Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were learning to create a login system in mysql and php when one of my classmates showed me and the teacher his code.

He did a select all on the users table and looped through everything with a foreach.

We both tried to explain him why that wasn't the best method but he just refused to accept that.

He turned out a designer.

By the way, please never do it his way 😬

Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.

Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”

Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.

So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.

Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.

Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”

Client: “Nah”.

Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”

Client: “Yes, but minimal”.

Me: “So what do you want from me?”

Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).

Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”

Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).

Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?

Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”

Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”

Me: “...what, a month?”

Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”

*a long silence*

Client: “So... what do you think?”

Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.

The typical devRanter

1. Uses dark theme of IDE and devRant app
2. Hates his/her clients
3. Likes Arch based distros
4. Checks his/her ++'s count or notifications after publishing a rant
5. Hates facebook
6. Associate the morning with a cup of coffee
7. Can't do any job when there are no headphones
8. iPhone vs Android? - fuck, they both are good/bad
9. Every time googles git command to remove a local branch
10. The best VCS is git, but I never used any other VCS

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of awesome people early into my career.

At the company I worked where I met @trogus, I became friends with a few people, including Tim, that I think were my favorites. It was a really fun bunch and though it may sound immature, but a lot of the times it felt like we were kids so for me coming out of college it was awesome.

There's so many stories from working with that bunch that come to mind for me. One of my best friends there was this guy "Dirty Devin." He started around the same time I did. When I first met him he seemed really boring and professional. After getting to know him, and after he'd been at the company for a few weeks, his actual personality started to show and he was like a child (in the best way possible) and was absolutely hilarious/made the work place a blast.

Our office had a ping pong table and neither Dirty Devin or I had ever really played. We started playing against each other and we both very quickly got really good.

I also met a guy named Botond (he's the one in the photo). He was very similar to Dirty Devin. Lots of crazy stories but the photo is actually a really funny one - we both got to work a few minutes early one day. And we couldn't get into the office. We kept trying to enter the door code and it wouldn't work. We kept joking that we must both be fired. Turned out that they had fired someone the night before and didn't bother to send out the new door code :/

And of course, Tim. I think we clicked pretty early on and had the same friend group at the company.

Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.

Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.

Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)

Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.

Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.

C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.

Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.

APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?

HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.

LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.

VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.

C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.

JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.

Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.

Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.

Credit: Thomas jalabert

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

So apparently devRant is a problem in my life. As those of you who've read any of my stuff here know I work at Victoria's Secret. So two of my friends come in just before I was ending my shift to see what the plans were for tonight. The usual - hit the club, crash at one of our houses.

Thing is, I was scrolling through devRant when they walked up. (the below is paraphrased)

Friend1: Ugh, you're still on that thing?

Friend2: Is she really? <looks over my shoulder>

Me: <eyeroll>

Friend2: I don't get it. <pokes me in the left tit> You barely post on Instagram and you don't tweet anymore. And you haven't commented on any of my posts in like days. Wtf bitch?

Disclaimer: Yes, we are those girls who talk like that and go clubbing and dress up and makeup and all that shit. Don't judge me because I don't give a fuck. Anyway...

Friend1: Seriously.

Me: Really? We're doing this? Because I haven't posted on fucking Instagram? I talk to you every day. I see you every other day. I like coding. I like tech. This place is awesome and the people are cool. If I want to see your ass or your outfit, I can just look at you. I don't need to be on Instagram 24/7.

Friend2: Jeez bitch. Need a tampon

<we all laugh>

Me: This is my thing. It doesn't mean we aren't friend and we won't chill, but my future is in development and technology. So deal hoes.

Friend1: Ugh you're such a nerd.

Friend2: <laughing>

Me: And you're both like totally vapid sluts. But I love you.

Friend2: Jelly

Friend1: Totes jelly. Girl you need some vitamin D

Me: I'm sayin'. But that doesn't mean I won't spend my free time coding.

Friend2: Ugh alright we don't give a fuck. Code or whatever. Just be ready at 11.

We all flip each other the bird and they leave. I guess if that's the level of acceptance I can get from my wonderful, gorgeous, annoying, amazing, asshole best friends, I'll take it. I am not changing my path.

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

Can we just appreciate for a second how @dfox is active in his own community, both in support and as a user? I've seen like a dozen posts today of "dfox ++'d my post on my new account", my own included.

Best OP

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

One thing I've learned repeatedly over the last 20 years is that companies are generally not deserving of your loyalty.

By all means, show up, apply yourself, and do your best work, that's just being a professional. But never get emotionally invested in a company you don't own.

There are really only two reasons for staying: earning or learning, ideally both. Once you have exhausted your current employer's limits in this regard, move on, you don't owe them anything.

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

The girl I loved for four years left me four months ago. It has been the most painful four months of my life and I struggled through the initial days. Both my health and my productivity suffered.

But I feel better now. Trying my best to keep moving forward and stay positive. Realised that shit happens and we can't just sudo our way out of everything.

Just wanted to share. Thank you for reading this far.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

Really upbeat quirky music on full blast. That really gets me pumped up.

*Story Time*
In my previous company, I had the best co-workers both technically and personally. So this one time we had a product launch scheduled and there was a shit load of tasks that had to be done before the launch. The entire team used to work for 18 hours straight almost daily to meet the deadline. Sometimes stress used to get the better of us, so to help ourselves relax, we used to play pranks on each other. Like this one time one of my friends had left his email logged in. Obviously we shot out a mail to the entire company group that I have become a dad. The funny part about this was he wasnt even married. So things like these used to keep us going and there was always laughter and fun going around.

