I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

The monsters live among us

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

I am currently working for a client who have all their data in Google Sheets and Drive. I had to write code to fetch that data and it's painful to query that data.
I can definitely relate with this.

PS: Their last year revenue was over US$2 Bn and one of their sibling company is among Top IT companies in the country.

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

This actually happened today

Colleague: Hey man I think there's a problem with my computer.

Me: Alright, I'll check it out.

(I go to his desk and find that his screen was turned off)

Colleague: It just suddenly turned off.

Me: (presses a random key on his keyboard)

(Screen lights up)

NaNaNaNaNaNaN BATMAN!

Found in one of our internal version control tools today. The Dark Knight is among us.

When I was studying OOP our teacher instructed us to submit a project at the end of semester. Me and my friend worked hard and enthusiastically and finished our first game in C++ (Ping Pong). We were very excited because we had put so much effort into it that we were 100% sure that our project will be the best among all. At the end of semester, turned out our teacher does not have much time to evaluate our projects, so instead he announced a motherfucking MCQ's quiz. Everyone got really really happy but I was thinking of multiple ways I could kill that bastard.

For the Germans among us. Found it at the Dortmund train station today. At least the syntax is right.

One of my friend at college asked me why her computer is running slow even when she is running only chrome.

Me: how much memory does it have?
Her: 1TB.
Me (somewhat confused): no no I meant RAM.
Her: yeah yeah it's one TB. I read the specifications of the laptop.
Me: *in my mind, fucking read it again* please read it again. You must have misread it.
Her( grinning face ): alright.

Guess who didn't talk to me for a week. 😂

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

AmongUs gonna be crazy...

My colleges and I were talking about salaries in our company. Our team as about 10 members. Many of us are receiving interesting offers from other companies, and we concluded that we were being underpaid.

In this life, unless you ask to, no boss will raise you, even if you put some extra effort and work the shit out of you, to bring that profit, new client or something else good to the company.

Nobody was interested in talking directly about that to our manager. Just a side note, our manager is an awesome senior developer and a very nice guy. It shouldn't be too hard to talk about this issue to him.

I waited until our annual performance and salary revision to talk about it. Everyday our team talks about this. Everyone is going crazy.

So I went straight to the point, during this meeting with our manager, and said that we needed to be raised. All of us, because other companies were offering much better salaries.

He said to me: "Take this paper, write down what value should every one receive, including myself."

I took this opportunity and put down the values, raising about 600€ for each one.
I looked at it and said: "This looks ok. I'll will ask your colleagues to do the same task. Wait here."

So he went and requested everyone to do the same thing, without explaining why.

Guess what happened? Some mother fuckers actually cut on others salaries, instead of raising everyone equally.

Anyway the manager said he would show that to the CEO, and maybe something would happen.

We were all raised in the values I said so, because the CEO want us to be among the companies that pay the most.

After the backstabbing, no one ever talked about that. Except for 3 good fellow developers, that thanked me for my initiative.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

!dev && !rant

My thoughts go out to all the french people among us, Notre Dame was such a beautiful cathedral.

Been there once myself a few years back, glad I managed to see it before it burnt down.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

Have no words for this guy.

I await the day, when @dfox and @trogus hire someone. There will be some pretty huge competition among us devranters.

!rant

Despite all the great technology we have available to us, I still find a pencil and a sheet of paper to be among my most useful programming and debugging tools.

Bought an ebook that turned out to be a .DRM file
...that only worked with that publisher's Android app
......that only works with Android versions < 6.0 (I use Android 9)
Tried it anyway, which among incompatibility issues, was raising a certificate error. I contacted the publisher about it
..."sorry, the author did not give us permission to sell this. You can have your money back"

What
Why are you even advertising it on your website as a publisher then??

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

A friend and a co-worker who prefers loneliness and interact only required.
Comes to office morning, connects to WiFi, looks at the mobile, keeps scrolling and laughs for an hour(quite in nature). This is what his been doing since month.
Curiosity among colleagues, we took his phone and found neither WhatsApp, nor Facebook and not even 9gag. His browser history had all dev problems googled..
Then, the day came, when we asked to him and the reply was...
DEVRANT(heard by all for the first time)..
Now many of us into devrant busy reading, ranting and laughing.
The outsiders unaware of such app might look at us think weird.. perspective and awareness matters..

