Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

For fucking fuck sake I fucking hate those dense motherfuckers with professor degrees from university. Lazy shmucks.

How, HOW, can you, as a sentient human being, force anybody to use Netbeans for the fucking final project? Two SOAP services, two REST services and PHP for communication? In Netbeans!? WTF. You didn't even teach us PHP for fuck sake. Why can't I choose technology I'm using!?

And to top it all of, Netbeans is the worst IDE I've ever used. I'd rather kill myself with a spoon than use for even one more project. How can ANY TEACHER use it for lectures and tasks? Using it teaches you fucking nothing, because it's generating code for you. It makes you braindead when you just look at it. It's works like shit and looks like shit.

P.S.
I hope that devTea's swear-words blocker will have some fun with this rant.

Clients that ask you to build X and then when you ask about said details to know everything up front, you get a deer in the headlights look.

I get it, not knowing right away is fine, but 5-6 months later and still "not knowing", being absolutely lazy with no responses to questions or just dumping the work to me to figure out from whatever source material you got it from and force me to crunch to save your ass isn't fun for me and I really don't give a shit about how much praise you give me publicly for the job I did.

I hate the feeling you get when you do a lengthy, drooling task that once finished got you nowhere.

My day was mostly productive for a Sunday, woke up late as all Sundays, spent the afternoon writing a proposal and exercising when I saw a notification for a homework for tonight at 12.

A research paper about Dijkstra's philosopher problem, 8 pages minimum. To be honest I've seen the problem a long time ago while studying C++ and I had the theory down and that is my issue, it becomes inherently boring and useless in my head. Is in this situations that my mind gets lazy.

I wrote the first 3 pages in half an hour but I was done, I started revising the proposal and fixed a calculation error, checked Rust's take on the philosophers issue and decided to save it for winter break along with learning Rust (although got some basics down), made rough budget approximations for the next 3 months, lost myself a little bit on deep house music (notable tracks tadow from masego, nevermind - Dennis Lloyd and gold - Chet faker), etc...all in all it took me 3 hours more to finish the assignment, including breaks and dinner.

I am working on a lot of stuff lately and my main project's sprint ends this Tuesday and it pisses me off, after all that I learnt nothing new, got nowhere with my project and will probably get 80 because Google docs has no margin setting. Worse than being lazy for fun is inevitably being lazy for being compelled to do low priority tasks by your head's standards.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Automate is a great app...
(Scroll to last paragraph for a question if you wanna skip the faff)

Semi addicted to a time waster mobile game that has micro transactions. Yet you can get free ingame currency by watching ads over and over.

Using automate i managed to 'automate' the process of "watch add. Click ok. Repeat"

Now when i sleep or idle ill just let it rake up some cash. Sadly it isnt full proof as sometimes (1 out of 20 times) it fails to run the ad and that breaks ot all. But restsrting it is easy and thats another 20 cash!

What have you done to skip tedious work for something trivial or some trivial gain but felt good you did it anyways?

Not sure if this is the right place but Just givin' it a try :)
I always was pretty lazy in school and i will never forget that my teacher tols me that i will never reach anything with my attitude. BTW being lazy in school does Not mean being lazy at all. The whole time my classmates did their homework, i was sitting at my computer programming and developing new stuff.

Now 1,5 years later i succeeded at my A grade (Not good but i got it), have a nice, well-payed and fun job as a developer and received a scholarship worth 16k € on a private university for all my previous knowledge and efforts for the company.

Really want to go back to my teacher and tell him about all that stuff.

Thankful to be a developer 🙌

TL;DR: was bad at school, got blamed by a teacher several times for being lazy, still got the degree, now working as a developer (it's fun and well-payed) and received a scholarship worth 16k€ on a private university

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

I'm wanting to basically make a program or collection or scripts to automate all the boring parts of my life (cause I'm a lazy shit basically)
Any idea on what would be the best language to do this. I'm thinking python tbh. The end goal is going to be bills being payed ( I will out money manually into a PayPal account or something for this) and shopping being ordered to my house. Like I said I'm thinking python but wondering if there is anything better. I'm gonna end up having a computer or something set up just for theses scripts as will then extend into home automation or whatever I think looks fun. As the best way to learn is to try and making something fun