My girlfriend is amazing:

After a long uphill battle trying to finish a huge open source project I started months ago. She noticed I was getting a little deflated.
So she donated a small amount to the donation page to lift my spirits.
She wanted to do it secretly but didn't know that it wasnt anonymous.

The little things spur us on.

I’ve had a good amount of incompetent co-workers in the past. One that stands out was this junior developer who worked at one of my previous companies. He was incompetent, but that wasn’t even his worst attribute. He was incompetent, and worse, he had a piss-poor attitude.

Myself and a few other devs at the company tried to help him, but he would literally get mad when people tried to help him. Sometimes he would even call one of us over and start getting snarky with us as we tried to help him. He was a piece of shit and a shitty developer. I don’t think he built one complete feature or fixed one bug in the year he was at the company before he was eventually fired.

Oh, and aside from his incompetence and shitty attitude, he had no sense of humor. It was so annoying. My friend and I made a little song based on his name and a group that sounded like his name, and he got pissed. We always used to sing it anyway after that and it always riled him up. I feel a bit bad about that now but he pretty much got mad at everything so whatever.

One of my favorite memories of him is when he was leaving one day, my good friend/co-worker and I were having a Nerf gun battle. The junior was leaving the office, and my friend tried to get him involved in the battle and shot him, but accidentally hit him in the back of the head. He said nothing, didn’t turn around, and just walked out lol. He was not happy about it.

Soon ™

That moment when your coworker puts on loud music, you're wondering if your boss is going to like this and then your boss turns his music twice as loud and the two start a battle of who can play their music the loudest.

Yup it was friday again!

After a long battle with CSS I give up and show the client a preview.
Client: I like how you made this first row a bit wider. Really makes it stand out.
Me: Yeah...right, that was intentional... 😎

*Battle music*
Wild customer appeared!

dev used Ubuntu

It's not very effective...

Foe customer used Stupid Feature-Request

It's super effective!

dev is confused!

dev hurt itself in its confusion!

dev used Reasoning

dev's attack missed!

Foe customer used Ridiculous Feature-Request

It's super effective!

dev used Rage Quit

dev fled using its Rage Quit

...

Me: (putting headphones on)

Boss: You are an engineer. You need to focus. You cannot multitask. Nobody can. You need to concentrate on the work and deliver. If you ...blah.blah.blah.

Me: 😃 hmm yes you are right (dying on the inside)

Boss: if you are listening songs, your attention is towards that, you learn nothing of what you are working on.

Me: 😃 True Indeed.

Inner me 👿: Motherfucker. I use headphones so I don't have to listen to you giggling about with your mates in a bragging battle, in a language I do not understand, which is noise to me.
And technically, I do not listen to songs, I listen to music, while doing repeated tasks, so that I can overcome the boredom and do it quick in a rhythm.
But you wouldn't understand now, would you, YOU OLD FART, you fuckin Remnant of the Ancient times.

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

Hello, anyone still interested in seeing my setup/battle station?

If yes, I'll post it in the comments ;D

Edit: posted it in a comment 😊

I just finished my thesis defense, one of the committee members obliterated me with incredibly difficult questions but it was so much fun to respond to this 40min smackdown after presenting all my work in 50 minutes. The battle has been won ladies and gentlemen, I am incredibly happy.

This post is in memory of all the devRanters fallen in battle against management stress and impossible deadlines.

Let their memories remain, and their loss never be forgotten.

ProTip: Use knife to save ammo in a paintball battle.

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Thinking of a name for a function or a variable is half the battle 😕💭

I've updated my setup! Added another screen. I'm ready for battle with the bugs.

Can't believe the US are talking about removing protection for net neutrality. I'm not based in the US, but hope devs out there are getting behind Net neutrality day and Battle for the net

I just wanted to show off my battle station.
I figured that some would appreciate it. :)

The real battle of distros......😂😂 even till now I have not settled on a Linux distro to use I am always testing them(for 3 years)

Politically correct project manager battle simulator

It's a constant battle

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.

No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.

If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.

You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.

Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your offshores, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.

One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.

But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.

Adobe BR stands for Adobe Battle Royale

So today I got really triggered when i hear this guy say that coding is cancer. I stand up and instantly the first thing going through my mind is that it's the battle of the nerds. He says he tried ALL of the programing languages out there and they were shit. I asked if he tried C# and he still says coding is cancer even though he has never even heard of any C# syntax. I asked if he used Batch as a started language and he still says it. So I just decided to roast him by saying "did you put .bat at the end of the file when you were saving? Oh wait never mind, I forgot your lazy ass doesn't have the intelligence to understand how to save"
Surprisingly everyone was silent and most likely didn't understand what I had said. So I just left wondering if he even bothered to get a guide on syntax for any of the languages he would have liked.

Not everything is node modules 😄

CTO joined us to interview a web fullstack today.

Amongst many battle analogies, he said "Fuck the corrupt and the weak. We keep only the best here"

If he watches 300 a couple more times, I think he will start wearing leather underwear and a red cape to work.

Such battle
Much wow

When I was working in a park near Seattle where I didn't find productivity to be a battle...

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

Satoru Iwata.

You might remember it as the former president of Nintendo, but he was also a very impressive programmer. As he was president of HAL Laboratories, he helped with the development of Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64 by porting the Pokémon Red/Blue battle system not by having any sort of documentation, but by reading the assembly source code.