My mom’s not too great with tech

she’s the kind of person who thinks I’m hacking when I use a terminal

My brother is teaching her to play among us, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen

Agreed to work on a mobile app project on Android. No contract signed, just was given what the client wanted from this sub-contractor.

No specific details given, had to figure out a lot of the minute details of how they wanted the application to behave. We would deliver a working part of the product before getting a % of the pay. We charged $30 /hr on a mobile app, low as heck.

It was me and another developer, neither of us had any contact with the clients to ask questions, all questions had to go through the sub-contractor. Many arguments and months later we find that what they're asking for only a phone manufacturer can do. Sub-contractor blames us for not doing our "research" when she/he was the only one able to contact the client to get requirements.

Sub-contractor wanted us to refund money. We declined but offered solutions.

Sub-contractor goes to client and manages to get approval of what we were able to do. Finally a light in this dark tunnel spanning 7 months.

On the day of releasing to the client the finished app, we get notification from Google that the app won't be published due to a recent policy change that came into effect in January. WTF.

Go back to sub-contractor, tell the bad news. Once again he/she says it's our fault for not doing the "research". Yeah as if we knew what Google is going to change. Asks for paid money back. We refuse.

We lastly suggested that we remove what Google wants removed on the app and release it that way.

We had billed 300 hours cumulative divided among 3 people (including the sub-contractor who didn't appear to do anything), and just 2 months of development. It's been 7 months and we were only paid for 240 hours, the rest was unpaid, and the sub-contractor still wants to make us give it back. /rant

A lot of online games (mainstream) tend to make me kind of angry or stressed. Lots of either blatantly stupid or negative players kill the fun.

A few days ago I've startet to see videos about "Among Us". It's on a big hype right now and their machmaking servers must be glowing.
Well, this game is fucking awesome and it makes me really happy! 😊
Nothing beats a 30 minute game of lying, betrayal, teamwork and good old 30'000 IQ big-brain detective work.
I think it's a great execise for remembering stuff.
You remember colors, who's said what and who faked or did which task. And the hardest part is, even if you fucking saw the killer, you have to present the facts in a way that people believe you.
Each round is unique and full of riddles.

Yeah, I just wanted to say: Fucking great game 😄

Are we all victims of self-inflicted poor posture? Or are there gods among us?

I used to work on a production management team, whose job was, among other things, safeguarding access to production. Dev teams would send us requests all the time to, "run a quick SQL script."

Invariably, the SQL would include, "SELECT * FROM db_config."

We would push the tickets back, and the devs would call us, enraged. I learned pretty quickly that they didn't have any real interest in dev, test, or staging environments, and just wanted to do everything in prod, and see if it works.

But they would give up their protests pretty fast when I offered to let them speak to a manager when they were upset I wouldn't run their SQL.

We are a web developer team of 4 people. The system we manage is huge because it's a huge organization.

We use php.

Requirements grow rapidly and debugging became a nightmare. So we decided to move from procedural to OOP to ease it a bit.

And we have this one guy in our team (joined recently) who doesn't understand the benefits of following OOP. He is the one who manages most side projects among us too.

We have tried hard to convince him and now we have almost given up.

So I am asking you guys, please give me some ideas of how we could convince him to learn and follow OOP.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Do you guys have private chat community among your workmates?

Here at the company in working in, we have an official WhatsApp group created by our boss. That group is practically dead and boss is the only guy who occasionally posts anything. That is expected.

Then we have another WhatsApp group among us employees and boss or someone of that level is not invited in it. It's pretty active and fun group.

Then we have guys only group which is intended for guy talk and nsfw happens to be a part of it. Nothing surprising about that.

Similarly, girls also have their own exclusive group for their own stuffs.

I think it's inevitable and customary that such chat groups would be formed among workmates or classmates.

Anyway Just wondering, is this case same for you?... esp for people in US?

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

(This happened a few days ago:)
First day on the job, last session of debriefing, HR comes to explain us some company policies.
Among them, they want us to fill in our working hours using a smartphone app (Android & iOS only).
I raise my hand and I ask them what can I do, since I have a Windows Phone.
HR lady's face is striken with sheer terror. Since then, I'm known as the "Windows Phone Guy"... 😁
I'm more than proud of myself. 🙂

P.S. We also got some cool Windows tablet to use during our training period...

There was this random image on devRant.
Yepp, it is Brainfuck once again.
For the bored devs among us and for the ones who seek a challenge to learn and have fun... here it is. Solve it on paper like I did in the first comment.

