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.
If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.
7 -
*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*
years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work
faith in humanity restored3 -
This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.
Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%
Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.
I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.
Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.
But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.
Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.
Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.
We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.
basically, make dev rant great again.
No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.15 -
Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
My fucking campus building.
Really. Built a new one in 2017, we started to study there since Oct 2017 til now and lemme tell something: it's shit. My classroom's paint cracked 2 months in. My classroom lacks a projector which is standard for every classroom to have one back in the old campus building. But nooope. No projector for 1.25 years, at least by now compensated by a 50" TV which whoever the fuck installed the thing took the *only* stock HDMI cable. Shitty floor tiling (think r/mildlyinfuriating but worse), shitty toilet that would break down every 2 weeks and "over the top" gymnasium with air ventilation so bad it feels like Hitler's fucking oven every time we got in.2 -
I hate the old people in my company. FUCK THEM!
First I'm telling you a bit about me, so my story makes sense. I'm currently employed as IT-Tecnician in a Helpdesk as 1st & 2nd Level Supporter. I'm working for the current company since 2 years and already sweat too much Blood and Tears for the Old farts.
Now to the Story:
I'm currently planing to make a three year study as IT-Business Engineer, because I was orginally a Real Estate and Account Manager. That is the highest schoolar degree I can currently get in IT with my background. After that I would get the pass for BSc or CAS.
Two years ago when I took the Job I told them, that I would like to start my study in the next two years. Back then they agreed and told me, they will support me.
After that I got a very good reputation in the company and also took part in projects, coded plugins and evaluated requierments for programms. I got still payd with a low Supporter income for my work.
In february this year I told them I want to start my study in May. They boss told me I should do a way lower degree for two years and go into infastructur segment. I told him that my wished degree would be higher and also include infrastructur. Boss told me, that I will need to prostpone my study a third time to autumn.
The reality is, that they want to underpay me as supporter and keep me without a degree. I should keep working on projects, which a high degree tecnician does and gets better payd. In everyway thats unfair and just a hit into my gut. They try to ruin my career and keep me cheap.
The joke is, the boss is over 50 years old and is egostic as fuck. He just wants to profit from my knowledge and wont pay me for it.
I already got the knowledge and just need to have a higher IT degree, so I get payd a fair sum for my work.
My only option is to quit the company or stay as a lowly supporter.
Even my other coworkers asked me, why I'm still a supporter with my knowledge. When I told them my story, they all shugg there heads and told me, I should get the degree.7 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
Time to time I do some Hard- and Software repairs for neighbors and get some little money for it.
My neighbor let's call this one "Bob".
Bob has a new printer and a old one which is over 15 years old.
First: Holy shit 15 years old printer works still. WTF? Is this thing Hulk or what?
He ask me why he can't print a 128 site Doc with pictures in it from the old printer. It always stop at around 50 pages.
I tell him that it has only 32 MB Ram/Flash and can't print more. Before the Doc's were much smaller and could print that, but today you got files with more than 10 MB and on a printer it need's atleast 128 MB Ram to process and print it.
Guess what? One week later he asks me the same questions.
Why don't you print it on your new shiny expensive printer and why do you need still that OFFICE WAR VETERAN OF PRINTER to print it???
Seriously just use the new and better one!! Bob please give that old one a burial. He deservs it!5 -
Shaving with an old-style safety razor just rocks - that metal thing consisting of three pieces where a slotted, double edged razor blade fits in. With the good Russian Astra Platinum blades at 10 cent per piece where a hundred piece pack lasts for years. The whole thing can be fully dismantled and cleaned.
I can't understand why people use this modern overpriced Gillette shit at 2 EUR per piece that you can't even clean, with debris stuck in-between that starts to rot if you use the blade block more than once. Must be brainwashing by ads. Even worse for women who pay 50% extra for the pink version of that unhygienic shit.
Oh, and real shaving soap with a real shaving brush and not the canned aerosol garbage that doesn't really work anyway.8 -
I am a Windows person. I always argue how great it is.
Well, not today.
I was today years old when I learned that you CANNOT uninstall store app via store ;p You need to go to settings / apps and functionality / your app / uninstall
The photo app (Yes the one bundled with win10) doesn't work if you use Hard drive compression AND it is a symlink for OneDrive (So you don't need to keep all photos on the drive). Fucking Paint works without problems.
Email client : If you alt+tab too fast after hitting 'Send email", there is 50% chances that email won't be send. Basiclly you need to hit "send" and wait until you see it in "sent" folder.
Well, as i'm ranting, here for Linux too :
I have a small ubuntu server VM, worked very well for last 6 months. Now "System in read only mode". Fucking apt-get upgrade fucked with something. I don't want to look, so I'll just rebuild a fresh vm.
And macOS should take sometyhing too : Who the fuck decided "enter" is for editing the name of file ?! really !
