I used to work with a guy who had 2 PH.Ds, in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and over 600 patents but I kid you not the guy could not use the coffee machine. Now it's not like this coffee machine was as easy as a Keurig, it was some $20,000 espresso machine that took a while to figure out but I tried teaching him how to use it a few dozen times and still he couldn't get it right. It got to the point where I thought he was faking it so that others would make it for him so I offered him $500 if he could figure it out. Still nope. So for the remaining 2 years we worked together I made him coffee whenever he wanted, 2-4 times a day, and he bought me lunch everyday. Before I left the company I bought him a Keurig so that when I left he'd still have coffee.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

My mom never touched a PC or smartphone. Well, most people didn't back then, because it was the early 90s.

But I brought a borrowed SNES to the hospital and taught her to blow on the Zelda cartridge if it didn't work. She died after we finished the game.

After that my dad bought me a commodore 64, the machine that taught me about electronics and programming, and molded me into who I am today.

On the first date with my girlfriend (now 12y together) we just sat talking for hours in her room, playing Zelda on her SNES taking turns, and I told her my mom would have liked her.

"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"

They're being marked as spam...

"oh damn, how can we fix that?"

You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.

"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"

Have you tried not spamming people?

"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"

No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.

"But we aren't spamming people!"

IT VS Marketing 100% of the time

So, our clients missed their internal deadline this weekend so we as vendor were also forced to work for the weekend and implement new features in a very short period. I implemented new features and my project manager stayed to support the testing and sent me home as I already had tickets bought for the movie.

As someone who hasn't done any developing in a long long time he even tried to implement some changes and complex JavaScript dom manipulation that they asked during testing so that I could be with my gf.

Few hours later he called me and with a sad voice said he is simply too slow and needs my help after all . I came and we stayed until 00h and solved everything. He paid for the movie and taxi.
The thing that impressed me was that he was willing to took over my job so that I wouldn't break my deal.

Best project manager ever!

P.S. Yes my gf went alone at the movie and yes we are still together xD

Buying a book on PHP? You might also want these...

Bought my older boys (5 & 6) each one of these for Christmas. It’s based on the raspberry pi with a custom Linux OS.

Not only do they put it together themselves, but it teaches them Linux and how to code. Tbh I want to play with it 😯

Technology never stops to amaze me.

I bought hdmi stick with nes emulator, connected it to power using usb on my tv directly no power adapter needed - only cable, it has 2 remote pads powered by batteries, all fits into my pocket and it has removable sdcard that I can connect to my computer and upload games.
I can go to someone’s house, bring up this little fella and we can play games together. It only took 40 years to do it.

Damn I remember playing, mario, contra or micro machines as a kid.

Spent 8+ hours playing great old games already lol.

I just need portable 60 inch tv screen or projection screen and battery that would power it for at least 8 hours and fit to my pocket and my life is complete.

Imagine you go to the bar, sit, grab a beer and play mario with random people all night.

Whatever you do, just keep going.

If you don't have mental capacity to do all tasks today, do one or two. If you want to do that side project you wanted, but lost motivation in the moment, do at least something, like a sign up form. Just keep going. Put some work in, make this day's net impact positive. And it's not all about work! Wanted to play that game you bought on a steam sale but never opened? Play the first level today. Wanted to learn how to make music? Download Ableton or Fruity Loops, watch a tutorial video on YouTube, replicate the steps. Just keep going.

Wandering directionless and letting yourself go is the sure path to misery. Remember — every figment of human behavior has a reason. It is important to identify reasons behind seemingly random behavior patterns and comprehend them in a non-judgmental way. Then, starve what holds you back, and feet what keeps you going.

I have bipolar type I + autism. Using this approach and remembering that everything has a reason helped me debug my low productivity. And no, I don't mean my job, I mean my real goals I want to pursue even if I had a billion in the bank today and never had to work a single day in my life.