He did so to allow Game Freak's developers (who were only a team of 4 at the time) to focus on their work on Pokémon Gold/Silver. But he did more: when they had to localize Red/Blue for America, they couldn't fit everything in a cartridge. They had the same problem while developing Gold/Silver, since cartridges had at most 8 Mb of storage capacity back then, and they had to fit not only the Johto region but the Kanto one as well! So Iwata stepped in, and created a graphics compression tool which managed to make everything fit in the cartridges.

He did this while not even being part of Nintendo, and the work was so impressive that the Pokémon devs thought it was "a waste to just have [him] as president!" (ie. why not make use of such programming skills).

Truly someone I look up to.

New idea, 99 developers write node module, only one person can survive! The rest of repo will be deleted from github and npm💂‍♂️

Constant battle of choosing self care over the code life.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Does anyone else ever go to random websites and play with the UI... then inspect the CSS to see how it is being done... You know to prepare for your next battle with CSS... :)

I really like React and I thought for a second that Vue will overcome React with stars but fortunately developers know what is better 😂😂😂😍

Never-ending battle

How do I don’t over complicate things?

Background: I’m currently working for a game with some base project. It alr has pretty complicated ai and some other system.

Today, I was asked by boss to help him set up a test environment for testing taking damage of a character.

First I tried to read up how the battle system and ai works in the base project. Figured, it’s overkill for this testing purpose.

Then, tried to use some plugin to automate the ai and movement. Make the enemy follow the target and stuff.

Alr spending half day, then suddenly realised all I need is just to make one script that takes damage on collision.

Why am I still a programmer? 😭

!rant
What I really like about all these growing startups/platforms like airbnb, netflix etc, is that they open source their cool technologies so that anybody can use them. If you look through their github repos, you can find a lot of cool and interesting stuff and especially it's mostly already battle tested and it works.

Imo this is some really big contribution in turn to the money they make :)

I feel like it's a constant battle between not caring and my desire to have money.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

My code is always a battle between best practices and what I assume would be the most efficient way to do things

That one time I was appointed to be a group project leader and forced my members to learn git. It was a fierce battle, but I did not give in.
Needless to say, I eventually got some thanks in return (after insults about git being complicated)

Had the first DDOS battle in my life lads, fuck me that was hard. I somehow managed to block these assholes, and some piece of shit was extorting money out of our business by messaging us in telegram. What a piece of shit.

@Everyone, I would like to congratulate @Haxk20 on being the victor of our little upvote fight.

It was a hard battle, and although I was ahead briefly, I would like to name @Haxk20 the victor!

Starting ++:
@Haxk20: 36,872
@C0D4: 35,401

As of post:
@Haxk20: 39,935
@C0D4: 38,454

That's an impressive: 6,116 up votes in total from everyone involved.

As I have noticed requests for the repo, i would like to state It will be deleted, but I will re-release it as an empty template in the event others want to use it later - as per our original agreement.

For several years now, I have been writing programs for myself. I have been publishing the source code for them, but none of them ever got much traction. Then I wrote a program that existing users on social media could just interact with without installation (because even that is too much apparently).

When I wrote the programs for myself with others secondary, I had logic problems to solve and dealt with fucked up API's. Now I still have that problem, but I also have to deal with user retardation. They are not using the program in the way I wrote it to be used, at all. They are not passing arguments where there should be, they are running commands that are still under development and therefore (rightfully IMO) available to only me. I am the one being blamed, why doesn't this thing work?

I'd like to rephrase their question to me. Why are you user not using the goddamn program properly? Why should I need to make half the goddamn code account for users' sheer level of retardation?

Yes, users are retarded. And it's not a battle we can win. Earlier I heard this saying that "every time you make your tools more foolproof, the universe invents a better fool".

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.

An ancient legend goes that there exists sacred knowledge that enables anyone possessing it not to turn one’s career into a constant uphill battle with the management.

I sought this knowledge, I travelled the world, to no avail. Once upon a time, I climbed the Mount Fuji and met the wizard in his pagoda on the mount. I won in a CSS-golf battle with him, and he revealed the sacred truth: one need to chose companies that do business instead of constant backroom deals and dick-measuring contests.

Like Prometheus, I give this knowledge to you. An ancient scroll says that for this I’ll be chained to the mountain of PHP legacy code, and HRs will peck my brain for eternity, but I found Arachne, the queen of HRs, and exchanged the keto-diet secret for freedom.

The battle is lost. I'm implementing the mother of all stupid features because the sales team wants it.

How do you guys battle procrastination? I got it bad.

Seriously, Ubuntu can go burn in hell far as I care.

I've spent the better part of my morning attempting to set it up to run with the correct Nvidia drivers, Cuda and various other packages I need for my ML-Thesis.

After countless random freezes, updates,. Downgrades and god-knows-what, I'm going back to Windows 10 (yes, you read that right). It's not perfect but at least I don't have to battle with my laptop to get it running. The only thing which REALLY bothers me about it is the lack of GPU pass-through, meaning running local docker containers rely solely on the CPU. In itself not a huge issue if only I didn't NEED THE GOD DAMN GPU FOR THE TRAINING

DevRant battle royale mode
Every user looses 1 ++ every day. The user with lowest score is deleted and banned from DevRant for a week.
Propose other outrageous, but intriguing changes to DevRant.

It's my second rant about Windows here in two days, but here we go:

Windows used to be a cool OS (and in part it still is). Yes, it's made for the end user, not power users, yes it has many flaws. But it was my gateway to computers and programming. I have fond memories of my first PC, playing around with the old win98 themes (my favorite was the baseball one!).

