Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Teaching 7-8 year olds the basics of web design. We're we're playing with CSS and changing colours of block elements and text. One girl put up her hand, completely confused as to why it wasn't working. Her code:
Section {
Background-color: rainbow;
}
Oh the wonderful mind of children26 -
My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.
Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg
...
The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.
M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?7 -
Hello again, everyone. As Sunday comes to a close, and Monday is fast approaching, I'll share with you the likely cause of my death by stroke and/or heart attack:
MONDAY MORNING COFFEE OF HORROR
Disclaimer: Do NOT try this. I am a professional addict. I am not responsible for anything this brew from hell causes to you and/or those around you.
So, I wake up, feeling like I haven't slept for days, or just notice the fucking alarm clock shrieking because I pulled an all-nighter.
Step 1: Silence alarm clock via mild violence.
Step 2: Get the coffee machine to brew some filter coffee (espresso works too)
Step 3: Get milk and ice cubes from the fridge (both are needed, I don't care if you don't like milk, trust me)
Step 4: Get 2 spoonfuls (not tea spoon, and actually FULL spoonfuls) into the biggest glass you have
Step 5: Pour just a little of the warm filter coffee into the glass, just to get the instant coffee wet enough, and start mixing, until the result looks like the horror you unleashed in your toilet a few minutes ago (and will do so again in a few)
Step 6: Mix in 25-50 ml milk, just for the aesthetic change of colour of the devil-brew, and to add the necessary amount of lactic acid to react with the coffee to produce chemical X
Step 7: Add ice cubes to taste (if you are new to this, add a lot)
Step 8. Slowly add the filter coffee while mixing furiously, so that the light brown paste at the bottom get dissolved (it's harder than it sounds)
Now, take a deep breath. Before you is a disgusting brew undergoing a chemical reaction, and your moves need to be precise otherwise it will explode. Note that sugar or any other form of sweetener is FORBIDDEN, as it will block the reaction chain and the result won't be as potent.
Take a straw (a big one, not those needle-like ones that some cafeterias give to fool you into believing that the coffee is more than 150ml). Put it inside the mix, and check that the route to the bathroom is free of obstacles.
Now, clench your abs, close your nose if you are new to this, grab the straw and DRINK!
DRINK LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW!
THAT BROWN DEVIL'S BILE WILL HAVE YOUR INTESTINES SPASM AND DANCE THE MACARENA WHILE TWIRLING A HULA HOOP!
YOUR HEART WILL GO OVERDRIVE HARDER THAN YOUR PC'S CPU WHEN COMPILING ON ECLIPSE AND BROWSING WITH IE AT THE SAME TIME.
The combination of caffeine and lactic acid will bring out the perfectly disgusting combination of sour and bitter usually expected in rotting lemons. After you manage to chug it down (DON'T SPILL OR SPIT ANY!) you have 30 - 60 seconds max to run to the porcelain throne, where you will spend the next 30-60 minutes.
After that, nothing can stop you! You will fix bugs, write entire codebases from scratch, punch that annoying coworker, punch that boss! You will be a demigod among mortals for the next 6-8 hours!
Your recipes for Monday morning coffee?15 -
Coding Guide:
wanna start coding?
it's very simple, just follow this steps!
1. prepare a notebook and pen.
2. choose a programming language you would like to learn.
3. find a nice site for study it, SoloLearn is a very good site, you can ask me in the comments for more.
4. start copying every code block and summary to the notebook.
5. don't worry about not understanding it yet.
6. finish copying at last 5 subjects.
7. start the course again, and follow the notebook.
8. do it few times, your mind will remember it.
now the hard part!
good job, you remember the basic, but don't know how to use it? well 1 more guide for it.
1. prepare a notebook and pen.
2. now, it's your time to teaching it!
3. try to explain the code in your words or language.
4. after few times your mind will remember all the necessary things about coding.
5. start to make little apps or even games.
enjoy =D
of course you need to coding every day for 1 hour+-3 -
Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————
My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:
1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)
2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)
3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)
4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull
5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video
6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time
7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)
8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed
9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button
10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)14 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.
4 -
So.... yeah, making a Scratch clone (with more features) is frustrating and super hard.
Major problems include
- Drag&Drop from listbox to usercontrol - stress level : 3/10
- connect blocks when two blocks are close to each other - stress level : 10/10
- generate live code when there was a change in blocks editor - stress level : 9/10
- write a compiler or some interpreter that converts block code to real c# code - stress level : 10/10
- generate output by calling csc.exe - stress level : 1/10
- make code at least readable - stress level : 7/1014 -
Heard Java 7 provides catching multiple exceptions in single catch block ! hmm .. why need when I got this 😎😁
try {
// do something...
} catch (Exception e){
//log it ..
}6 -
So, finally I can rant after a while.
