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Me: *listening to some random semi-obscure track on spotify, liking it, add it to playlist*
Come home, girlfriend playing the same track. "Yeah I've had that in my playlist for two weeks now". Our accounts are not linked in any way, and I only use Spotify on a PC at work, while my girlfriend only uses it at home.
It might just be coincidence, or us having similar tastes.
But the issue is that it's getting more and more difficult to know whether me and my girl are spiritually linked unique snowflake soulmates who are so perfectly in sync with each other, or whether an algorithm suggestively linked us both that song based on scraped location and behavior data.
And whether it matters. Maybe it matters. I don't know yet.
In twenty years maybe humans will be unsure whether it was a wonderful coincidence bordering on cosmic fate that you ran into your new love, or whether Google purposefully drove you towards the same lunch cafe at a specific time because it calculated that she was the perfect candidate to strengthen your susceptibility to advertisements over the coming decade.
Malicious AI will not come into lives bearing guns.
It will not instantly take all of our jobs and enslave us.
It will just know you better than you know yourself, it will know everyone around you better than you know them, and it will play incredible mind games. It will not be designed with malicious intent, just perfectly execute on top of the malicious systems we already have, and even arise as an emergent property within new systems.
It will rarely be clearly visible, but you will increasingly say to yourself: "That's odd, I was just thinking about that". It will detect depression from a smile, physical attraction from a glance, reliability from patterns in your voice and illness from the bloodflow in your cheeks.
It will not just make our cars autonomous, it will make our lives autonomous. It will protect us, decide for us, keep revenues and human satisfaction in a "balanced maximized" state, it will make everything feel easy, slightly abuse us, and when one of us suddenly crashes at 140 mph into depression, debt or addiction it will prove impossible to know whether the humans or the algorithms were at fault.
I'm incredibly afraid and excited about the coming 10 years.13 -
This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...
Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]
Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.
[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]
Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.
May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.
[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]
Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.
[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]
Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.
Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.
On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.6 -
I think having the wrong job can really bring down the quality of life.
My friend has to drive two hours each way to get to and from work. That's four hours wasted commuting.. and his job is service desk agent.
What are the consequences, you ask? He never has a spare second to talk to me, he's quickly developing gray hairs and he has no time awareness.
Having the wrong job is unhealthy and results in a cascade of bad side effects.. When most of your day involves work-related things, that's just wrong. There is no Yin-Yang there. I know because my work life is somewhat balanced.12 -
I had to create a c++ dungeon 2d game as University project.
The spec said "a terminal game made with char"
I and my team made a real game with anemies boss, and balanced stat in 15 days with Qt (we asked if can use external libraries)
We got 6/8 point for the project cuz we forgot to put protected/private the attribute of the player...3 -
Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:
People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.
The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).
Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.
Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.
Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.
I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.
I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.
I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).26 -
I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.
Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.
Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.
Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.
It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.
The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.17 -
While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.
I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.
The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.
Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.
Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.
This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.
What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.9 -
Theoretically I can build multicloud, geo reudant, load balanced, auto scaling infrastructure. But most of my workday I spent in outlook writing E-mails and arranging up meetings.1
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Best code performance incr. I made?
Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)
Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.
Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.
Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.
With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."
After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.
At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.
VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>
A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"9 -
Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.
This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.
The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.
Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.
Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.
DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.
Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.
We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.
Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.
Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.
So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.
Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!
What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.
This my friends, is why admins are assholes.4 -
I'm having an existential crisis with this client.
We are spending millions of $s every year to make sure the product's performance is perfect. We are testing various scenarios, fine-tuning PLABs: the environment, application, middleware, infra,... And then we provide our recommendations to the client: "To handle load of XX parallel users focusing on YY, yy and Zy APIs, use <THIS> configuration".
And what the client does?
- take our recommendations and measure the wind speed outside
- if speed is <20m/s and milk hasn't gone bad yet, add 2x more instances of API X
- otherwise add 3xX, 1xY and give more CPUs to Z
- split the setup in half and deploy in 2 completely separate load-balanced prod environments.
- <do other "tweaking">
- bomb our team with questions "why do we have slow RTs?", "why did the env crash?", "why do we have all those errors?", "why has this been overlooked in PLABs?!?"
If you're improvising despite our recommendations, wtf are we doing here???
One day I will crack. Hopefully, not sometime soon.3 -
I've got a rant-type question:
Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?
There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.
What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.
*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.
I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.
It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.
I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'
(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)
I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!
(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)55 -
Few weeks passed, and I as a freelancer without job all I did was seek for one and couldn't find anything.
Now I'm overwhelmed with all the work and interviews I got in the past weeks xD
Never balanced...