However, I am very disappointed now. I just had to basically force Windows 10 to stop hogging my bandwidth. It was an actual battle, with the OS simply (I kid you not) running update and other services EVEN AFTER I SPECIFICALLY DISABLED THEM. I just saw the Windows update service running, while its status was disabled. It's absurd.

Sorry Windows, but that's not what I want. I want to choose what happens on my own OS. Linux gives me exactly that, why can't you?

I realized I am a rant grifter...

Somebody makes a good rant. I respond with witty, snarky, or angry response. Then I cash in on them sweet internets points. Rant grifting.

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

So my mom says her printer isn't working anymore. I sit and battle with drivers and mysteriously missing virtual usb ports for two hours, give up, we decide to buy a new printer.

Next day she says her scanner isn't working either.

It's only then that I notice her USB hub cable is unplugged.. aargh.

Hey, it's 2023.

If your component isn't written in TypeScript, I'm not using it :)

"TypeScript is overly complicated!!!" why, because it pointed out everything wrong in your JS code?

"TypeScript is not flexible!!!" why, because it makes you not rely on fragile "only possible in javascript" patterns?

"TypeScript isn't needed!!!" why, because you've never worked on a project with more than 100 lines of code where dependency management and clean code policies were implemented?

god just stop with the JavaScript purist BS, you aren't going to win this battle, and it's even worse because not only are you injuring everyone in the software community, you're injuring your own productivity and skillset

actually, you know what, fine. just use pure JS and HTML implementations. see you in 10 years when i'm retired and you are still running around in circles wondering why the world has left you behind

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

I love it when rather than fix the bug that is causing the faulty data you write a bot on a schedule to clean up the faulty data. It's like a bot battle who can mess up / clean up the data the fastest. Unless your clean up bot has a bug then you are just F'ed.

Warning: long rant

I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm the only person who cares about their privacy

I try, as much as I can, to avoid surveillance. I use firefox, protonmail, duckduckgo, e2e encrypted chat platforms, avoid social media like the plague, and do everything I can to block facebook and google trackers on websites I visit

And it's exhausting

Each search I make means I waste another 30 seconds because duckduckgo doesn't pull the answer directly from webpages like google does

I get weird looks when I give people a @protonmail email address, and I have to explain what it is to them every fucking time

People ask if I have social media, and I either give them nothing or my Github account

And for what? Nobody else cares, no matter how much I explain how toxic google and facebook are to society.

They just say 'I have nothing to hide' as they scroll Instagram, letting Zuckerberg build an intimately detailed profile on them.

They just say 'so what' as they google memes from their chrome browser, allowing google to share that information with god-knows-who

If everyone else has given up their privacy for convenience, why am I still fighting a losing battle?

It feels like I'm fighting a war against big tech by myself, and I'm tired and about to lay down my arms

Lost my auntie to a very long cancer battle.

There is a long list of people that I would've rather died than her.

Why don't workplaces have a category of leave for "literally dying inside"?

A new head of operations joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need 500 warehouses across the country — we might need that capacity. We will build them rather than renting them — Amazon does the same thing, so we should too. We also need our own shipping fleet — FedEx has that too, so it’s a battle-tested approach. We might need that capacity. We need a future-proof solution.
— Uh… That’s kind of dumb. Are you kidding me?

A new head of engineering joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need an AWS cluster running Kubernetes deploying microservices built with Docker. We might need autoscaling. Frontend should be Next.js + TypeScript — everyone does that now, plus we can develop a React Native app more easily if need be. We need a future-proof solution.
— Wow! That’s what I call a good manager. You really know what you’re talking about. You’re promoted!

After long years of unholy battle with windows my dad has accepted linux as his saviour 😂

Every battle station looks better with a Octocat on it. :)

This one is interesting

- 9 to 5 (including breaks) aka WLB
- Building products in my area of passion (Music, Art, or Travel)
- High paying (I don't care for those perks like free food or bean bags)
- Enough vacations without judgement
- Continuous innovation (fuck your 1830s product)
- Good social capital (teams should trust me for my decisions)
- WFH where I can opt to go in to office whenever I want (so that I can build my awesome battle rig at home)

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Tabs vs spaces. The battle most programmers fight.

- I’m tired of being caught in this political bullshit and thinking about how to withdraw my money from the bank ASAP because govt can block my account to prevent me from leaving, how to let my salary make its way from Europe to me without making me a criminal for even having foreign currency, even though I pay taxes, being left without my meds because the country I was born in decided to deny the existance of my illness. At my age, I should be thinking about where do I want to go for vacation and what hair color should my next sex party fuck partner have.
- I’m tired of fighting this never-ending uphill battle with guilt upon guilt upon guilt that cripples my thinking and renders me helpless by the face of it, the constant sense of dread over me failing to even put into words what’s bothering me.
- I’m tired of seeing literally any thing associated with my childhood and having flashbacks of violence and gruesome things done to me as a child. Today, I had a full breakdown over seeing default Windows Vista wallpaper.

My anxiety always hits hard, but how hard should I hit the wall with my head next time to beat this shit out of it? sometimes I hear little bubbles inside. I left my country, but how hard should I vomit next time I eat two jars of nutella as a self-harm session for my country to leave me? I already have my eyes all red and messed up because of doing this. I can’t see straight. is it within my body? can I pull it out?