!dev

Playing Among Us just reminds me how absolutely insanely stupid the general public is.

Bugs among us ...

you know how every film awards ceremony has a dead people section where they play a video showing the pictures of the newly deceased but stylized like as if they perished in battle, like sepia+zoom out?

anyhow someone should edit a video like that for devrant users that deleted their accounts.

i browsed my posts yesterday and noticed several users that aren’t among us anymore.
(cue gregorian chant) may you rest from idiot managers and idiot client.

Hi my dear fellow coders, I have a small request for you.

If you are among those coders who are working on microchipping people / quantum dot something, tracking people, classifying people, AI, ML or any other such software which is going to harm or cage us or take away our freedom. Please stop doing so.

Why I came out with this rant?
I myself am working on a covid-19 screening app which would rate people based on symptoms and if they seem high risk they would not be allowed to enter unless they do a covid-19 test. I am tracking their movement and the requirement is to restrict people’s movement.
My conscience says that this is incorrect and and I should not be a part of such things which take away the freedom and liberty of people.
I am stopping it now.

Storytime. Go watch social dilemma on netflix NOW. You might realize how much of hacked are you in terms of generating revenue for tech companies.

Ads have been the primary source of business for every web player. those weird sayings "ïf you are not paying the product, you are the product" are true but vague. Its all simple maths. if you are scrolling on your feed, and an add pops up, and you have ANY sort of interaction with it, like slowing your scroll, swiping across its items, clicking it, viewing its comments etc, then at least one of the parties involved achieved success and generated revenue. And that party would be the one responsible for making this behavior true for millions of users and billions of ads.

social media in a gist: "We are going to give a customized version of our product to every úser, so as to change the mindset of this person towards some stuff because we are getting paid for that"

What we are losing is tremendous when studied in terms of behaviors and psychology. we are becoming addicts. addicts to those continuous scrolls, those new posts when we make a swipe up gesture, those notification pings, these nonsense recommendations that are remotely connected to our interests . No matter how much tired you are and want a sweet death like sleep, a simple "PINGG" and you wanna go back to see what is it about.

Those bell icons. Those are the fucking worst. a collection of all the notifications that will catch the center of user's attention. User hates the red number on its bar , so let's fill it with more and more notifs than required. I bet the upcoming decade will see ads in the notification bar too. those big fanged Faang giants are just waiting on one another to see who tries it out first.

Social media has shown to make young gens much more depressed fragile , nd less comfortable in taking risks fearing the backlash. the rates of getting a driver's license are decreasing while the rates of suicides and self harm among teens is increasing.Real dates are now decreasing while the viewership of porn industry is staggering. even the parents or old gens which are not much into social media are getting effected by this, because the children are transferring their fears of social media interaction to the whole family environment.

And you know who is going to be the next big player in terms of using a mass manipulating tool for commercial benefits? News and Journalism industry. And THAT WOULD BE HORRIBLE! Imagine someone paying news channels to target people with certain beliefs and presenting news in a biased manner as opposed to rational manners

social media is one of the best tools of persuasion. and in the hands of a dictator or a cult, it is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. We think that recommendation Algorithms are designed to help us gain more knowledge as they are gonna recommend us similar content. but what these algorithms are doing is to move our attentions pan from something that we are interested in to something which is commercially profitable, in the common interest of a large group and which we might be interested in too. i can think of a million times when i went from watching college subject lectures to cat videos

We have now 4 types of political deviations : the people who are absolute supporters of the ruling party, the people who are absolute supporters of the opposition party, the critics and propaganda community which throws dirt at both and the people who are neutral and not inclined to anywhere. the propaganda community consists of social media, tools and content maker which could easily flood the streams of everyone else with the beliefs they want / are paid to and their major target is to move the natural bias of un-inclined people in a particular direction. and this is wrong, it is a wrong thing to disrupt a natural balance for personal benefits, being treated like zombies

A network provider has tons of data about us... its transferring the freaking packets of our voices and images. but it is governed by the national laws to not use them in wrongful ways. but the software industry have no laws for any kind of regulation. they can hoard as much data as they want, use it in whatever ways they want and yet call themselves as "self regulated" by paying shit tonnes of bribes.
The need to be controlled, come under government jurisdiction. taxes should be enforced on how much data they can collect as they have the power to undermine the whole democratic systems using their tools and data.