No work at all, or too much work.3 -
OK I've just got an idea that I think would be quite neat:
How about a virtual rubber duck that sits in the corner of your editor? Just like the gem in old Word, if you remember. It's yellow and quacks sometimes, and nods understandingly when you talk to it (mic monitoring).
And it also monitors your typing and says (popup text bubble) things like:
"those parentheses doesn't look balanced to me"
"did you really initialize that variable?"
"you wrote JASON again"
"you forgot the ;"
You get the point.
I don't have time to implement, feel free to steal my idea and become a millionaire.5 -
Software engineers: "Maths is hard and scary!"
Also software engineers: "I've learnt to write a balanced binary search tree in c++ as interview prep!"
Mathematicians: "Have you guys heard of an AVL tree?"20 -
Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4720819/...
So here we go, the start of day three. A bit of pain in the hips from a badly balanced backpack, but after some adjustments to the contents of my backpack I think I'm ready for another day. 20 km, here we go!
3 -
them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...
it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.
also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.
if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..12 -
On your standard epitome of being a geek, I started to show my coworkers how to play Cardfight Vanguard, a TCG since we all love TCG's (we play Magic, Pokemon and a few others) and we had made Friday our official "TCG or Board Game" day.
List of games we have played:
Star Wars CCG (dear lord this game is BEAUTIFUL shame it is no longer being published)
Magic the Gathering, we have a love hate relationship with this game, mana plays a big reason as to why we do not fully love it, it sucks getting stuck with no possibility of drawing proper mana.
Pokemon - Easy to get into, easy to play, there is nt much more to say, by far, our favorite in terms of how much money we can make out of selling rare cards that we do not use.
Dice Masters - My Personal favorite, and I am also the undisputed champion of our group
Cardfight Vanguard is my current favorite, very tactical in a lot of ways, luck of the draw hits in a funny way, I feel it is properly balanced, not much bullshit ass rules or mana issues. Reminds me of Duel Masters, I used to LOVE that Game, but Wizards of the Coast and the anime fucked it up so well....
Anyone here likes playing card games?4 -
Imagine a multi driver high quality balanced armature earphones. They have stainless steel ear channels and replaceable meshes. They’re also made by apple. Seems impossible in AirPods era?
No. Apple made them. They are really good and extremely comfortable. They are rare nowadays but here in Russia I just bought brand new pair for just $50. They sound awesome.
I listened to JH Layla and everything by Noble Audio. This forgotten apple earbuds still sound awesome.
It’s not a 3am rant. They actually exist. I have them.
31 -
I know "windows 10 bad" rants already have been done enough and are kinda redundant at this point.
But it's so frustrating for me when doing event stuff.
like yesterday during a quieter part I wanted to pull a USB thing. I knew I've turned of system sounds at least two times one this machine last year and sureley it didn't turn them on again, that'd be silly ...
"de dung"
shit!
And today I did some stuff and realized somehow the energy settings are at "balanced".
In the past I had went through every neccessary box to go Full Power, checked every neccessary box, but nOOooOo - lets randomly be balanced again. WTF?
And it's not like shit didn' work already - I remember the times when bluetooth actually was intuitive to use and settings didn't randomly change - is that what they think " progress" means?4 -
I am able to work 15 hours on my pet project then take a short walk outside and feel like a balanced man, but even just an hour on a commercial project is a massive effort even though the code is clean, the stack is modern, I'm good friends with the client and I also like the concept. The mere fact that I'm doing it for money takes the fun out of it.3
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Thanos goes into an AWS Bar and asks for an EC2 Instance. What will be that instance family?
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General Purpose. Why? Because everything should be balanced.1 -
When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...
You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?
That. I felt like doing that.
I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.
I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.
1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.
So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.
I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.
I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.
I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.
It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.
Excuse my language, but:
Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.
If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:
May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.
I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.3 -
There was a rant earlier of someone working a 9 to 5 job now which i can't seem to find, wanted to answer in regards to wk26
They were complaining about it being a boring job with boring processes and not learning anything new..
you can't say that you haven't learned something new, i bet you haven't learned a new language or technology but there are plenty of other skills to be picked up from a company that have worked for this all their lives..
I mean, these kind of companies have either seen it all already and had tons of bad experiences they are trying to avoid, or then never experienced any of them but are still trying to avoid them.
I once worked for a Japanese company in Europe. All decisions (big or small) were taken by answering with the phrase : If it isn't broken, don't fix it. As a result they had an excel with over 64k complaints in them (1 row per complaint) and their website was running on 19 Sun servers, load balanced, using php 4.2 because the technology was just too old.
Point being, plenty of things to learn, getting new experiences, even if they are bad, at least now you know, how not to do things in a certain way, but all in all, working at different places, even bad ones, gives you perspective..
And perspective is important.
Perspective is experience.