Aaand, the reason was?… fear. I discovered I had PTSD all along that manifested when I was misdiagnosed and prescribed strong neuroleptics. In a way, it's a chemical lobotomy, just less invasive and more reversible. My intelligence came back, but it came back together with PTSD.
Now, instead of chasing mythical productivity, I know the reason behind the lack of it — PTSD. It is hard to fight what isn't defined, but it is real to win a fight with a thing with a name and a face.

Just keep going. That's my message to you.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

Instead of making business cards, I bought small index cards. The first time ‘round, I carefully taped four or five together with chalkboard tape and then wrote on them with gold pen. Now I’m just using the index cards and black pen since the reaction to that in person’s been positive. What do you guys think? Are people just humoring me in person?

My first contact with a computer was in 1997, I was close to 9.
My parents bought it together with a 17" screen and a color inkjet for about 6000.- CHF if I remember it correctly.
It had Windoozle 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, Radeon Rage 128 something.
At first I was not allowed to use it, but after watching them write documents for some time, they allowed me to draw random stuff in MS Paint and use Word.

It did't take long until I figured out to do more stuff on the system.
I think I crashed Windows a few times by installing some random demo software or shareware and execute just anything to see what happens.

When I turned 10, my godmother gave me Age Of Empires 2 as a present (I wished it so badly) and since this gift, I was somewhat addicted with computers and gaming.

My mother forbid me a lot of times to use the computer for weeks. 😄

But it all made me know computers better and even start programming with Quick Basic! (later VB, C++ and C#)

My mother is a manipulative bitch.

From my childhood, I remember nothing but fear and guilt. When I was 13, she shamed me for my body looking ugly and too feminine. She shamed me for having better vision than her, and that I don’t need to wear glasses.

I had a broken toe once, and she shamed me into admitting it wasn’t in fact broken. After two weeks of pain, she finally got me to the doctor, and x-ray had shown it was in fact broken.

She always made me carry her heavy luggage with her crap to the airport, and once I got hernia. The surgery was needed. After the surgery, they didn’t care, didn’t give me the time to recover, and made me carry her crap again. The second surgery was needed. It was more complex than the first one. Now my body is ruined by those disgusting scars. I hate my body now. It is ruined.

She tried to knock down the door into my room when I was crying and didn’t want to talk.

She screamed at me when I wanted to donate some of my old clothes to charity, the ones I bought with my own money. She is so obsessed with her crap. She hoards it, and she was hoarding it into _my_ room, not hers.

My father is still unknown. She abandoned me as a kid for my grandparents to grow me. I barely saw her till the age of six. Then I grew up with her and my stepdad, and their relationship was all manipulation and guilt. She made him apologize and beg almost every day over the course of thirteen years. They were fighting about their miserable sexual life, lack of her orgasms while I was still a kid. She just didn’t care. Once they decided to talk about their pissing kink right next to me when I was (not in fact) asleep.

When I was raped, she did nothing. She just kept on calling me beautiful and insisting she wanted me to wear mascara, while hating gay people. It was all before I realized my gender identity.

She also didn’t notice I was autistic. She liked it, as it gave her advantage. It’s easy to manipulate an autistic teenager.

After my coming-out, she told me she had cancer, and she wanted to stop treatment in order to “die sooner and not see me”.

But once my bipolar disorder awakened, things changed. Bipolar is my shield. I can be manipulated, yes, but bipolar will obliterate my whole world view once a year, together with your manipulative crap you planted into my life. And because it dismantled a 19-year-long, almost fractal manipulative masterpiece, I fear nothing now.

I disowned her some two years ago.

I started out learning Python. And before you "tsk, kids these days", it was before Python became the go to starter language for a lot of universities. No, I started learning around age 12.

My dad (a programmer himself), bought "Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner" and we went through it together. He started out holding my hand as I went through the exercises, but pretty quick I was getting through them mostly on my own.

It was really fun, and I'm absolutely going to do the same if/when I have children of my own. The books exercises were all games, which made it really fun. Instead of "hello world", the first program printed "game over". I was super proud of the hangman game I eventually wrote.

It gave me a leg up when I started taking actual classes, and really instilled a love of coding and puzzle solving in me that propelled me through two degrees.