The only question that is left asking is : how to not get affected with this continuous hacking while being in this industry itself? How do i make money off this 2 edged sword that is technology without getting cut myself? How to not being a mindless zombie for these giants trying to make everyone a small node of their massive eco system?

For the Germans among us:
Do not you think that this is a lot of request for anyone who wants to do an apprenticeship at 1und1?

What else do these bloody ass cocksuckers want?
It is fucking called apprenticeship for a reason.

The temporary friends you meet in "Among Us" makes the game even more charming. Many players are overly aggressive assholes then you meet that one player who's into the childish shit you are into. Hiding behind a box, standing on top of each other, celebrating with party or flamingo hats then boom, one of you disconnects.

CallMeKevin had three episodes where he always had that one random homie. He didn't find them ever again. There was a time he was an impostor and he proved it to that same "friend" he just met in that lobby a few minutes ago by getting into a vent in front of him. In every emergency meeting, the guy vouched for his innocence and the impostors won even though the homie was a crewmate.

I'm rambling. I just like how the game was designed. Of course, there are far more people who lose their shit for someone lying when that's literally what the game is about. Users will always be dumb no matter what.

HELL YEAH! First day into the vacation and after checking the mails, I see that I have a new job offer from a company I have applied for. It is not the company with the highest priority on my list, but it is still cool to have them inviting me for a talk that fast.

Btw. I have a question to the experienced job switchers among us (I do not mean job switchers in a bad way).
What do you guys set your priorities on when it comes to joining a company? Do you have any tips for people who want to join a company in a general view? What NO-GOs can you give to us? Thanks.

YAAAY,
finished my first small project today!
It was the final project of my semester in coding and because coding isn't the main focus of my studies there's not much expected from us - new Date, sorting a list and using local storage were among the more 'complicated' things we learned...
So most of my mates just develop/design a small portfolio website or something but my team (2 others and me) wanted to do a little more so we built a progressive web app, complete with service worker for offline functionality and so on, that can take pictures using your camera, save them to IndexedDB, display only the images the currently logged in user actually took and much more... and today is the day all bugs (that we found...) are finally ironed out!
Now I know that still is just the very beginning but now I want to learn mooooore!
Am happy, had to rant. :D

Here's something I just remembered and wish I hadn't. During my senior year in the horrifyingly fucked up abyss of despair that is the "tech" oriented highschool I wasted my teens to attend, we had two programming teachers.

You might ask why the fuck, well the system is corrupt and a smalltable of serial pedophiles thinks kids are more productive if you make them go to school two times a day. Eh, just let 'em off for about hour and a half in-between uninterrupted bouts of twenty-four hundred minutes of classroom torture so they can eat, jerkoff and take a shit, not necessarily in that order.

So you spend four hours of your day listening to someone who doesn't even know what a computer is go on about fucking ethics in technology like anyone gives a shit, then you're free to have lunch and smoke some crack, and then you're back in school, but this time you're on the lab/workshop.

Oh, and there you get to do cool stuff, right? Yeah, if by "do cool stuff" you mean get electrocuted and fingernails hammered in, we do not care about student safety that is our trademark and all fucking rights reserved. Charming as shit.

Anyhoo, fastforward to senior year and I'm in the kvnsolerat squad pretty much not giving a fuck anymore as the disconnect between the teachers themselves is so inexcusably ridiculous it more than deserves the full contempt of every student.

We have two programming teachers as I said,

one "teaches" us theory during the first run: he's barely a few years older than us and is asking we learn sockets on our own.

The other is in the lab, she's older than hair gel and I hope has already died in some extremelly painful way, bitch has taught NOTHING but html for the last THIRTEEN FUCKING YEARS

Now I'm okay with this <shit>and this</shit> as I find it charming and all but why in the name of fuck am I even bothering showing up to school if the classroom guy teaches no fucking theory and the lab crone doesn't even care to know what theory we should be putting into practice? DROPPING THE FUCK OUT and skipping universities altogether seems like an EXCELLENT idea right now. I'm game!

A decade later, I awake to a minor bleed coming out my fucking dick and I'm still not as fazed by that as I am by the tenebrous memories of these useless fucking morons sucking the life out my teenage self for no fucking reason. I wake late at night, shambling, pale, sweating, not for the blood that drips from the tip of my cock, but for the utter disgust I feel at the thought of these bullshit educational institutions.