I.
FUCKING.
*HATE*.
THIS.
KIND.
OF.
PEOPLE!!

I KNOW that you don't understand what you're doing or saying, THAT'S WHY I JUST TOLD YOU A VERY SHORT, SIMPLE, AND CLEAR SENTENCE TO SAY WORD-FOR-WORD TO THE OTHER GUY WHO, IF HE'S AT LEAST HALF-COMPETENT SHOULD IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTAND AND RESPOND WITH *FOUR* *WORD* *ANSWER* and instead of that you blabber on for 5 minutes how you don't know what to say to him and how to explain what we need (FUCKIN ADMIN LOGIN YOU BOTH WINEFLY-BRAINED MORONS!), and he blabbers for 5 minutes back something something bullshit someone else and then REMOTES INTO THE COMPUTER, AND DOES A SYSTEM REINSTALL OR REMOVES DUDE'S USER ACCOUNT OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT BECAUSE MY SKYPE CALL WITH THE DUDE DROPS AND NEXT TIME DUDE IS CALLING ME HE'S CONFUSED ABOUT SYSTEM SETUP SCREENS!!!!!!

WHAT!!!!
THE!!!!!
SHIIIIIITTT!!!!

told him sorry but call the fucker who fucked it up for you, i'm not wasting two hours of my time just because some school "IT admin" thinks the best solution for user not knowing his admin login is to remotely trigger a reinstall or someshit on the machine.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

Any other front-end developers check out Visual Studio Code? It’s got a lot of really nice features, including the absolute best implementation of Emmet I’ve ever seen. My new favorite editor on both Windows and Mac!

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.

Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.

Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?

Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.

Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.

Me: but…

Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.

Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…

Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.

Me: but it’s a product!

Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!

Me: I lead the frontend teams…

Manager: ….

Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.

Me: I confused but happy… I think..

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

The robotics proffessor has offered me :
1- joining uni's robotics team
2- joining the startup team

I then asked if I can take both of them and he said this is not recommanded.
So what do you think?
Whick of the 3 items (3- none) fits best?

Best of both worlds. Yeah, I'm broke.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

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.

You wake up in the middle of the night with an awesome idea for a new app.
You spend weeks thinking about it, open a private repo, start to design the UI and logo, and in all your excitement explain your idea to the family and best friends, but no one really finds it cool.
Slowly you start to lose the excitement, day after day you consider it more and more stupid, until you start to hate both the idea and yourself because you really liked it.

6 months later, when you totally forgot about it, you find an app on the App Store very similar to it (but with less features)... as App of the Day, sold for €6.99, 4.8 rating, thousands of positive comments and loved by everyone.

The moral of this story?
If you really like your idea, just make it happen without looking at anyone.

I was actually successful in one that I literally got from the American version of The Office.

I conditioned one of my employees to want chewing gum after I did a clap motion with my hands: snap the fingers on both hands really quick and do a fist to palm tap and say "hey bud, want gum?" and because I specifically bought his favorite he would always say yes.

Eventually, and after months of doing it, I was walking around the office when I did the motion, but this time without gum. Now, he was on the fifth levek of the virtual world doing his shit fully concentrated and he STILL looked up at me looking anxious. I said "what's up?" and he just said nothing, that he felt that he was missing something but couldn't put the finger on it.

Just like in the show, he then complained that his mouth felt funny. Eventually he waddled his way to my office to ask for gum 🤣🤣🤣🤣

tl;dr I successfully Pavlov'ed one of my employees to have a need of chewing gum every time I do a finger snap clap motion.

I am the best manager in the world.

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

Linus Torvalds. He created Linux and Git, both used by millions of people. He started to create Linux when he was 21 and still in university. It is currently running on a lot of devices including Android. That is really an accomplishment, to make an operating system is one of the most complex things you can create as a programmer. It is also cool that it's open source and how it is maintained. Both Linux and Git was created because he needed them, he creates things that are useful. He could have earned a lot of money but he cares much more about tools and software than money. I think he is a great person and speaker (and he is from my neighboring country Finland 🙂). I use Git everyday in my work and it makes it so much easier. He is for me without a doubt the best programmer in the world.

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

I think the coolest all-nighter I can remember is when me and one of my best friends were still in school. We were up all night figuring out what to make. At the time we played a little browser click game, so we came up with the idea of creating a bot for it.

We're both PHP developers, but we figured that wouldn't be an appropriate language to write a bot in. So we went for C#. Both of us never worked with it.

At the end of the night we built a fully functioning bot, that could continue playing the game when we were at school. It could do all our manual tasks and could even decode Captchas with the Google OCR package.

That night was productive.

First time in years that I've hugged my best friend. Felt weird and we got really confused looks from the others (class full of boys n shit), but we were so happy because we both got a really good grade on an important test!

Why isn't this a common things men do!? We should all hug more 🤗

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Tl;dr: I do not care. Just read it or fuck off.

A friend of mine who is a paki classmate, as well, had applied for the same "Ausbildung" offer as me half a year ago.
The company is based in Germany, but is working in the US, France, UK, Turkey, China, [...], too.
After 2 interviews, they told us to contact us back within the next week. We have had our interviews on Sundays.
In the list of all candidates I was the second best. The top candidate was my classmate. The third best candidate was a guy who was involved in the last interview with both, me and my paki friend.
The candidates list was not shown to everyone else, but my paki friend.
They wanted to give him the job. [That is a big company who is creating a new dev team and expanding their IT building. Nonetheless they only accept only one candidate.]
My classmate had been given a letter that he had to sign within the same hour he was with the managers. He discussed it and said that he has other offers open and want to compare them first. They gave him a timespan of only 1 day afterwards to sign it.
He told me he is going to decline it and he did.
Normally, I should have been the person who gets the letter to sign to be accepted for the job, but no.
After letting me wait for almost 2 weeks, they sent me an mail (they usually sent ordinary letters to invite me to interviews lol) in which they said that I am unfortunately not taken for the job yada yada yada and that they wish me luck for my future.
Fuck yourselves. How about that?
I was the second best candidate. The best candidate did not want the job yet you fucking morons do this type of shit. You want the best for me?
I want the worse for you. Death to both of you managers who sucked all of my energy, patience and time.
I am really fucking pissed rn

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Be me
>programming since I got up
>don't have much time to program because job sucks up all my time
>dont know the best solution to a problem so decide to take a small break
>open rocket league
>start 1v1 match
>4 minutes later
>dad walks in my room, demanding I go pretend to be a stone age nibba
>pic related
>wants me to dig some dirt for his crops
>wants me to carry multiple buckets of water
>wants me to plow literally fields
>no.jpg
>thisIsRealLifeNotMinecraft.wav
>tells me that I'm addicted
>tells me that he's getting rid of the Internet again
>fuckyou.png

Only my girlfriend and programming bring me joy and you reduce my capacity to interact with both. Fuck you.