After I stopped helping people coding online few months ago, because I was getting literally spammed 24/7 by everyones shitty multi-million dollar ideas, I introduced few of my classmates in to coding. Now, after ~6 months, I am spammed by my classmates by their awesome programming ideas which are too hard for them but they are sure its gonna be awesome. The difference is, that I cant say "FUCK OFF AND STOP SPAMMING MY INBOX WITH YOUR FUCKING IDEAS" to my friends and block them. Please fucking kill me. Once more someone will start messaging me their fucking idea
-like this
-in
-separate
-messages instead
-of writing one
-long and propper
-message
I am gonna swim with a toaster. 😡3 -
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.9 -
Addition to my posts about getting accepted to faculty of information technology at the Czech Technical University in Prague:
I am now officially in the student life mode :D
Tasting the life at a dormitory and living on my own... (still okay considering that I don't have to work for money, I just ask my mom to send more money when I don't have anything to eat so I can buy the cheapest food I can find to live yet another day 😇)
Soo does anyone reading this post happen to be living at koleje Strahov? I'm in block 7 and you can find me by looking for an MSI gaming notebook with devRant stickers all over it. Hit me up and we can go out and have some beers :)1 -
You have a job for 7 days and you will get paid with 1 piece of gold per day. Problem is there's a block of gold made up of 7 pieces, and there is a knife that can cut it only twice. How would you solve this problem? Making sure the employee has the right amount of gold every day!
There are no tricks in the question like buying a new knife or whatever. There is a unique mathematical solution. Go!8 -
Smart contact lenses and the appropriate software. It would be the ultimate AR experience. I have no idea how to produce them, as they would need to be super high resolution, lag free, completely wirelessly powered and connected, safe to use and to wear and useable 24/7.
My current concept is a ultrabook sized block that can be taken around in a backpack.
Oh and wireless handoff ...
meaning everything I grab and throw in your general direction becomes available to you, kind off like they do it in Avatar. This should also work with PCs, tablet and everything else.
Speaking of grabbing you would also need some kind of minority report glove so every bit of hand movement can be tracked precisely. But probably a bit more elegant meaning only small stickers on the back of your hand.
Did I mention that sharing stuff should enable working together on the same object in real-time?
Also this system should integrate seamlessly with a smart environment, meaning looking at the light, opening its context menu and changing its brightness or colour should be no effort at all.
And of course all of it should be open source, highly scalable and either hosted on public infrastructure (funded by taxes or smt) or by each individual for himself to protect his or her privacy.
So who is with me?2 -
Lost 3 days because of shitstorm not knowing why my nextjs localhost app wasnt working just go the 3rd day on mongodb dashboard and have a warning that mongodb will block any connections of ip addresses that are not manually added (i have no idea how mongodb works other than just how to use it in code)
Because the shitstorm knocked me off the internet for 3 days (will probably be for over 7 days cause these assholes dont give a shit to fix it) i dont have wifi access so my localhost app cant work
However my dads android has unlimited gb of 4g internet access so i connect to his hotspot and then try to run the app but still fails. I thought i cant run the app until my internet gets fixed from shitstorm just to find out i had to manually allow the inbound IP address of the android phone into the mongodb dashboard. And now it works fine. Fuck off
6 -
Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:
1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.
2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.
3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.
4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.
5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.
6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.
7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.
8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.
9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.
10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.
My 10 cents.1 -
What a week.
A family emergency on Tuesday doesn't stop the client meeting on Thursday.
And yes, that 7 hour block of time was solid programming without stepping away from the computer.
3 -
tell me guys what would you prefer:
function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,p6){.
...
}
or
function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(
p1,
p2,
p3,
p4,
p5,
p6
){
...
}
if you read this rant before expanding, you got a complete context on how what function a is, its calling b 2 times and how function b looks.
if instead of the first option, i had used 2nd block, you wouldn't even know the 2nd param of b function without expanding this rant.
my point?
i prefer to keeping unnecessary info on one line. and w lot of linters disagree by splitting up the code. and most importantly , my arrogant tl disagree by saying he prefers the splitted code "for readability" and becaue "he likes code this way, old-eng1 likes this and old-eng2 likes this" .
why tf does an ide have horizontal a scrolling option available when you are too stupid to use it?
ok, i know some smartass is going to point that i too can use vertical scrolling, but hear me out: i am optimising this!
case 1 : a function with 7 params is NOT split into 7 lines. lets calculate the effort to remember it
- since all params could have similar charactersticks ( they will be of some type, might have defaults, might be a suspendable/async function etc), each param will take similar memory-efforts points. say 5sp each.
- total memory-efforts= 5sp *7 = 35 sp.
- say a human has 100 sp of fast memory storage, he can use the remaining 65 sp for loading say 5 small lines above or below.
- but since 5 lines above are already read and still visible on screen, they won't be needed to be loaded again nd again, nd we can just check the lines below.
- thus we are able to store 65+35+65 = 165 sp or about 11 lines of code in out fast memory for just a 100sp brain storage
case 2 function with 7 params IS split into 7 lines.
- in this case all lines are somewhat similar. 5sp for param lines as they are still similar which implies same 35sp for storing current function and params
- remaining 65sp can only be used to store next 5 lines of 13sp as the previous code is no longer visible.
- plus if you wanna refresh the code above, you gotta scroll, which will result in removing bottom code from screen , and now your 65sp from bottom code is overwritten by 65sp of top code.
- thus at a time, you are storing only 6 lines worth of code info. this makes you slow.
this is some imaginary math, but i believe it works10
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View