Let me repeat this. One guy, ASKING us to learn about sockets, ON OUR OWN, and that's what goes in the fucking exam. But we don't have the time to study because we then go to the lab, where we don't get to learn about sockets, WE'RE STILL MAKING SOME FUCKING KAWAII WEB PAGES FOR THE LOCAL VETERINARIAN. GENIUS. FUCKING 10/10. SYNERGY.

And you know what hurts me the most? Bumbling dumbfuck that I am, I WAS AMONG THE BEST OF MY CLASS. I WAS THE KID TEACHING THE OTHER KIDS. I LOVE PROGRAMMING RIGHT NOW AND I LOVED IT BACK THEN. I was INTERESTED in learning MORE and they taught me FUCKING NOTHING. Worst of all, DIDN'T EVEN GIVE ME FREE TIME SO I COULD LEARN ON MY OWN. THESE kinds of "TEACHERS" are the SHITSTAINS on the curtain! I DONT WANT THEM FIRED, I WANT THEM DEAD.

THIS IS LONG, NONSENSICAL AND I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT THE PUNCHLINE IS SUPPOSED TO BE IM JUST RABID. They FUCKED me! I was FUCKED by PROFESSIONAL assholes! AND I CANNOT WASH AWAY THIS MEMORY. FUUUUUK

But WAIT. I can go visit whenever schools open up... play nice... gain their trust... show them all the crazy stuff I've built... get 'em slowly on my side... make them like me... make them think highly of me... respect my goddamn beaten-up, washed-up and traumatized brains... then SLAP THEM SQUARE IN THE FUCKING JAW WITH ALL THE BULLSHIT THEY PUT ME THROUGH. DENOUNCE THEM PUBLICLY. FLOG THEIR MOTHER FUCKING BUTTCHEEKS TILL THEY ASK FOR FORGIVENESS. I'LL TAKE A GOOD FUCKING SHIT RIGHT ON THEIR MOUTHS AND THEN CUM ON THEIR FACES AS THEY DIE. MY VENGEANCE SHALL BE COMPLETE.

I THINK I'VE LOST IT AND I HAVE NO IDEA IF ANY OF THIS MAKES SENSE BUT I FEEL BAD DISCARDING IT SO I'LL JUST CLICK POST LIKE A RETARD. TA-TA

!dev

Nothing like a quick game of Among Us to reassure your disappointment in the human race.

It would be very cool to have a wrong random username showing. But yeah a lot of extra work for an April fool's prank 😁

BTW who has 10101010? Can we do a viral binary hunt thingy among us and tag the person here?

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

Today I read a comment on devRant about somebody asking what 1337 means. I think most of us know (almost trivial, maybe?), but what is really great is that so many people replied explaining what it means. Some replies were awesome, some were creative, some were just a basic answer to the question.

But none were hateful. ❤️

DevRant is a place for awesome people like you who understand that every one of us doesn't know something every day. That's developer life. That's devRant life too! The other day I told a senior developer about a Haskell project of mine and he asked: 'What is Haskell?' I was impressed, but it taught me a lot.

On devRant I see no troll comments like 'omfg fucking retard, you must be a faggot and live in a dumpster', which are common on the www nowadays and could have been found under a question like 'what is 1337?'. But not here. And this, while I see the occasional swearing in rants, but never at other members.

So thank you for just being normal people among other normal people. We swear at each other's fugly code sometimes, but we are a creative bunch of smart asses that stay classy at it.

👊

My university had a Programming Fundamentals course in the first semester and we got assigned this grumpy lady who demanded respect and would always claim she was the best at programming among her colleagues, had an obnoxiously snobbish tone and had a habit of forcing unneeded nonsensical sarcasm everytime one of us stepped up to ask her a question.

She taught C++ and I'm not saying she didn't know her stuff or anything; I respected her regardless (because she was my teacher), but she would mix up C classes in and insist that that was the right way to do it and had no consistent programming style.

Once she got so fed up with our class that just to prove her point that we're all dumb and worthless (she hated us a lot, yeah) that she started explaining binary trees and recursion out of the blue and gave us assignments for them... even though they weren't going to be covered that week. It soon became a shitfest, to be honest.

But on the plus side, because I didn't wanna listen to her lectures I pulled two all-nighters and covered the semester's worth of C++ and started napping in a corner in her class. She never had personal beef with me so I was thankful for that but her being the way she was helped me learn C++ with more motivation and vigor than I normally would have and also let me earn some change because my classmates couldn't understand her classes and wanted me to explain whatever she covered.