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Advice to new coders? I got multiple, unrelated to each other.

1. Start with the FUCKING BASICS !! Invest some time with fundamentals, don't just directly jump on frameworks like React or Angular.

2. You and everyone else are always going to blame your technical skills if you're unable to land a job. But you have to realize that is not always the case. Your attitude and energy towards the interviewer plays a vital role too.

3. You're gonna have to take a hit to your salary expectations starting out. It's just the way this industry works.

4. Think of yourselves as a freelancer working for companies. Those who call themselves Employees get stagnant and dependent on their company pretty fast.

5. Your objective is either to learn or earn. If there is both, amazing job. If there is either it's good enough. If there is none, time to jump ship !!

6. HR is there to protect the company from you not the other way around. Be better at spotting crocodile tears.

7. Try to find a WFH job over a WFO job. If you have an urgency, then either works but keep applying to WFH jobs. It's the best thing.

8. Focus on what you're building instead of what you're building it with. Devs have a tendency to fight over what tech stack they should use instead of focussing on the larger picture.

9. You're gonna get overwhelmed at some point when you're gonna get terms thrown at you like XML, JSON, API, Figma, Git, SOAP, REST. Don't worry though you'll get there.

10. You should know how to google your solutions, like really. This is like 60% of the job.

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

If you like looking at language designers fight on Hacker News (and who doesn't?) go ahead and search for the V programming language or Vlang as it is also called and also for the posts that the creator of Odin lang has done in regards to V langs creator.

Its a shitstorm. Apparently both languages have been designed as alternatives to C (not as in "this will kill C!!" like rust does) and occasionally you will find some posts from the Zig language creator.

Fascinating fights actually, have been able to learn a thing or two about why some ideas concerning language design are whacky etc.

I am also trying to understand language design better, which is the main reason why I appreciate all of them fights.

10/10 best drama series I have seen thus far.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Current list of developer skills:

* Can find 3rd or 4th best solution to most problems

* Easily ready to accept blame for anything to save time since it's likely my fault anyway

* Caffeine addiction only enough to make you worry, not intervene

* Can explain how JavaScript DOESN'T work, thus getting us both closer to understanding how it does

* Only choke on parts of presentations that aren't critically important, like minor details and Q&A

* Good at smack talking other languages I also don't know how to use

* can make a mean gumbo

Best of both Worlds: Android on Phone, OS X for working. In my opinion everyone should use what he/she likes best. So no offense to anyone :) btw: I know that the Android Sticker doesn't look 100% like the original one.. it's all about the message behind it :)

I'm pretty new here, but I can't begin tell you how much I appreciate feeling like a part of a dev community for the first time. It's great having a place to share, vent, and occasionally let out a fuck-filled rant.

I guess most jobs are too formal for you to be verbal and brutally honest about your experiences and frustrations -- and friends can take the honesty but do not understand the technical stuff. This place seems to be the best of both words. Cheers.

My best CS teacher was the most passionate dev I've ever met. He is still teaching Software Engineering at 65, and he's reached that unreachable level of nerdiness, when you are more of a philosopher than just a coder.

Random anecdote: back in 2010, we both spent Christmas week playing and prototyping with Lego Mindstorms and Android, in preparation for my bachelor thesis project!

I fucking hate stupid accountants!

Yesterday we went to a customer to talk to the accountants because we want to remove one of their unused PC's in the office.

First, just the way they think (and talk if) they are the most important and it's absolutely critical everything works 100%. I see they are important but not 100 times more important than everybody else!

They called us their EDP-guys (EDV in German, that's the translation I found). That insulted me a bit. I'm rather called IT-guy, I don't know anything about the fucking EDP systems nor want I to. I'm there to make sure the hardware works. But whatever, fine, call me what you want.

Then they straight up threatened us, because their work is so important, they can't afford to have downtime in their systems. They don't really care, but the bosses of us both do and if we fuck up they (the bosses) will hold us responsible. There is a fucking update for your piece of shit software (datev)! I don't do the update, I'm just responsible that the update can be deployed on the hardware. I'm not responsible if this update fucks your system and frankly I don't care!

I could tell them all of this but they won't listen. They always talk in this patronising arrogant voice, because they are so important and we better don't fuck up the update.

I'm there to help. I don't want downtime for your systems. I want you to work with our systems the best you can.
But fuck you, I hope the server burns down!

I'm not much a fan of JavaScript. In fact, I am not very fond of any dynamic language, but JavaScript is one of my least favorites.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS for all of my web serving. Why would I do that? Am I a masochist? Yes.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS because having the same language on client and server side is something that web has never really seen before, not in this scale. Something I really really love with NodeJS is socket connections. There's no JSON parsing, no annoying conversion of data types. You can get network data and use it AS IS. If you transmit over socket using JSON, as soon as that data arrives on the server, it is available to use. It gets me so hard.

JavaScript is built to be single-threaded, and this is rooted deep into the language. NodeJS knows this isn't gonna work. And while there's still no way to multi-thread, they still try their best and allow certain operations (Usually IO) to run async as if you were using ajax.