Waking up from a dream with a girl in it.
TL;DR: We fell in love and I can finally somehow remember her. Not completely though...

(To the perverts: We did not have sex nor did we kiss.)
The worlds I am becoming a part of are very complex. I won't get into the details of how they look like. I will tell as far as I can remember.

<vaguely remember the beginning>
My sister, my mom and I went into a house which turned out to have weird things inside.
Suddenly I became something like an agent and I had a special mission. I went to the basement of this building. Saw a few guys chilling there. Grabed a walkie talkie which was taped on the right wall. I have listened to it while moving back to the entrance, when I have arrived there, it began to do disortion type of sounds.

<I have been to a lot of different places here. Telling each of them would make me to not come to an end lol>

Then I have decided to go outside. The outside-of-the-house world changed. I was at floor 8 or something like that. It was very high when I looked down. All of the sudden I got into a waterfall type of thing which was about to suck me in to a circle. The waterfall was limited to the area of where this house was. It was basically hovering above the streets, but never reaching the streets.

I somehow met the lovely girl in a cube type of thing that helped us not to fall down through the spiral. We enjoyed the action the waterfall created. It made us move in a circle and we had to hold ourselves at the wall of the cube which luckily had knobs to hold on.

After that whole action I have been in my bed and sleeping. She somehow found me on a social media platform and contacted me with "Meet me on <some strange date>".

<some unlogical world shit happens here. I will just skip them until the date>

The day to meet her comes. She is up on a hill with a "purple?<idk it was purple-ish>" sky.

<can not remember the dialogue>

We had a great time and I felt that she had feelings for me.
She then went away. What about me? And me, too. ;)

The next day I went to see her again. She was gone. I found out that she has a brother. I talked to him about where she might be. Turns out her brother was a demon or satan <idk they all became agressive and god-like powerful lol>.
He told me that she must be there where <random name of enemy> is to fight the enemy to rescue her mom.

Her brother went to help her. I followed him since I did not know where the enemy was. Let alone where I was. The world has changed for the 99999th fucking time lol.

I followed him up another hill with trees and a lot of people. It was autumn.

Then we found her sitting on a hill looking down to the sea beneath us with cherry blossom trees around her.

The dream was about to end. I felt it. So I have asked her a few questions after the happy greeting, but I can not remember them and her answer anymore. But I do remember that she did not say anything after one question. She just stared at me looking through my eyes which immediately did end the dream.
I was able to get into the dream shortly after it a few times, but I was not able to interact with them.

Besides of that: I have had "Battle Symphony-Linkin Park" playing as a background music for the whole dream a long.

The good thing is that I somehow would be able to recreate her. I know how she looks like to about 60%.

I do not even know why the fuck I am telling y'all this.

Will try to keep that one short.

So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.

Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.

I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...

Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like

30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC

And just casually missclicked...

And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.

No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work.

just received an email about a "hiring tournament", didn't know that was a thing... soo disgusting

"Hello John

How are things going in your career? Are you interested in remote work, at challenging projects in big companies such as Google, Pinterest, Udemy, eBay, and groundbreaking startups within a warm and continuous improvement environment?

BairesDev is holding an exciting hiring tournament, an online competition where you will fight against other developers for the chance to get hired and win incredible awards with the opportunity to be a part of great projects. We would love to see you there!

It will take place on Saturday, November 28th" (but the image says 12th 🤪🤪)

So you are "fighting" other developers for the chance to get hired, what the heck

If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.

For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.

Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.

its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.

other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.

all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.

this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.

Last thing for the day...show me your battle stations. Here's mine:

no fucking documentation

no fucking explaination

and your example doesn't even work

let's just run around in circles until we all die

waiting to exit this 🤡 world

yeah, i know, everyone is like "why can't you chill more"

because this what we are stuck doing 8-9 hour a day!!!!!! this is literally our lives just wasting away!!!! and it's not even fun anymore; you can't enjoy it if everyone is so fucking incompetant any step at being productive is fucking battle

god so sick of it

The battle rages...

My battle station. Want to get a 34'' curved screen, but can't make up my mind which one. Gaming and photography... Colors vs reaction time 😵

Biggest hurdle I have overcome is <b>myself</b>.

All my expectations, worries, fears, and doubts definitely caused major hurdles I had to crash through, trip and fall into, or they downright exploded into balls of fire as I would stand dumbfounded and burned by flames of regret.

Learning I was the blocker to greater achievement, success and ultimately happiness was a very hard lesson for me to learn, and a lesson and discipline that I still battle with today.

It is difficult to climb the seven story mountain of madness with heavy burdens, plodding with little progress.

Free the weight, and the natural warm air currents will lift high the spirit, and the body will follow.

"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly" ~GKC

Windows updates are fucking trash. Even if you disable built-in Windows spyware services, they tend to switch themselves on again.

Instead of engaging in that uphill battle, just use a firewall. Whitelist apps you use, and Windows will have no way to update itself or to call home even when the spyware is on.

On my gaming laptop I use Portmaster firewall. It’s free, open source AND has a good UI.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
- Helmuth von Moltke

And make no mistake... the users are the enemy.

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

When I was in school, I could walk as long as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't walk as long as I want anymore – my legs hurt and just stops moving. The spasm won't go away easily and I have to wait for it to stop.

When I was in school, I could learn as much as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't learn as much as I want anymore – my brain just stops absorbing information. I can see letters but I can't read words.