I'm not good in doing presentations and I'm not sure if it is a common style or technique that to engage your audience, you need to ask a show of hands if they know about something..

I attended a "meeting/workshop" and the presenter just kept on asking who among us knows blah, have read blah, have seen blah, who doesn't know blah blah blah.

Why ask us to raise our hands? Are u conducting a survey? For those who raised their hands did u feel a sense of belongingness? For that one guy who raised his hand he was bullied.

I don't understand why ask ppl to raise their hands? For what?

If u want to share info then just deliver the message. Full stop. Don't make it embarrassing for the rest of us.

Hey ya'll back with another college boi question.

I want to develop a web server akin to that of jackbox/among us. Where each session has like an 'ABCXYZ' style code, and i assume are using TCP sockets on the back end.

I'll be writing in Go cause I <3 Go and its a chad language. Anywho, am i supposed to spin up a new websocket server each time someone wants to make a room? Or do i have one websocket server and some sort of map of rooms.

gameRooms := map['id_string']clients

Anyone have any suggestions for this?

Alright, it's before our midterms in second year PU. Our teacher tells us to teach an entire chapter on databases ourselves and splits us up into groups to teach parts of it. This isn't uncommon. In our college some teachers would give out printed notes written by themselves for particular chapters.
Our CS teacher tells us to write our own printed notes for the DB chapter and distribution among ourselves and assign the task to the same groups. Not many of us refer printed notes anyway (especially CS) so we just copy out stuff from our textbook and put in a Word document we're supposed to submit to him...
Goddammit ... The guy takes the file and then goes full fucking retard. Forces everyone to PAY FOR A COPY OF THE NOTES WE FUCKING WROTE and tells the class rep to inform if anyone doesn't take a copy. He then tells us that the money is going to the college meal program and if anyone has a problem they can ask him for the receipt.. Donate to the program fine and all but he could have told us before hand and he still forced us to do it and no one ever asked for the receipt because we guessed he was bullshitting us.

!rant

Another day, another weird trend that's come up on devRant. Today it's Light Theme vs Dark Theme. Take your pick and place your bets! 'cause after setting Windows to dark theme, I ain't leavin' it! What about you guys?

So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.

He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.

Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.

Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.

I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized.

So there was this position in our college for part time programming/building a project. Being university students looking for part time work a lot of us applied there.

Finally the person that was selected among all of us was the person who does no work and is completely useless. If you ask her to do something she despite taking a long time doesn't produce any output.

So my question is what did the interviewers see in her that they selected her despite multiple way better people applying.

{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}

- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.

- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.

- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)

- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.

- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it

- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work

- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.

- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.

- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.

- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working

- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.

- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.

- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.

- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call

- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?

To the physicists among us:

I'm in the process of planning a very lightweight mini drone that flies with the help of radio signals that's surrounding it.

I'm targeting 100 MHz.
I calculated the amount of energy (Joules) of it and just when I did change the formula from E=h*f to Power=E/time I realized that time is basically going to be infinite and now I am stuck finding a solution to this.

I can't just use a potential infinite amount of time in this equation and need a workaround.

Any help is appreciated.

Well, not best experience per se, but most memorable one.

So I am accepted to CS program at the university - happy days!

First lecture of the first day of the first semester in the first year...

...It just had to be that guy. He was famous for for his strictness among the faculty as we later found out.

But, the lecture. It's 8.25 am, I am making my way into auditorium, and it's filled with freshmen like me, of course. Instead of cheerful chatter noise I hear literally silence. What the? I catch the glimpse of the blackboard - the professor is there, hard at work writing out some stuff that can't comprehend. Double checked the name of the lecture - computer architecture.

8.30 - so it begins, I remember taking a place along the front rows in order to see more clearly. Professor turns to us and just starts the lecture, saying that he'll introduce himself later at the end and there is no time to waste. OK...

And he just dumps the layout of x86 computer architecture and a mixture of basic ASM jargon on us WITHOUT TURNING TO US FOR LIKE 30 MINS while writing things out on the blackboard.

The he finally turns 180 degrees very quickly, evaluates our expression (I know mine was WTF is this I don't even understand half the words), sighs, turns back and continues with the lecture.