With modern versions of the language, the server and client side can share scripts! With the inclusion of the import keyword, for the first time I have ever seen, client and server can use the same fucking code. That is mindblowing.

Syntax is still fluffy and data types are still mushy but the ability to use the same language on both sides is respectable. Can't wait for WebASM to go mainstream and open this opportunity up to more languages!

Aggressively eliminate from your life everything that causes the slightest mental distress. Replace everything that has to it even a hint of undesirable emotions.

I once read about a girl who left work to buy a plane ticket to Australia to get away from her abusive boyfriend, and started her life from scratch. Being in an abusive relationship myself, I envied her.

One million seconds is eleven days. One billion seconds is 31 years. If you have just one second to spend with a person, you won't run out of the population for 248 whole years. There is no such thing as an irreplaceable person, no matter if they're your father, mother, best friend, wife, or husband.

Pain and trauma won't really go away, but they won't get bigger. You, however, can. One day you will be dying, and realizing at that moment that you didn't live the life you wanted to live, while knowing it's too late now, is the scariest thing that can happen to a human being. As you fade away, the sense of time will slip, and whatever you're feeling will stretch to eternity. Make it an eternity of calm happiness, and not an eternity of doubt and sorrow.

Make sure that when this moment comes, you're ready and comfortable with the life you lived. At least be confident it was YOUR life, and not someone else's.

This goes to everyone, both mentally/physically ill and healthy, and to both neurotypical and on the spectrum.

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.

I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.

"Hey Human,

I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.

FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.

I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.

PeeEm**"

This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:

// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.

// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*

Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.

*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.

**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.

I've fucking had it with youtube, fucking jizz slapping knob butlers. I'm going to setup a mirror on my server, the idea is:

- Setup a youtube-dl cron that fetches multiple times a day both audio and video versions of the music playlist I have, hopefully with some sort of progress tracking of each download and total, so I could check if it has run successfully and have a nice dashboard, might need to do that myself (except if compactd proves itself to manage that all)

- Need to figure out a way to download the "best" quality but not go beyond 1080p, since if some videos for some reason are uploaded @ 4k, that'll be a waste of space

- Have Compactd/Funkwhale/Koel as the music player frontend for the audio version of the files, preferably one of them should offer download of the files too, so I could have a similar setup to spotify, though I could probably also just have some filebrowser installed or have a password protected index.

- Not sure what to use for the video versions, since sometimes the video goes with the music; plex? emby? suggestions are welcome

- Saw somebody (ab)using google drive as their backup for all the music they download, so I want to setup something similar, rsyncing all videos and music to some account, so in case shit majorly hits the fan, I can just download everything back

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Just found an interface in an app of my company that uses the best of both worlds: csv AND xml 🤦🏻‍♂️

<Name>John;<Lastname>Doe;

🤣

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

I am .net developer which doesn't work with .net core(yet) and obviously i have windows as work os, while at home elementary OS is my main(again dual booting win10). I don't get why so many linux/windows rants are around. Get best of both worlds. I personally constantly need both and each are very different and better at handling different stuff, so why don't you (fanboys) stop it :)

From today on I'll have two roommates. Two girls, who always listen. And the best part, if I don't like their response I'll just use their APIs to make them say what I want. Too bad both of them are unemotional boxes.

Our relationship is like a diode, you take and never give (I demand sex as compensation).

Btw, I really used this but with simpler words with two girls who wanted a ride to go and have fun with other boys in the clubs...

My best friend gave them a ride for over a year.
When we denied more, they started calling me... Wonder why.

Took them one time, asked for gás money.
Only called me one-month later, didn't ask for gás but said I wanted some snug and fun in return... OK, you can have us both (OH YEAH!!!).
On the club, they go for the muscular guys, leaving me alone.
When I got tired, got to one of them and said, ask your friend a ride home because I'm going now. (they ran for my ride since the guys they picked were all pricks and would probably dump them somewhere).
Never called me again...
Told what I did to my best friend, next time they called he demanded sex for both of us, never called him again.
And that's how you fuck opportunistic people. Fuck them.

Found out two of our best engineers put in their notice. They both have shaped the culture here and I don’t know what it’s going to be like without them.

!rant

MASSIVE UPGRADE ROUND 2:

We took it by steps, the DBA did his portion and I did mine, we had waited for the entire thing to be finalized today on Sunday since our users are probably jerking off to their waifus (as they should) and today was my part. MA BOE the DBA was with me the entire time and the whole process took us about 4 hours of both of us getting multiple heart attacks here and there and praying to the elder gods of Asgard for their devine protection as we venture into the calamity of fire and juten ass mfkers that are our fucking servers for this particular process.

Man I really hope for the pandemic to be over and take my dude out for a nice beer, some wings and some relaxation time.

Best DB/Dev team I have ever been with.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

My best prank: A year ago I was at my friends flat, which he finally rented with his new girlfriend. He is a kind of person, which has like constantly opened 110 tabs in chrome, three or four instances of chrome running, torrenting at full speed and in the meanwhile a few films having opened to "watch" later. He is very very secure about his computer and NEVER leaves me or anyone else alone with his computer. That day we were just talking in the same room, and he goes for some food. I was like yeah thats my chance to prank him. So I opened a new tab and came with an idea - what If I change his desktop background to some random chick, to prank both him and his gf. I knew she will not be mad but his reaction would be priceless (it was his first gf). So I started googling, found a three pretty naked chicks. This was like soft porn, they were still "dressed" but not much. I did not wanted to use a porn for this.
So I was about to download image - right click - save as - little window opened and..

...what the hell, that guy had literally like terabytes of porn in download folder, all totally in one chaos, thousands of images, millions of downloaded videos, all categories just everything from gangbang to milfs or old/ young, what the fuck that computer was like cursed station of porn.