My body slowly decay. By the age of 21, I have two abdominal surgeries, joint and bone issues, clinically diagnosed depression, the food I eat won't digest without pills and much more to handle. If the pain is what stops me now I could only imagine the next step when I don't even care about pain just like I don't care now about my unwillingness.

On the other hand the realization of my own mortality was extremely liberating. Yes, my body slowly decomposes and needs to be fixed here and there but at least I know that my personality heavily depends on some fluids inside my body. I know that I have limited amount of fucks to be given.

I slowly lose my health over time but I gain something more and I gain faster than I lose. I don't care about things like indents or JS trailing semicolons anymore – I just build and ship viable products over weekends. I almost never argue and enforce my vision inside the team I manage as a teamlead.

Yes, I'm depressed and not productive but depression would go away and my confidence is here to stay. I'm here to earn just enough money to buy a house and launch my own small projects that wouldn't require that much time to provide me with basic needs.

Everyone I see is fighting a hard battle. I'm here to end mine.

Ugh seriously my night atm. Fix one bug, more show up D:

It's a constant battle of getting the code finished, and having it look readable. It's so easy to fall into the downward spiral of bad coding.

I've played 46000 battles in WorldofTanks.
avg battle time: 10 minutes
Total minutes: 460000
Total hours: 7666.66
Total days: 319 days of gameplay!

Now I just wonder had I invested all that time to code what I could have become by now.

When Facebook launched an all-out battle against Apple last year, little did they know that the war would be two-fronts.

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

Figured I'd show off my battle station since other people are. What does yours look like?

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

Life is a constant battle of not knowing whether I want to quit programming forever, or if I just need 8 hours sleep.

Sometimes I feel sorry for @jAsE, that man is fighting a tough battle with his computer.

;_; all the best

TL;DR: I hate how management doesn't listen to devs (even Dev managers).

We need to sort out our release process where I'm at. It takes a Dev about 2 solid days to complete and it's hideously involved and ripe for human error. They're completely out of action until it's done and it happens once a week!

It's stopping us releasing business critical bug fixes and features that need to go out. Instead the work just sits in develop for days doing fuck all.
Can't be agile if it takes so long to deliver value 🙃

Plus makes any fuck ups by our department look worse as it takes an age until it's fixed which reduces their collective trust in us and our opinions.
Making any improvements we want to make harder todo as they're harder to convince 🙃

Has anyone had any success getting automated releases?
How did you convince management to prioritise it?

I need to convince someone who has some influence in my company and ask how they got that influence

I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:

I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'

Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.

I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.

But it ended and I let it go.

In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.

I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.

And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*

And that's how I got my current job.

*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.)

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops."
-- Joseph Weizenbaum

Goals for 2018

Finish all my udemy courses I purchased back in 2016 and never watched

Learn to write tests for all my work

Figure out the shitty api in Drupal 8

Redesign my apps so they look pretty and make me more money.

Learn to Automate my app feeds

Redesign my company website to look more professional

Sell my townhouse

Start running again

Loose weight

Be a better husband and father.

Learn new tech and make something fucking awesome!

Go to tech Meetups

Hang around smart people and learn to be a better coder.

Battle my demons and autism.

Finally figured out that 500.30 error.
You won't believe it, but y'all probably will... But I solved my problem by fixing literally one line of code.

This of course pissed me off because this problem persisted for an entire week, even my supervisor could not figure it out.

But I learned so much in failing to find it and making wrong assumptions along the way.

Solving a problem is sometimes just half the battle, the journey along the way counts for something.

My supervisor was super impressed too, so that made me even more happy.

Anyways onto the next problem. 🤪

The battle is on. I say TABS!

Spent 20h working non stop on a project we were presenting to customer on the next day. Had a shower at 6 am and drove to the client with a colleague. We were presenting the features one by one. As he was presenting I was finishing the missing features and we switched every couple of minutes. Never again working for a company that sets deadlines on the first meeting with customer

Just had to debug a piece of code for the 5th time today and I'm starting to lose my mind. Why do programmers insist on using single-letter variable names?! Is it really that hard to come up with something more descriptive? I mean, I get it, "x" is easy to type, but so is "counter" or "iterations". Does anyone else feel like they're just constantly fighting a losing battle against the entropy of poorly written code?

Today has been a battle of async methods and foreach loops

Why oh why do companies scrimp on hardware and tools for devs. It's a constant battle to even use my machine let alone make progress. I cost 1k a day a decent machine 2k maximum. I have spent the last two days fighting hardware issues.

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.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

DEVELOPER v DESIGNER

The never ending battle!

My stickers turned up.

They cover some of my MacBooks battle scars quite nicely

!dev
Sometimes life just cracks its knuckles and goes like, yeah let's just fuck this guy inside out.
Everyday is a battle. Cockroaches are my worst fear. Like Orwell's Room no. 101 level fear. My tiny student residence room has so many that I'm sick of killing them. And they just keep coming back.
My worst sorrow is lonliness. I'm the kind of person who's fairly independant and level headed but I just love the feeling of having close ones around. So much that it's a part of my existence and identity. And sadly, that's just not there right now.
My worst misery is unproductivity. Not working on something useful always makes me feel guilty. But all the stress and responsibilities and the above mentioned problems leave me with little mental room to do what I like unless I put in a lot of conscious effort into it which drains me.
Despite all this, I stay happy. I smile at the end of the day and I'm fucking proud of it.