Well, ALL os are shit, all have downsides, I need my own OS. But I still want AA games... So windows for me.25 -
so I left uni after my PhD and joined a start up where the boss is a Cambridge grad who does coding and is like 50 years old (he never told us the true value), the CTO is very talented and another dev who quickly became my best friend and me doing data science. the 4 of us worked together like friends and the efficiency was fantastic, there's no bureaucracy bullshit or shit boss talks. We built the whole thing from scratch (okay I admit they did most of the building) and to this day, we work just has we have been.
-
Twenty years ago today (I double-checked) my father bought me the Liberty Basic compiler for my 8th birthday, marking what I consider my first foray into programming.
Thanks to that, I'm a tired and moderately happy 50 year old man.
Happy birthday, hobby from hell. :)5 -
I just want to mention some old software from 50 years ago that is running on Voyager 1 and 2 and needs to be maintained and cut due to nuclear power source depletion.
https://popularmechanics.com/space/...2 -
Stories from Gary #000
Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.
So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.
Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.
Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.
I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.
-.-
So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.
"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.
To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.
tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.4 -
So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?
You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.
Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.
In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...
So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.5 -
This always gets me:
Developers complaining that their 4 year old / cheap ass computer is slow.
Get. A. New. One.
It's not that hard.
Here, let me do one for you:
https://computeruniverse.net/en/...
I just went to a site that delivers across Europe, and selected a cheap laptop with a decent CPU and SSD. Short on RAM, sure, and without a Windows License. But you can buy RAM for an additional 50$, and that brings you to a total of 550€, delivery included. And it will WORK. And it will be fast.
It's too expensive?
No, not exactly. Wherever you are in the world, if you can code decently, good enough to have the right to complain about development tools, you are eligible to at least 10$ per hour income as a freelancer across the globe. I've had such opportunities offered to me by many organizations, especially non-profit ones that need cheap employees. I actually was offered more but let's stick to 10$ per hour.
So that's 1600$ per month. Enough to buy 3 such laptops. Oh, taxes, I forgot. So you get 2 laptops. Wait! You need food and everything else. Well if you're in a country where that offer actually makes sense, then it's likely that you can live off of 400$ per month quite well. Maybe 800$ if you need to pay rent.
So that's roughly 1 month of work for a laptop that will make you not waste time on waiting for stuff.
Sweet! 1 Month! What does it get me?
Well assuming that you have no laptop, it gets you A JOB that pays you 1600$ per month.
But if you DO have a laptop, you can sell it for cheap, and benefit from the following:
1. Boot-up time from 30-60 seconds to 10 seconds.
2. Installing software - from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
3. Opening a browser - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
4. Opening an advanced text editor (Atom, VS.Code) - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
5. Searching for a file on your entire hard drive - from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
....
You get the point. Waiting is reduced by several times.
So how much do you really wait when coding?
Well are you compiling? Are you opening a new project and the IDE needs to re-index the files? Are you opening programs like a terminal emulator, browser and such? Are you using virtual machines for dev environments?
Well all of these processes become several times faster. Depending on how often you do it, you'll be saving yourself from 1 hour per day to upto 4 hours per day (my case, where a HDD would be just out of the question).
How much is that time worth? At least 10$ per day. If you're working for 20 days per month, 240 days per year, that's a total of 2400$. And for the life time of that crappy laptop of 2 years, that's 4800$ saved. And that's with hugely conservative numbers. Nobody pays 10$ per hour any more, except if you've just started in the industry. I know because I've been there.
Please, for all that's sacred to you, justify right here, right now, HOW THE FUCK can you not afford to get that 8GB of RAM, that cheap ass SSD for 100$, or even a brand new laptop (hey! it's even portable and has FHD graphics on it!) for 550$.
That's why every time I hear someone who is a professional developer complain that they don't have money for a decent machine, I have to ask: why the fuck are you wasting yours and everyone else's time?!10 -
!rant
I love the first weeks after a job change. It's just like falling in love, everything seems to be perfect until you take off the pink glasses.
Have to wait until I'm assigned a burning project to have a full picture.
Actually I am in a burning project. Deadline in 2 weeks. Doing Bugfixes which do not require in-depth project knowledge, and... It's fine. All a matter of perspective. I also think that project based work suits me more than usual 15y old legacy enterprise shit. And I'm able to switch. From embedded C++ over hardware dev to fullstack .NET (I consider myself as a full-fullstack dev, able to do everything from hardware to frontend).
Topics such as IOT, medical, device engineering, machine learning. Wow.
It's my first company having >50 employees and multiple offices in multiple countries. I used to jump every 2 years from one shitty garage company to another.
Wish me good luck ✌️2 -
Companies try to find young devs, less experienced but more openminded and flexible.. do you think we will still find some cool sobs when we're > 40 || > 50 years old, even if we keep up with new technologies and stuff?
Never thought about it until now..3 -
TLDR;
Couple of years ago when I was leading small team that was aiming to deliver new application for company I worked in we were fighting for bonus during weekend. I told my coworkers that I am at work this weekend and try to meet this impossible deadline and get bonus for it cause I need this money. I don’t expect them to come since I can’t provide them nothing more then free time during work week.
Well they appeared at work.