In that point I was like fuck that. This prank has no sense then. So I just closed that little window and did nothing. Prank failed.

Nowdays, He still does not know what I know about his "hobbies". And I will never say him lol. About a months after he broke with his gf and moved to different house. He has now three monitors attached to his computer and 4tb of space. He is still complaining about "lack of space" and "too big downloaded movies" but we all know what is going on lol. We call his "working deck" a sacred porn station.

Very random, I’d normally post this on twitter but my girlfriend is there and it’s about her. A bit long and very personal...

to;dr My girlfriend and soon to be fiancé officially who is certain we are going to marry, doesn’t want to invite people to our wedding anymore because she doesn’t have close friends like I do and I’m quite disappointed.

My girlfriend and I have been planning to get married for a while now at least 18 months. I haven’t asked her to marry me yet officially but I know she’ll say yes because we’ve discussed it. We’ve spoken about a small wedding with a few friends not much family but the more we spoke about it the more she’s reduced how many people we should invite. Today she basically said she doesn’t want to invite anyone because she doesn’t have any friends she’s that close to or trusts like that.
By comparison I have about 5 best friends I can count on any day of the week and at least 5 other friends I’d want to be there. We’re both introverts but I’m close to some of these guys because we have similar mental illnesses and trauma from our youth and we gravitated to each other like magic. She kinda gets jealous of that sometimes or sad that she isn’t close to anyone like that besides me. But not like a toxic jealousy or anything. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point it really may just be us at our wedding.
I’m a romantic and the day will be great regardless, after all it’s her I’m marrying not them. On the flip side I’ve always seen my wedding day as something I’d get to share with my close friends I wanted to get married in the past in fact this would be the second time I’d propose to someone. She’s the one that made me feel like I’d marry again after the first engagement went terribly.
I’m disappointed and if I bring it up too much it’s just gonna make her feel awkward and cave for me but I don’t want that. Gonna marry her regardless though.

Once again I have loads.

My best teachers were...

The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.

The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.

But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).

Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.

He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.

He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.

As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.

Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.

The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.

You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.

Hello fellow coders can you help me here plz.

I'm really confused whether to buy MACBOOK PRO 13 INCH or SURFACE PRO 4. Both of i5/8gbRam/256ssd specs. Price almost same in India.

My main use is programming ( web apps/ open source) + portability.

Factors I like in macbook pro:
1) unix based
2) best service here in India ( heard from answers on Quora )
3) DURABILITY ( heard from answers on Quora ) ( will last for many years without any glitch).

Factors I like in Surface pro 4:
1) its ultraportability
2) pen & touch
3) better typing experience ( since I code/blog for long hours)
4) native bash support
5) sexier than MBP :P

I really like SP4 over MBP but I'm worried about its durability and service(in India).

What are your thoughts on this guyz?

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

Me and the CEO of my company are both in the same clan in clash of clan.

I've never worked for a cooler guy. And funny enough he is much much much better than me. He has been playing for like 4 years.

When I started writing this 2 weeks ago (yes I forgot about this) he was working with us, he resigned in the meantime.

I just did the same, Today.

So, I guess best ex-ceo for a probably best ex-employee.

😕😕😕😢😢😢😕😕😕

Not work, but was very pissed off anyways.

So, today my C# lecturer was teaching about escape sequences in strings. Specifically, he's showing how to escape the single quotes character ( ' ) since we're learning about how to send SQL queries as well.
He started writing on the whiteboard the following and said that this was how to escape the single quotes character in a string:
\' "abc123" \'
Me and one of my classmates looked at this and started to ask questions, since this is definitely not how you do it. Somehow, the lecturer could not understand us. We tried to explain it the best we could, starting from verbally, then writing on the whiteboard, then even showing code on a laptop. For some unknown reason the lecturer still couldn't understand where he was wrong and both of us just gave up after 15 minutes of trying to explain it.
Mind you, most of the class had little to none prior programming experience, me and said classmate are one of the few that actually programmed before, so all my other classmates were just very confused as to what is right and what is wrong.
Now I'm really questioning my lecturer's abilities....

Network, talk to people, and get yourself on the spot, document everything and make sure that you take action when others do not.

Kissing ass can take you far, but I ain't about that life, because sooner or later the fucker that promoted you because he liked his pp getting suckd by you will leave or get put in the spot. Or change alleagiances.

Your best bet is to be ANYTHING OTHER THAN A FUCKING NECKBEARD WITH AUTISM and be someone that people likes being around, I know it sounds hardcore, but people around you will ignore the things you don't know if you are a charismatic guy. Dress well, work out or find ways to improve yourself in ways that are noticeable, use human psychology to be fucking likeable.

Work hard, both on yourself and on your craft, study, get better, be social.

Stop being a twat because high chances are that the higher executives of your branch will not give a shit about your knowledge, but how good is to have you around. Join the circle, fuck your opinions about anything else, this is business, and business doesn't care about a lot of things. Don't cut throats, but make yourself a force to be reckoned with.

Source: Upper management, deals with VPs on a daily basis, knows that being a neckbeard will not take you anywhere.

The facebook python group caused me to make this meme due to the outrageous number of Which ide for python posts we see there.

Everyday its the same 2 questions, How long does it take to learn python, and which IDE is best.

Both of these questions require subjective answers. fml.

I interviewed for a Lead role at a popular energy producing company last week. The fucking retard that was interviewing me was multi tasking and only asked me a few questions. It was as if he was forced to do it. He came late and couldnt even introduce himself. He just started asking questions.

After about 2-3 questions, he asked me to tell him my current salary and my salary expectations. I told him to go fuck himself for the former and said i was open to negotiations for the latter. We said our goodbyes afterwards and the interview was terminated. The easiest I have done in a long time.