Foosball table?.. No. This is a battle ground. The opponent must at all times be annihilated.

C0D4's devrant battle...

I spent the whole day on git conflicts, I know it happens sometimes. But I do feel like a slow programmer, the boss even said so by comparing me to someone who has 15 years experience by saying I produce less lines of code than than him ( I have 5 years of experience).

So everyday, I have this nagging thoughts; "you are too slow, you can't even program, what are you doing, do something else this isn't for you etc" .

And then when I solve the problem "You are the best, you know everything etc"

A constant battle between self-destructive and positive thoughts.

WRITING CODE ON PAPER...smh

I know many people wrote about this already, but writing code on paper is one of the worst things of a CS class. I’d rather get a computer with no internet access and use a notes app to write code instead of having to write everything by hand. It takes so much more time that you could spend thinking about the problem. Not only that but also my hand gets tired of writing...ughhhh

I need to convince my teacher and the school to switch to writing code on computers! I will not loose this battle ahah

When your network admin doesnt realize you are a developer and get paid to fix problems. Tries to change your background to Justin(e) Bieber with group policies and you overwrite them in the registry. Now to plot revenge...

Temporarily in an apartment while my landlord fixes a potentially disastrous foundation problem and my flooding room. Having my battle station on a folding table finally paid off, super portable. My laptop is on a union break here

I find lately my biggest challenge as a developer is sticking with one editor. Currently it is a battle between Sublime Text 3 and Atom. Not a battle where I switch every few days. This is a battle where I find myself switching at least once a day for no real reason.

void rant(){
Pokémon go is fun, but it's not great.
Doesn't everyone think that it would be better to actually battle for your Pokemon's level?
They could perhaps keep a similar evo system (Everytime you fight you get like 1 poke candy)
This catch and release system is getting kind of annoying in my opinion.
I want to get attached to my Pokemon and actually feel like a trainer, not a garbage disposal for Pokemon.
They already have a battle mechanic, they would just need to enable ai battle algorithms and ambient encounters.
}

Allo vs. WhatsApp vs. Telegram vs. Other?

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

Entrepreneur me VS Artist me
The ultimate battle inside me..

Me: Can we get a landscape mode for devRant?
Brain: No! Think of one reason why.
Me: Ok...

So I've identified a key demographic that's excluded from social networks, by their very definition.

Misanthropes.

Misanthropic individuals need their own little area of the internet too.

I propose "MySpaceNowFuckOff.com" although this would probably result in a protracted legal battle. I'm open to name changes.

It would be a site for socialising with others like you, who don't actually want to socialize, where you don't get "likes" you get "disinterested acknowledgement", there isn't a share button but a "shame this idiot" button. And you don't have friends but a list of "people who haven't pissed me off... yet".

I was working on computer project with a friend. He saw my devRant stressball was sideways so he turned it upright. I saw it was upright so I turned it sideways. We both have aspergers so we keep doing this for two hours before either one of us says anything about the OCD battle we were having.

You would think acknowledging the situation would allow us to laugh it off and get on with our work....

Half an hour later Devy McRant Face has to go in a drawer so we can move on.

the closer i get to the ending

the higher the resistance

the harder i fight the battle to win

the harder life tries to prevent me from winning

just when we were about to finish

just in that moment life did its best to not make it happen

why

what do you want from me

i am just a human being

what wrong have i done in trying to help mankind

what is happening

why is this happening

what... do you want..... from me.......

I will fight this battle to the day I die, it's spelled 'cancelled', not 'canceled'

Oooooh ooooh let the battle begin.
Richard Hendricks would approve of this 😜

!dev

1. It's one of those few times in life that listening to Lq's Numb doesn't make me feel less anxious. Or Somewhere I Belong. Either way, anxiety levels are on all time high.

2. I have completely lost appetite. Usually at this point in time I'd go to doctor and ask for Xanax or something similar, to chill for a few days. But covid. I ain't going to any clinic, plus, ain't nobody got time for that.

3. On top of everything, I am also PMSing. The lack of energy, times n. (n>10)

4. Struggling to get out of bed for hours is now a reality.

5. I'm glad ("glad" is exaggeration tho) this will pass in a few weeks. I am hanging on to that hope and experience tells me it will pass. But my feelings are like "nah, we doomed. Let's just run away. Or just sleep until it all passes or we die of starvation."

6. My brain must work for the next few days. If I have to push it by drowning it in sugar, I will. But I'm also obese rn. Well, I guess it's "Hello diabetes!".

7. My hands and feet are cold. Like, freezing cold. Meanwhile, the rest of me is sweating. This sucks. Ngl.

8. I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. Like, those last stabby stabs moments in a battle where you know you're gonna fall down soon. I know this feeling of doom and gloom is PMS related, but it's there. I have no solution for that aside from nicotine and sugar.

9. I can't even cry. Which is sad.
... Do you see what's happening there? That's the loop I'm in.

Where are my fellow ladies at?
How do you battle imposter syndrome in the classroom or workplace?

Overhearing discussions/arguments about whether it's pronounced "su-doe" or "su-doo". Come on guys, it's just a matter of preference, it's not a religious battle.

I got into development only a short time ago.

My mother paired up with a partner who was a dev making some serious cheddar when I was just barely not a teenager anymore, while I was working shitty low-wage customer service gigs.

Honestly, the only reason either of them could give me for doing it was the money.