Just wondering if heading to a burnout is common among us.
I had some responsabilities in releasing an application for the humanitarian comunity last year. Quite important if you realise it can help to save lives in Palestine and Syria, so I was very motivated to succeed.
Unfortunately my manager, a former developer, could not admit we needed time to integrate devs, test, etc...
So I ended up chronically lacking sleep, like few ours per day and no sleep the week end.
... and i finaly just jumped on the first other job I saw to make sure I would not fail my life miserably under a train, because life is not worth it when you don't sleep.
Did you or someone near you experienced that?

I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.

My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.

I got my first computer when I was 16.

Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.

Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.

My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.

My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.

They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).

They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.

I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.

Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.

long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"

TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!

Obviously the top item on the table is NN, the "end users" from both sides of the connection on the net are for the saving it, and the middlemen that only own the "cables" want it to be repealed.

We have the solution to end this issue forever. It wont be easy, nor will it be fast.. unless certain "entities" team with us in secrecy. (There's a reason why certain "entities" have stayed silent regarding NN, due to agreements to not get involved due to the risk of backlash. AND if NN is repealed Those Entities cannot fix the problem as their hands are tied to continue to provide content to the end users.) Read between the lines you will understand it will all make sense later.

I will make The Official Public Statement within 24 hours of the FCC Vote. That statement will be how to get involved, help, get us jump started in your area, funding, the ENTIRE details of the plan, goals, and timeline. AS WELL as how to contact us. This will take time and we are not a magic solution that will fix the problem overnight.

We are however THE solution to the underlying problem with ISPs of today. We have been researching for quite a while and digging deep into the entities that have caused us to get where we are now. The further you go digging into 'THEM' the more pissed off you become as you truly realize whats going on and has been on among the ISPs its MUCH deeper than you are being told.

OUR solution will remove all of "them" from the equation completely as well as being faster, and cheaper than the Tier 1 as you wont be paying for the connection or speed, you would be paying for the hardware/overhead cost. AND we will be bringing you closer to the content providers than EVER before.

AND we will be the only solution capable for competing in the current Tier1 Monopoly zones, I promise you they cannot match our plan's price, IF they did it would be only as a loss leader and NOT a sustainable long term solution for those competing with us at are for-profit....

In order for our solution to work, and to keep the internet service non-bias, well non-bias from OUR members :) this will need to be a collective effort, focused one clearly defined vision. WE WILL AND WE MUST ALL set "profits" aside on this as profits in selling nothing other "connection" to the internet has gotten us in the mess we are in now. AND YES we realize profits help maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, BUT that isn't true in this case...Overhead from our view includes those anticipated costs.

Smaller ISPs will need to make a decision, give up profits, become one with us, and be apart of the mission OR they will be left to suffer at the mercy of the ISPs above them setting the cost of bandwidth eventually leading to their demise.

This will happen because we wont be bound by the T1s .... WE would be the "Tier 0" that doesn't exist ;)

This sounds crazy, impossible, BUT its not, it will work WILL happen, regardless of the FCC's vote. as if the FCC choices to keep NN, its only a matter of time till the big lawyers of the ISPs find some loophole, or lobby enough to bring us back to this.

Legistlation is NOT the solution its just a band-aid fix as the cancer continues to grow within.

PLEASE understand that

Until the vote is made, and we release what we are doing, stay put, hang in, it will all be explained later, we are the only true solution.

BIG-ISPs WILL REGRET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE!

What needs to be understood by all is with net neutrality inplace the ability to compete aginst the Tier 1s directly over customers and reinvent the internet to lower or remove costs completely, increase speeds AND expand to underserved/unserved communities ITS NOT POSSIBLE WITH NN

NN REPEAL is the only way to the fixing the problem for good... yes the For profit BIG ISPs will benefit but not forever.. as repealing it opens the doors for outside the box big picture innovators to come in and offer something different, the big ISPs have clearly over looked this small detail being the possibility of a “NonProfit CoOp TIER 1 ISP” entering into the game thru end users and businesses working together as one entity to defeat them... THE FOR PROFIT ISPs over looked this because they are blinded by the profit potential of NN Repeal, never did they consider our option as a possible outcome because no one has attempted it....

We will unite as one

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When I started uni they told us we were going to use Java in programming courses, I get why because it is easy to learn and it can get you a quick start. But at the same time they said, "c# is the standard among the companies in this region". So I am a little confused by this, why not learn the language that we will use WITH the companies cooparating with the uni? (For me it is no problem wether we used c#, c++, java or python, I have experience in all of them but still.... why)