Fast forward to last friday, I received a call from someone in HR. She offered £60k. I couldn't believe what I heard, so I asked her to repeat the offer. She replied in the affirmative, £60k! I refused and told her I was hoping for £100k because that's like the average for the position I applied for. I could literally hear her gasp with shock when I said that. She replied by saying that's the kind of salary we pay people 2 levels above the one you have applied for! What the fuck I said to myself. Is your company that poor was all I could think of??? I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told her to go and see if they can come back with an improved offer.

She sent me a mail this morning saying the best they can do is £75k. Oh no, for your troubles and mine, can you talk to HR and let them raise it £95k was my reply to her. She replied moments later, No. £75k is the final offer. C'mon, I presently earn more than that. I only want to leave my current company for new challenges.

Moral of the story: Politely ask for the salary range for the role you are applying for at the early stages. It saves both the employer and applicants having to go through an interview process only to be disappointed at the end.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

Observation rather than a rant.

Some of the best, most experienced devs I've ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with have invariably all been the most humble and least opinionated. Mention (x language that might commonly draw disdain) and you don't hear boos and hisses and jokes being thrown around, you hear considered, succinct observations about how, if they were to work with this language, there'd be various coding styles and rules that they'd suggest working to in order to avoid some common pitfalls and frustrations.

Mention a language or framework that they know little about, or heck, they know quite a *lot* about but in which they wouldn't consider themselves an expert, and they're the first to suggest drafting in help. They're more than happy to listen to bring themselves up to speed, even if that "outside help" comes from someone considerably younger and less experienced than them.

This has particularly come to mind as of late as I've found myself working with both ends of the spectrum, but it's been my experience for many years now. Have many others had the same experience?

It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.

Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.

In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.

I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.

My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on.

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

A medical doctor, a lawyer and a programmer debate whether it's best to have a wife or a girlfriend.

"Easy", the lawyer starts, "a girlfriend comes without any legal obligation, you can have a lot of fun together but when you get enough of her, you can just leave her without any trouble"

The physician objects: "That can only come from a man who never truly loved a woman. Your wife is not just someone who you have fun with, she is you bastion of calm, your ever-loyal partner, the completition yourself. Clearly, having a wife is better"

Both now look at the programmer who remained silent throughout the debate.

He cleans his throat and than says: "Both. You need both. You can tell you wife you're with your girlfriend and you can tell your girlfriend you are with your wife. And then, you can finally code in peace.

Worst:

Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.

Best:

After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job.

!rant

Me and one of my best friends joke way too much about being in a relationship that when he said that we should get married I legit spaced out and started to think how would that even work because he lives in Mexico and I live in the U.S. then i wondered how our work schedule would be and who would hog his gaming pc the most

We are both dudes and we are not gay. But you know man...if you are nor gay for your best friend...are you even best friends?

I've finally found a goldmine of accurate job listings that don't include Windows shit-administration... So I'm thinking of sending out applications to all of them. Problem is, as you might recall from my previous rants, I had a flash drive with my GPG keypair on it stolen from me. I still haven't fully replaced the key (I made another one and published it but I'm not using it yet), and because I'm fairly confident that this flash drive's data has never been used (so likely just plugged into Windows and formatted), it's unlikely that I'm gonna bother rotating all of the contents that were on that flash drive.

That said however, my emails now all have signatures underneath them as follows:
Met vriendelijke groet / Best regards,
[my name]

- My outbound email is usually signed with my private key. If not, please don't hesitate to ask me about it through a different communication platform.

IMPORTANT: My keys have possibly been compromised. An encrypted flash drive on which this GPG keypair was stored has been stolen from me. I'm in the process of phasing out and replacing this key. Please do not use it to encrypt any emails to me anymore.

Not entirely sure whether I should remove or keep that last bit. As a potential employer, would you see this as a red flag (he's got encrypted data stolen from him, wtf that's incompetent), or as a nice thing to know that it was properly disclosed (so no secrecy around potential data breaches)? Both seem equally likely so I'm a bit confused about what I should do.

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

Let me tell you a tale, children. Of how one of the mostly ghastly, horrid pieces of software currently on this earth came to be in its current, pitiful state.

It all began on January 28th, 2015.

On that day, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, sat leisurely in his office. He had just finished watching a live stream for a conference held by Facebook.

Minutes after the stream ended, he quietly sat in his chair, pondering over what was just shown.

The whole keynote was well done, he thought. But something about it just didn’t sit right with him. It was one specific line uttered by one of the keynote speaker that bothered him.

“React Native will help developers easily write code that will work on both iOS and Android”.

Out of all the talking done throughout that conference, it was that sentence, in particular, that stuck out like a sore thumb t Cook.

Those words began to echo in his head. “...Android”, Tim muttered to himself, gritting his teeth.

He immediately grabbed his Iphone from his pocket, and called the Technical Director of Xcode.

On the phone, the two discussed Xcode as it pertained to Facebook’s latest tool.

“Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide any support for React Native”, Cook told the director; “Just make it a bit more inconvenient for anyone using React, that’s all”.

The director thought his boss was nuts. Why on earth would you want to intentionally make using an IDE as painful of an experience as possible? But the technical director also knew that, more importantly, he wanted to keep his job.

“...We’ll do our best to make it a total pain in the ass to use React Native in Xcode”, the director told his boss with a shrug.

And so began one of the sickest jokes ever played on developers. A joke so twisted and cruel, it would make even the creator of PHP gasp in abject horror.

Who knew that someone would go out of their way to create an IDE that doesn’t even bloody work half of the time.

And don’t get me started on the absolute piss poor excuse for documentation this thing has.

The saddest and funniest side of our industry is (atleast in India): someone works hard and makes it to the best colleges, do great projects on AI, ML; get a good score on Leetcode, codechef; gets a job in FAANG-like companies...

Changes colors in CSS and texts in HTML.

And, why is there so much emphasis on Data Structures and Algorithms? I mean, a little bit is fine, but why get obsessed with it when you never write algorithms in production code?