A couple years went by, I was extremely fortunate: found a job within 6 weeks of finishing a year-long program at the local technical college which only yielded me a basic cert. By that time, my mother's partner had long lost their job, and I had paid their rent (twice my own) on two separate occasions. I went from usually having about a hundred dollars after bills to last me until next paycheck to five times that.

A couple more years go by, I'm doing pretty well supporting my own family now (my wife and child, not anyone else) and somehow doing way better now than the people who spurred me ever did. I no longer have a reason to compulsively check my bank account out of worry that I'm overdrawn.

Now I'm locked in an endless battle in my mind to find a correction for every flaw in my life, or at the very least a workaround. I go to bed and wake up thinking about the same things: my work. Buuuutttt.... My family has everything they could ever need and more.

So I guess I could say the support I got from my family was:
* an initial nudge in the "right" direction
* a reality check on what the industry can be like
* a sentence to eternal damnation by changing my paradigm on everything

Personal projects, I think, are 50% of the battle, and projects you are required to complete are the other 50%.

Personal projects encourage you to try new and hard things without too much fear of failure.

Required projects make you learn something and complete it.

Both are absolutely essential to craft a well-rounded dev.

My workplace keeps moving more and more teams into the building, but the number of restrooms remains the same.

All it will take is one bad food-handling day in the cafeteria to enable battle royale mode.

No one loves Java as much as Google and Oracle. They are willing to have a battle in court. Or maybe it is just that $9 billion 😂😂😝

But on a serious note as a former paralegal "I don't think copyright should be applied on a programming language " plus, I feel like even if it is applied... google is using java in it's own way (android) as the courts have stated that you can't copyright a language syntax or API definition. So Google can use the Java langauge syntax and core Java API freely on Android.

I don't know about you but, a lot of clients do bring up their concerns..on what the implications are for them and their company developing mobile apps!!

Any updates? Concerns? Thoughts?

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

Technically not andev rant but fuck it. This pusses me off no no end.

PC gaming as I used to love it, is ending.

E3 for pc gamers was a death march. With the exception of hitman and just cuz 4, which are both more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I'll play them both because they're good fun, but look at the PS4 lne up. Control, Anthem, Detroit and more, all NEW IPs.

Meanwhile over in PC world we get the 50th billionth Battle Royal and (surprise) another JC.

I couldn't even being myself to finish Origin (WHICH WANT EVEN A GOD DAMN ORIGIN STORY)
sigh

I'll have to get a PS4. I just LOATHE playing FPS with a controller.

Oh, yeah, and a new fallout. With one mode. Which is great because it means I get to be fragged and tea bagged by 9 year old Asian kids..

!dev

Battle of titans:

Me vs Windows Update.

No, this time not about automatic restarts interrupting my work because I've postponed "important" updates for far too long.

Well, technically I lied.

Last evening windows force rebooted to install updates. OK then, I'll go home. This morning I saw windows update frozen at some percentage.

This evening I've got 3 forced restarts in 5 minutes. Only notepad++ with an opened and unsaved document saved my life.

Apparently, windows update follows a simple logic:

if(user.IsUsingComputer && lastUpgradeAttempt.HasFailedWithTotalFreeze && versionUpgrade.CanInstallOnlyWithFreshWindowsInstallation)
{
update();
}

Seriosly. Why am I forced to install an update only to see it lock up the entire computer and rollback after I intervene? Last time I had this issue only reinstalling windows helped, which costs about 2 days. Excluding one day to try suggested solutions, remove drivers, av scanner, etc.

Is it really that hard to implement logic like:

If(lastUpdateAttempt.HasFuckedUp)
{
windowsUpdate.FuckOff();
}

Let's say you're working on some pretty complex JavaScript code, and it's just not working right, nothing you try seems to fix it and you can't figure out what's going on. So, rather than continuing to bang your head against the desk, you decide to do the smart thing and shut down for the day.

You then come back to it the next day, refreshed and ready to do battle with the code! You start by adding a few simple logging statements to see what the hell is going on.

You then run the code and... IT WORKS PERFECTLY?!

You scratch your head for a while before finally realizing that cache didn't get cleared yesterday, so your changes were never executing.

D'oh!

Do you:

(A) Beat yourself up for missing such a stupid and basic thing despite doing this shit for literally over 25 years now, or:

(B) Do a happy dance because you just got a free day and can effectively start the weekend early knowing you accomplished your goal for the week?

(or, I suppose, both, which is kind of where I land)

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

To those of us who suffer from "Not invented here syndrome", I want you to ask yourself this question. If "reinventing the wheel is so valuable", would you re-implement the entire OSI stack?

No, as it would be a COMPLETE waste of time!!!

In all the layers below your application, several things related to how your code gets presented to your end-user are abstracted away from you. If you are able to accept that completely, why do you feel the need to re-implement every well-understood part of your particular project?

Cars, for example, are mostly made from standardized parts that solve well-understood problems. It then may have a few custom parts that may solve some novel problems to make it stand out from the rest.

Buildings are made completely from standardized parts, with regulations on how they are put together with some room for artistic flare.

If Software wants to be as equally respected as the rest, we need to get to that point.

DONT reinvent the wheel, just use battle-tested parts and just focus on what your project is trying to solve. It will be way more fruitful and fulfilling.

/rant

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

I love doing what we do b/c we're always solving tough problems... But f@&k it sucks just before the right answer becomes clear! It always feels like it's impossible, until you're playing with your daughter and her Barbie dolls... Then it's a battle of not forgetting it....