It's the bit that glues the knowledge together.
Go out and explore, don't be afraid, everyone needs bad experiences, even if it was only so we can identify the good ones. -
load balanced three micro nodejs instances with Apache in my local system. load performance improved by 50% straight.6
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Wanna make a good outdoor shot but only have a bad camera on hand? No problem!
1. Place the sun into your frame
2. Click it to adjust exposure
3. Shoot
Yes, this limits what you can shoot, as it’s not always possible to keep the sun in the frame. But, in exchange, the sheer amount of light will make your pic _very_ sharp, as if it was engraved, colors will be restrained and balanced on pretty much every camera, noise level will be zero, and a REAL lens flare will serve as a nice finishing touch.
2 -
Play designer board games; they are multi-tenant programs, complex algorithms, modularity, meticulously balanced, and all elegantly linked to an artful UI. They are also made out of cardboard.
It is hard to play them and not become a developer that builds increasingly holistically.8 -
I'll answer this seriously, since every other answer just jokes about having no social life.
I used to introverted as fuck long ago. Now I enjoy a fairly decent, balanced social life. Here's some points that may help.
1) This is the most important point. Schedule your time with discipline. Especially if you freelance on the side like me. If you decided to finish a project, mark your calendar and get to it. No dawdling. If you decided to watch a movie, mark your calendar get to it. Decide that you will spend an X portion of your time with entertainment and Y with work. Don't let them overflow into each other.
2) Don't hate Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and other tools. Okay facebook is shit. But he rest are just tools. You can use them to connect meaningfully or to follow shitty things and make your feed toxic. If this isn't your cup of tea, at least try using them on the weekends, you'll make new friends.
3) If your work requires you to work long hours and weekends ok often just quit. You decide what your limits are. I quit a similar toxic job and it's made a world of a difference.
4) If you have a significant other, establish communication rules and boundaries with them. It's perfectly fine to tell your spouse or boy/girlfriend that you're busy at the moment. It is equally all right to tell your work that ou aren't available because you're busy with family/friends.
5) Visit a gym and get your stamina up. You'll meet fun people. It takes a healthy body to have a social life or you'll just be permanently tired.3 -
I will use whatever gets the most hate, religiously. You all hate Apple? I will use Apple everything. You hate JavaScript? I will write everything in JavaScript. You hate Safari? I will use Safari as my main browser.
As long as I'm the unique antithesis to your mediocre thesis, we get healthy synthesis, and the world remains balanced.9 -
Question for leads...
Have you found that it's possible to have a balanced leadership style instead of ruling with an iron fist?
Let me explain what I mean.
There's always going to be room for improvement, there's going to be at least the occasional issue that happens, etc.
As a lead, your job is to not have issues happen and to have the team work effectively.
Now, for me, my goal was to have a balanced style in the sense that if there's a small issue or small room for improvement, but the team is already stressed, I take the heat for it if necessary and let them relax so they're not stressed and they can focus on the bigger things.
For medium improvements, I essentially put it to the vote so the team can have their say in whether they agree with the proposal on improvement.
And so on, idea being to have a balance between "Do what I tell you" and "do whatever you want".
However, I have found that doing so does essentially nothing to improve team morale and team cohesion. Any thing that needs doing and I force them into it, any thing I don't protect them from, any thing they don't agree with will still manifest as problems in the team, a single "you have to do this" will make them complain about the leadership style being "force to implement".
Being completely hands off and essentially not a lead, just basically a support dev more or less, is not what I'm really looking for, but also isn't good for a team that does genuinely have things that need to improve (stupid errors not being caught in dev OR review, system not being fully testable because of external dependencies that are not really necessary for tests, etc).
So the only option I see there is simply ruling with an iron fist and leaning into being that hated lead that just forcea you to do things and "doesn't care about you".
I've already stepped down from this lead position because I don't want to be that guy, but if I'm looking for another position I'm curious if this is just universal or hae you guys found that it IS possible to have a "good team" where you can be adults and discuss things as a team and improve as a team?6 -
TSA questions for screening software engineers: Sunday an engineer from Nigeria got screened on if they were really a coder with googled questions like "write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced." What questions should they really be asking?7
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To everyone that struggles with addictions or self-destructive thoughts (mental), you are not alone.
I just want to say, look around you for a second, and grasp the amazing world we live in. How everything is balanced, day turns to night, nigh turns to day, water turns to a cloud, cloud turn to water, you came to existence from nothing, and you'll turn back to nothing.
Don't fool yourself with all this media bullshit, do this and that and so on. You don't need anything to feel loved, you have yourself.
Life is like the ocean, some waves are hard, while others are soft. Learn to surf.