Now, don't tell me that, we use libraries and we should know what we are doing, no, we don't use algorithms even in libraries.

Now, before you tell me that MySQL uses B-tree for maintaining indexes, you really don't need to solve tricky questions to be able to understand how a B-tree works.

It's just absurd.

I know how to little bit on how design scalable systems.
I know how to write good code that is both modular and extensible.
I know how to mentor interns and turn them into employees.
I know how to mentor junior engineers (freshers) and help them get started.
Heck I can even invert a binary tree.

But some FAANG company would reject me because I cannot solve a very tricky dynamic programming question.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

I’m gonna invent scrumban.

I am gonna toot my own horn a little in here and say that the best mentorship experience I've had comes from me being the mentor.

I have trained interns at work, and they both said that I was able to teach them more than all their programming teachers combined. I was a TA at uni and got the same remarks and i help friends in their uni level courses at a local uni all the time. The remarks are always the same.

I like teaching. And don't know why some people hate it so much yet still decide to take in a paycheck. I want this industry to get better, I want my city to get better(because I loathe it) and I really get a good feeling from seeing other people succeed and be happy.

I really want to teach. Thinking about getting more years under my belt, earn a master's degree and then I would really want to teach professionally.

My biggest issue, here in the U.S education is ridiculously expensive. Teachers that don't give their best and yet make that paycheck are a disgrace to our industry. I want to show passion to others and if possible transfer a lil bit of it.

I just want to teach man. Already work at a school and I want to make that transition one of these days.

I seriously don't fucking understand those people who like programming iDevices.

I mean, in my personal experience you have:
- iPhone not connecting to a WiFi (while working on a network project)
- Mac, while using multiple desktops on 2 monitors: I have the 3rd desktop active on the 2nd monitor, search for terminal to open it and it opens in the 1st desktop of the first monitor
- while making an app (ionic or unity), is about 5 to 15 times slower compared to the same android apps (same exact code, but gotta go throught XCode, y'know?)
- takes YEARS to download XCode, but is necessary to even just build for lastest iPhones updated
- takes years to upload to AppStore and when it's done it just tells you "oh bitch, you know what? you forgot that fucking icon for tablets, how about you rebuild it all? and NO, you have to change the build number or I won't accept it"
- App quality was so pedantic on the first publish but then always fucks it up at the second upload, like "hey we checked it the first time, now we can just 100% trust it works and doesn't use anything scammy"
- code+compiled app for iOS is like 1GB while android vode+build is like 100MB WTF do you even put in those 900MB? random trash? WHY?
- I'm not even gonna get into the forums or the amount of money you have to pay for both product and services
- MacOS works ALMOST like Linux, but takes all the worst from both windows and linux to give you the worst performance with the best graphics, but it looks cool, so doesn't matter

A good world would be a world where Apple goes bankrupt after Steve Jobs died

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

Best part of the holidays for me has been the steam sales. I grabbed "TIL-100" and "Infinifactory". Both of them are wonderful logic games, and til-100 has you programming in assembly. It's the most challenging yet fun way I've ever programed!

A while back a buddy and I were keen on making an MMORPG that for a variety of reasons just didn't work out.

Game development is an exercise in futility unless you have a LOT of time and a LOT of willpower. Unfortunately, where the project would have taken at least both of us, only one of us was able to actually do the work. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which one of us it was :|

It sucks because it was a stellar idea, the art style was going to be amazing, and I had already began working hard on a lot of the music. My best musical work to date, just sitting private on my soundcloud, unused and collecting dust.

Listening to them now still fills me with that glimmer of hope to a degree, but it's bittersweet.

Hey everyone!

TL;DR I'm looking for a way to make a webapp for iOS.

I am developing an app for iOS devices. I am more familiar with JS, CSS and HTML, not to mention I have already created a fair chunk of the app. So it would be great if there was a solution that worked like UIWebView/WKWebView. I've had numerous issues with both of these widgets. UIWebView worked the best, most like a normal browser renderer, however still has some very annoying anomalies. For instance the input box could be covered up such so that you could still type but not see what you were typing, no other web browser does this. I've had plenty of issues that I have had to find hacky workarounds for. Is there a better way? I've heard of Titanium by Appcelerator, however I wanted to get as many opinions as a can.

Thanks!

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

It's was the forth year of my college, in the corner of the world in south India, I wanted to something to combine both medicine and the coding that I learnt, I started learning about heart murmurs, it's basically a skill based diagnosis that only 1 in 20 heart specialists can make by hearing the heart beat and listening to a small murmur that happens during the systolic cycle or the diastolic cycle. I wrote a program to learn a lot of sample murmurs and try to find (very bad hand made logic) the similarities between two wave patterns, the problem started with noise so I went out and built a new stethoscope with a carbon mic inside a normal stethoscope head and try filtering the sound at source (worked well enough at that time) I then tried to find people to test it on, but alas I was not able to find patients as doctors are not supposed to reveal them etc. I wanted to show them visually how a murmur pattern would look like and I stole some code and made a plotter for the wav file and presented everything. By that time I got a lot of close amazing friends involved and they helped me solidify the project and we won the best project award and I got my first gold medal of my life at the end of my academic life :) it was one of the best moments of my life. Second only to the joy of getting married to wife. May be third if I put getting a job in Microsoft India Development Center.

I still wish I could dig that code up and write it properly with what I have learnt today but work is never ending and I find great problems to solve everyday which I know I can make a difference, may be when I get retired I will dust out that CD with the decades old c++ code and write one last program...

One of the best times I had coding was when my friend and I were coding our very first program at University. Both of us had no prior experience with coding and really had nothing to do besides school. So we naturally became friends through coding.