Welcome to ROAST YOUR BOSS BATTLE part 1

I will go first.

"Your personality is a complete horror movie with a Snapchat filter in disguise."

"If you working for heaven God will personally hire you just re-fire you for eternity."

"You are wasting resources, there are approximately 5 trees that provide you oxygen, go find them and apologies."

"Your mother should swallow you instead of giving birth to you, and this world will be less of one idiot."

It's more of a learning project than something I plan to actually use for anything, but after playing a few classic SNES-era RPGs, I started writing a simple turn-based battle system. I haven't worked on it in ages and would love to get back to it, maybe even turn it into a whole game some day.

IDE battle--- what is everyone using?

My main languages are- C# - laravel - node/angular - HTML/ CSS. And use git / aws.

I have used the following- and like / hate them all. :) but I want to see what others are using and opinions on them.

Visual studio- bla...
Sublime 2 & 3
Atom
Coda(s) 2 - 2.5
Phpstorm
IntelliJ
TeamCity
Mono develop
Eclipse

After 20 years of endless battle with Information & Technology, it'd be like..

I bought a $1 Steam game called Square Brawl some 5 years ago. It's a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares.

It's among my favourite couch multiplayer games, but the programming is shit. The resolution is weird, the launcher is some default config screen that came with the game engine, with a controller it's tricky to avoid picking a second color by accident which spawns a ghost player that is jointly controlled by the AI and the player. Sometimes the game spawns 10 copies of everyone, all of which you control at the same time. Getting stuck inside walls is commonplace.

On an unrelated note, I'm making a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares. It's gonna be FOSS and web-based. I haven't settled on a name yet but I think Tetragon Tussle might be good.

Very tired lately, also not very hungry ... And when I am hungry the food just doesn't taste like it used to 🤔 anyone had something lik this and maybe some tips on how to battle this?!

After two empty boxes of Kleenex, I’m excited to announce that I won the battle with common cold.

Seeing Angular markup after having used Aurelia for quite a while. Let the js framework battle begin.

Every time a new hype thing appeared, I was annoyed, like "kids these days and their tiktoks".

But at some point in time, this pattern of mine changed completely. I don't know how it happened, I don't know when it happened, but now I experience... acute nostalgia?

I miss Elon Musk and his twitter fanbase. I miss tiktok. I feel like a time traveller who went into their past, which is our present, to experience the cultural landmarks once again, because their time here is limited, and tomorrow they will have to go back.

I miss my autism problems and mental health uphill battle. I miss avengers and thanos. I miss metaverse.

Oh, and also... I miss you.

I've worked with a couple of languages but python won my heart at the end
Been using it for 5 years now
But I feel I need to revisit java and c#
But my python conscience whispers:
"Yu want to dump me now... of all the things we've done together"

The manager get me a new framework for a project in iOS.

But there is one problem, he unzip the framework in Windows OS, unfortunately in Windows unzip file differently from OS X. the result is a framework very strange, and it doesn't work!

You understand the battle between me and him.

There was a project I took over that was supposed to be at 90% when the previous developer quit. The project was in QA with some "minor" bugs that needed to be fixed. When I looked at the minor bugs I realized that the project had major underlying data issues. So after working 80 hour weeks I managed to hobble it together and make the release date.

That was a little over three years ago. Since then another developer has taken over maintenance and enhancements on the product and overall the application works pretty well for what it is.

So his analogy is, that the application is a tank that was made out of aluminum foil that has been hit many times in battle. Whenever it has been hit we have patched the tank with random things like bricks, soda bottles, and old car doors yet somehow it keeps going. The tank is still surviving the war but we really don't know how.

🐜

RANT

I am finally coming to the realization that I hate my job. I love working in my field but the place I working for saps my soul. It feels like a battle going to work every day.

I'm not sure if it because it is inherent working in local schools but it always just turns toxic. Teachers think you are their personal slave and why they can't get their class statistics up. Then they complain to the administration. That administration expects us, a skeleton crew, to bend over backwards, stop what we are doing, and fix everything. Because we aren't doing anything at all and we broke their shoot out of spite.

On top of that, and don't get me wrong, 1:1 is nice and all but it isn't just buying devices and giving them to teachers and hoping for the best. You have to invest in support, programs that work for the teachers in using the devices, and TRAIN THE TEACHERS!!! Teachers are smart in their own way but the online lifestyle isn't for everyone or of the box.

All in all, I just hate having to justify everything I do to people who just think everything is free and I have no personal life outside of work.

/rant

The life of a normal person is like waking up every day with a zero on the scale of suffering. You did something good — here are -20 points to that scale. Something bad happened — well, here are +10 points. Being a bipolar person, my life is like beginning every day with +500 suffer points. Every day is a devastating uphill battle to just break even.

Why live then?

You can't win. If you have a healthy sleep schedule, do sports and eat healthy, it's still +500 every day. One mistake like fucking up your sleep schedule — boom, you now start at +700.

In Japan, a new breakthrough in psychiatry is happening as they were able to tie bipolar disorder to a HHV6 herpesvirus messing up the operation of Parkinje cells in human brain, unreachable to the immune system because of blood-brain barrier. A nasal spray treatment is proposed. If successful, bipolar disorder could be cured forever.

Until an actual nasal spray is released, I decided to wait because it's a huge bummer killing myself only some three years before this breakthrough.

But if their experiments will never come to fruition and my conventional therapy will not be successful, I will kill myself.

I don't want to live like this.