Family reaction story to me being a dev?

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

My new glasses are coming soon :)

Now I won't be as blind as a blindfolded grandmother inside a dark cave at night!

Everytime I code, my nose practically touches the screen, because even my mom's old glasses don't really help.

I can barley use Devrantron because of my blindness, but at least I can see well on mobile.

If you are wondering how my old ones broke, well, my little sister sat on them. That little demon, I love her, but she's pure evil.

Oh, and she did it on purpose btw. I asked her why and she said she wanted to know how it feels like to sit on glasses. She's not crazy, she's 6 years old lol.

My teams current process is:

1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.

2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.

3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.

4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.

5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.

6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.

7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.

Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.

That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!

How do I know when I’m ready for a junior dev job? Currently I’m very familiar with syntax rules, data structure, I even created my first p2p app and I’m feeling more comfortable with server side programming and handling dependencies.

But I can’t like code blindfolded and I’m very slow and have to think very deeply and concentrate very hard before doing any minor thing.

How do I know??

Anyone else hates those tutorials that go in a direction for pages and pages, then suddenly they tell you that while that works, it's inefficient and insecure. THEN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU NOT TALK ABOUT THE PROPER WAY??? You don't teach people to drive a car blindfolded.

Medium before:
How to perfectly manage a reactive server with 4 frameworks blindfolded

Medium now:
THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULD BE SCARED OF AI
AI WILL KILL US AND RAPE OUR WIVES
YOU ARE USING CHATGPT WRONG!!
DON'T WAIT AI TO STEAL YOUR JOB, KILL YOURSELF NOW

Everytime you use OpenGL in a brand new project you have to go through the ceremonial blindfolded obstacle course that is getting the first damn triangle to show up. Is the shader code right? Did I forget to check an error on this buffer upload? Is my texture incomplete? Am I bad at matrix math? (Spoiler alert: usually yes) Did I not GL enable something? Is my context setup wrong? Did Nvidia release drivers that grep for my window title and refuse to display any geometry in it?

Oh. Needed to glViewport. OK.

!rant

Sooo not so long ago, i was saying something about my recent first interview. I passed it and it felt so good and that kind of made me proud. But now it is even better! I just got my first peanuts as a developer and i must say "boy, it felt good" !

Thank you all, members of the devRant community for always giving me not only courage to try, ideas to research and reasons to laugh, but the most importantly: some insights of how things are out there. For a introvert like me it is really great to not simply step into the darkness, blindfolded 😁

Cheers to you all! 😘

Trying to refactor legacy code can be a real adventure. It's like exploring an ancient ruin, except instead of hidden treasures, you're uncovering cryptic code and dead ends. But the real plot twist comes when you realize there are no unit tests to guide you. It's like trying to navigate a maze blindfolded - you never know when you're going to hit a dead end and end up with a headache! 🤯

9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:

I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS

What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:

password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6

Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?

$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3

$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6

$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]

$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!

Anyone else out there feel like Git is like Charlie Brown’s “stupid kite-eating tree” that just lies in wait at code deploy time to ruin you? I can never get it right. Either I’m doing some edits and realize I’m on the wrong branch or the master is inexplicably ahead of local (or vice versa) and even though I can see in the git log where things went wrong, it’s like crossing a freeway blindfolded and hoping my git fetch or reset or merge doesn’t blow everything to hell. WHYYYY IS THIS SO DAMN HARD?!

Spent 4 fucking weeks trying to implement this motherfucking feature and in the end after 15 failed implementations it turns out that my first implementation was good. Turns out this other devs fucking feature had a bug (he forgot to add two lines to clear current state and to update current state again). Motherfucker.

Took me over 100 hours to debug that piece of shiet spaghetti codebase and I had to go through grief stages few times to the point where I started questioning my own damn ability

Sometimes it sucks not being able to go step by steap and think in a linear way. I guess if I followed the breadcrumbs I would have solved it sooner. But poking around things and trying out random solutions was like going through a maze blindfolded until I got it right but I guess thats how my brain works.

At what point are you an expert in C++?

Herb Sutter's talk tilted "Back to Basics" (available on YouTube) contains the message "it's easy to forget that you're an expert" in the context of writing code that utilizes the latest complicated features of a language to squeeze out the last drop of performance.

So what makes someone an expert? Is it just writing production code? Is it groking the entire panel presented by a standards committee member? Is it contributing to the STL? Is it when you can write your own compiler while blindfolded and juggling rubber duckies in under 60 seconds?

What makes a person an expert in any language, for that matter?