One of directors tested application on Friday and sent email to ceo that it’s not working pointing around 20 bugs in long message so we won’t get bonus.
We closed around 50-100 bugs during weekend and I responded to email on Monday ( deadline day ) that all of those bugs he mentioned are not present on test environment version and he must tested some very old version.
Ceo called me and we clicked trough first 5 from list in his office and everything worked. I told him that deadline is Today but he refused to give us bonus to not discredit his director but proposed double bonus for squashing couple of minor remaining bugs in next two weeks.
We got this bonus and had a great laugh about it.
I also herd that this director called his qa to tell them it’s impossible of what we did.
Well those were funny times. I was young, earning shitty money and had nothing to lose. -
Cars
I love classic cars because of their simplicity.
I don’t want to remove dozens parts, need computer or call support to fix simple car problem.
Mechanical solutions were good and reliable in some of the old cars so we can still renovate them and use them after 50-60 years, we won’t be able to do it with modern cars so we are in fact producing lots of waste.
Today’s car companies are ripping off their customers by providing overcomplicated solutions that prevent customers to repair a car on their own.
And don’t let me start about proprietary car software and protocols.
That’s a big world problem right now. -
Programming is stressful. I feel like I'm 50 years old already with white hairs. What non technical job have high salary but lesser stress?6
-
I’m thinking of replacing my dev duck with baby yoda.
Btw he’s 50 years old, and I bet his psychic abilities could help me run my code better.
5 -
Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.
Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.
I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.
After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!
After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.
So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.
Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.2 -
so my poor old hp bro is starting to give up on me after 3 years . there are both battery and performance issues. I knew its death was near when i got its keyboard replaced i saw its battery's state 6 months ago. it was fat as me . Now it can't live without the wire for more than 30 mins.
apart from that am getting frustrated with everyday performance of my system. all i open is 50 tabs of chrome and android studio where bitch gradle generates a billion byte sized files at million places and cache folders . (and sometimes a terminal and/or files and/or vscode).
I have decent specs tho i5 7th generation/8gb ddr4 ram/ 2gb nvidea graphics/ 1tb hdd. but still my ubuntu gets stuck everytime i switch between chrome and AS . (maybe i have not made correct swap partitions or maybe there is an issue due to ubuntu/windows dualboot)
what should i do ? I guess i have to spend some shit on a new battery. But apart from that, iwanted to know about performance. how to get a beter performance?
I have heard of solutions like getting an sdd or increasing ram, but am broke af and might not afford a 1tb ssd (yes i do need that much amount of memory, my system is currently at 650 something gb) and about ram i have heard it doesn't offer much improvements. is that true?What should i do?6 -
So I was browsing glassdoor the other day to find out opinions about particular company and out of curiosity I also have check my first company I worked for and OH BOI, old memories that were buried and forgotten long time ago, came back after reading just a few feedbacks.
IT WAS DREADFUL PLACE.
To give a context that company has ~80 written negative feedbacks with 12 years on the market and never exceeding 50-60 employees, while other companies I worked for with ~5k employees, more then 20 years on the market have roughly ~100 written negative feedbacks each. -
From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby
Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.
Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .
Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.
And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.
Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website -
Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.8 -
Trying to figure out how the below code works. Everything is straight forward. The code works as I ran it in qbasic in dos emulator.
But for the life of me I cannot figure out wth cap1 and cap2 are. I debugged the code and saw values being set, but I cannot figure out where the data is coming from. I assume it is somehow related to the function declarations. Been 20 years since I did anything with qbasic. Maybe some other old fogie can tell me what is going on here:
DECLARE FUNCTION integrate (sample, cap, tc)
DECLARE FUNCTION differentiate (sample, cap, tc)
COMMON SHARED accumulator
CONST pi = 3.14159
SCREEN 9: CLS
FOR timeConstant = 10 TO 600 STEP 100
accumulator = 0
FOR a = 0 TO 22 STEP .01
wave = 0
FOR h = 1 TO 10
wave = wave + SIN(a * h) / h
NEXT h
lopass = integrate(wave, cap1, timeConstant)
IF wave > lopass THEN
trigger = 1
ELSE
trigger = 0
END IF
hipass = differentiate(trigger, cap2, 20)
PSET (a * 30, 50 - wave * 20), 15
PSET (a * 30, 50 - lopass * 20), 14
PSET (a * 30, 100 + timeConstant / 4 - trigger * 15), 2
PSET (a * 30, 270 - hipass * 20), 15
NEXT a
NEXT timeConstant
END
FUNCTION differentiate (sample, accumulator, tc) STATIC
fsample = tc
leakage = 1 - EXP(-2 * pi * 1 / fsample)
capAvg = leakage * accumulator
accumulator = accumulator - capAvg + sample
differentiate = sample - capAvg
END FUNCTION
FUNCTION integrate (sample, accumulator, tc) STATIC
fsample = tc
leakage = 1 - EXP(-2 * pi * 1 / fsample)
capAvg = leakage * accumulator
accumulator = accumulator - capAvg + sample
integrate = capAvg
END FUNCTION
The output looks like the image.
10
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