Enjoy life, my brothers and sisters, enjoy the small things and accept things are sometimes fucked up.4 -
I wrote a tiny Windows app that switches to High Performance energy profile when plugged into AC and switches to Balanced when on battery. It sits on the tray and you can override settings manually. I made it back when I used Windows 10, but it's also handy on other Windows versions
Is it worth publishing?1 -
OCD driven development
- level of recursion determined by how much the algorithm bothers you
- too much and nothing is ever finished
- not enough and code is shitty and unmaintainable
- can result is longer variable names
- takes longer to name a variable
- text slightly misaligned requires hours of debugging time
- balanced by "OMFG that will take forever to fix" Sometimes...
- can lead to unobjective code reviews1 -
My social life is currently mosty consisting of being social with computers, therefore my socialLife and devLife are pretty much balanced.
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Customers CEO insists we need to start the 3 weeks to deliver crunch website project by having the hottest UX design on the planet done by a professional UX specialist specializing in hotness who might charge a lot and take a few weeks and leave us no time to deliver said hotness. Grrrr.
I felt like Sirus Black as a dog bouncing of the chest of the werewolf.
When I explained in full why it's a great idea to have a great UX concept, the project is an education website, for the government, and it's WCAG AA. Balanced against all the reasons that we had more urgent things to look at with such a short timeframe they insisted "The UX Guy" will save us. Dear fascist bully boy. I am a UX guy! I may not be "The UX Guy" but I remember when Javascript was for popups and the extent of most peoples PHP was sending forms via anonymous SMTP. I bet the design will look something like the CNN website or Apple.com. Both bastions of web accessibility standards. Grrrrrr. -
I'm all spooked out. I just added complicated JS code in a massive block, doing something complicated, using syntax that I wasn't sure about.
Load the page, smugly expecting like 200 errors. None.
Alright...
Run everything... it works.
WTF.
It's all balanced out though, because then python started freaking out with the wackiest motherfucker of an error I've ever seen. (A pointer to a function magically turning into None) -
A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.
It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.
Since then I've been working odd jobs.
And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.
First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.
I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.
Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.
Custom column types.
Embedding html in cells.
Reorderable columns
Optional but nice to have:
Changeable column width and row height.
Drag and drop on rows and columns.
Right click menu support out of the box.
After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.
And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.
Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.
Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.
And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.
Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.
Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?
Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?
Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?
As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.
For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.
And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.
How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?
I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!1 -
Is there how to get upload and download speeds balanced?
Will we be forever stuck as mostly consumers of internet instead of as much as producers?3 -
I like watching the videos on the qt website where engineers with foreign accents describe their love of the framework it's kind of amusing
It's kind of a massive framework it takes up decent disk space !
Maybe Ill win the battle and finally eb able to keep photos of myself much diminished as these people apparently try to hide how hot I was in my actual 40s
Certainly had a slimmer waistline lol
Now I got that lower belly gut I'm working off slowly yay
Bottle of wine yesterday prolly didn't help but the 11 miles of walking today and the workout prolly balanced that out.
Need to get to running some more
Did that the other day doing sprint walks and poured goddamn sweat ! -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.
1 -
What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...
I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.
- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)
Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)
But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.
As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...2 -
It really depends on what time of the year it is. During the fall and spring semesters, my dev life and social life are about as balanced as they're going to get. From working on things in the CS class to socializing with the people I've met in those classes, this part of the year is pretty balanced in my opinion. During breaks and the summer, however, I don't really have a dev life. I don't have a dev job, so really the only times I do have a dev life is when I willingly decide to work on a side project, or have to update some major stuff on one of my three personal websites. Other than that, the only life I have during those breaks is my social life with the buddies I play PC games with on Discord.
I will say this, though. The day will come when I will be having to balance a dev life and a social life year-round. To be honest, I'm not really looking forward to that day. -
Hi all! I want to share my site (https://tinytunes.app/ ) , which I completely created myself. Some information about how I created it:
1) I bought a domain that was freed from the previous owner (here https://mydrop.io/en/ )
2) Next, using the web archive, I restored the information of the main page - http://web.archive.org/web/...
3) website banner and logo created by myself using the service Canva
4) The theme for the site was used by Balanced Blog, but the main page of the site was created from scratch (without editing the template).
5) I added a few more pages to the site and a blog, which I am now actively filling
I would like to read the opinions of professionals: what was done wrong on the site, there may be some comments (some shortcomings, very noticeable) ...
From what I see myself: H1 headers - two instead of one (haven't figured out how to change that yet)
And the footer of the site - remove information about wordpress, add something like "2023 tinytunes.app All rights reserved. - I already figured out how to do this, I'll fix it soon)
I'm just starting to learn web programming, this site is only 3 months old. With knowledge of codes, everything is very weak for me - I study on my own from open free sources.16
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