Sometimes just thinking about those sorts of memories can take a great deal of stress of your shoulders, because one can think back to a simpler time.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

So after 7 months of soul crushing searching I was able to land an awesome job I never thought I'd get! I didn't really get hired for my projects, I think I was more of a culture fit that knew enough of what they were talking about. My colleagues are awesome, helpful people but they are also clearly way ahead of me as devs. I know that many new hires have similar feelings and it's more a matter of drive + time. I understand that and I'm ready for the marathon ahead of me but I have one HUGE concern... I don't understand unit testing. I've never written unit tests in JavaScript or Java (just on paper I wrote random assert statements for a college exam question that somehow turned out correct). More importantly, I don't understand when to write unit tests and what my main objectives should be when writing them. At work they talk about unit testing like it's just as basic as understanding version control or design patterns, both of which I have had no problems asking questions about because I at least understood them generally. I come here looking for resources, mainly things I can go through over the weekend. I understand that I'm going to have to ask my colleagues for help at some point but I DON'T want to ask for help without any solid base knowledge on unit testing. I would feel much more comfortable if I could understand the concepts of unit testing generally, and then ask my team members for help on how to best apply that knowledge. I'm sorry for begging, I'll definitely be looking for resources on my own too. But if anyone could point me to resources they found to be helpful & comprehensive, or resources that they'd want their co-workers to use if they were in my position I would be very grateful!!!!

(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)

honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:

- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)

- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.

- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.

- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.

- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.

I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.

Any JavaScript developers out there willing to help me out with something?

I have an interview question that I like to ask candidates that no one ever seems to get right. But, to me, it seems pretty basic, so I expect MOST JavaScript developers at almost any level of expertise to get it, and I like it generally because it demonstrates some core knowledge of JavaScript concepts and syntax.

But I want to verify that my feelings about it are reasonable, because give how few ever seem to get it right (and I'm talking across literally hundreds of interviews, MAYBE 2 people have ever gotten it right), I'm starting to wonder if I'm right or not.

Look at this code, and then answer the question after. Please do so off the top of your head and without testing anything since that's normally the experience a candidate would have. I'll give the answer after some time for anyone who gets it wrong but is curious.

But this isn't about YOU getting it right or not, and it's not about whether it's the best way to do something in JavaScript or anything like that, it's just about whether it's a reasonable question and whether my expectation that MOST JavaScript developers should get it right is fair.

const O = {
sayHello : function() { alert("Hello"); }
};
const S = "sayHello";

Question: using ONLY the variables O and S (and you MUST use both), write code that executes the sayHello function.

Thanks!

My PM ! Yes you heard it right ...he always pushes me to edge of everything and make me strong enough to handle tough situations both in professional and personal life! Because of his guidance I was able to find out skills in me put them to best use..😊

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

Enterprise software that sacrifices desktop UX for responsive html rather than best of both worlds.

I administer Atlassian stack instance (among zillion other things, of course). Once I've got an issue about login problem:
"I can login to Confluence, but not to Jira, could you help me?"

Looking into projects configuration, into user's permission groups in Crowd (both apps are connected, it will be important in a moment)... Everything looks good. Wtf?

Suddenly, I've got this idea:
"What username do you use in Jira?"
"My username."
"What about Confluence login?"
"My email."

Realization in 3... 2... 1...

Wait for it...

Just a little more tension...

"Nevermind, thank you!"

Remember, guys, always give them a chance. Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. And I wish you all only such issues! :-D

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

Applying Occam's razor and I might be wrong..

Hiring a candidate and job hunt, both are fucking exhaustive process.

We, as a human race, have aimed for Moon and Mars but are unable to solve the problem at hand which can save millions of hours each year reflecting in immediate cost savings.

Here's my (idealistic) solution:

A product to connect job seekers and recruiters eliminating all the shitty complexities.

LinkedIn solved it, but then hired some PMs who started chasing metrics and bloated the fuck out of the product.

Here are some features of the product I am envisioning:

1. Job seeker signs up and builds their entire profile.

2. Ability to add/remove different sections (limited choices like certifications, projects, etc.), no custom shit allowed because each will have their own shit.

3. By default accept GDPR, Gender Identity, US equality laws, Vetran, yada yada..

4. No resume needed. Profile serves as resume. Eliminate the need to build a resume in word or resume builders.

5. Easy updates and no external resume, saves the job seeker time and gives a standard structure to recruiters to scan through eliminating cognitive load.

6. Recruiters can post their jobs and have similar sections (limited categories again).

7. Add GDPR, Vetran, etc. check boxes need basis.

8. No social shit. Recruiters can see profiles of job seekers and job seekers can see jobs. Period.

9. Employee working in Google? Awesome. Will not show Google recruiters thier profile and employee such job posts.

10. No need to apply or hunt heads. System will automatch and recommend because we are fucking in AI generation and how hard it is to match keywords!!

11. Saves job seekers and recruiters a fuck ton of time hunting the best fit.

12. This system gets you the best job that fits your profile.

Yes, there are flaws in this idea.

Yes, not all use cases are covered.

Yes, shit can be improved and this is hypothetical.

But hey! Surely doable with high impact than going on Moon or Mars right now.

Start-up world has lost its way.

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

Fixed a high priority bug today just prior to release. There was 100% test coverage. The tests pass both before and after the change. The product behavior is correct now where it wasn't before. Just one more reminder that test coverage does not equate to either quality or correctness. Tests are alarms (at best), and quality of tests are no better an any chunk of code. All tests have costs, but not all have value. All reasons why I am skeptical of the value of code coverage, TDD, or anything that posits that "all tests are good".

!rant

Got a permanent contract today after 1½ year of temporary contract. 🤩

I'll be doing mostly whatever I want, but it starts with a new mobile app for both Android and iOS. Maybe I'll try Xamarin or React Native. However, I don't know iOS (Swift) yet, so maybe I'll learn it along the way. It depends on what would be best for the users.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.