Hi all, first rant.

I work on an app on the Shopify platform, which requires me to look at the front end of people’s Shopify stores about half the day.

Can we PLEASE get the Shopify devs together and convince them to put a hard limit on the number of pop ups and slide ins and modal apps a single store can have running??? When a user (or app developer) can’t click on a product to buy it (or test installation) because ‘spin the wheel’ and ‘join the mailing list’ and ‘Karen in Ohio just bought a toaster’ won’t stop popping into the view, your UX is shit.

I realize people could still actually go in and build these things into their store code - but I’m willing to bet VERY few would.

Thanks - rant over.

Blue Robotics

This company makes underwater thrusters for submarine applications. With their first thruster they made it easy to make a homemade submarine. The motor was powerful, the thruster just worked. They even had a promotional where they created an automated surfboard that made it from hawaii to somewhere in california with one of their thrusters pushing it there the entire way. It was a great product.

Then they created the next version. This was the same thruster, but it had an ESC(Electronic Speed Controller) sealed in an aluminum puck on top of the motor. This ESC could be controlled by servo controls, or by plugging it into an i2c bus. You could pull different stats off of the motor over i2c it sounded great. So my robotics team trusted this company and bought 8 motors at $220 - $250 bucks each. We lightly tested them since we had not even finished the robot yet. One week before the competition our robot got completely put together and we did our first few tests.

Long story short, Us and 22 other teams did roughly the same thing. We bought these motors expecting them to work, but instead the potted aluminum ESCs were found defective. Water somehow got into the completely resin sealed aluminum puck and destroyed the ESC. We didn't qualify that year due to trusting a competition sponsor to deliver a good product. I will admit that it was our fault for not testing them before going to the competition. Lessons were learned and an inherent distrust of every product I come across was developed.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Sometimes it's uncomfortable for me to code anything because all I do is based on other stuff that is based on other stuff and so on.

Am I truly a creator when all I do is putting the puzzle pieces together so it looks unique?

I actually never honestly go beyond "modding".. Why do I always have to rely on other stuff working? And other stuff continuing to work for the following decade?

I thought it's only the case for software/web/etc but apparently most hardware projects are stuffing bought things together.
Music is stuffing chord combinations and melodies together.

It all goes on like that.

I want to write something in PHP.

Yes, coming from me, it sounds like stockholm syndrome, but for me PHP is reminiscent of simpler times.

I want to get a server right where I bought the domain, with CPanel, log in with FTP and ~~push~~ (excuse me, _send_) index.php and other files there. I want to open phpmyadmin and throw some stupid fields together that won't work at scale, but "scale" will never happen.

I want to design websites without normalize.css, without any kind of javascript but some silly UI stuff, I want to send emails with sendmail and not sendgrid. I want my gradient buttons back.

Symphony and Laravel can kiss my ass.

So today at work while trying to get a group of people together to play a game of foosball my boss comes up to my friend and starts talking with him.

The conversation then goes on to include the topic of a new hire coming onboard and my boss not wanting to take him into our team because he feels that the new hire isn’t smart enough.

I’m the time span of this argument/conversation I went and helped another coworker, bought a keyboard from a friend and also finished reading a 25 page white paper.

At the end he still doesn’t want to have the new hire on our team.

All I wanted to do was play a game of foosball 😥

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

My Frankenstein monster.

Scraped out of discarded parts thrown away by friends and ex's (in most cases easily fixable by changing fried parts).
It looks like shit and runs even worse, but considering that out off all the setup only mouse and keyboard are actually bought and not 8+ years old or held together with glue and hope, I'm quite fond of it.

I was never a big fan of Github to be used within a company. So about 3 years ago where I used to work I implemented all the tools from Atlassian. Like litteraly all of them. And first I was stunned of the possibilities I had with Jira, Confluence, Bamboo and Bitbucket! But while self-hosting all thoose services you always felt, that Atlassian just bought all thoose companies and "threw them together"
BUT with newest features of Gitlab, I think they outperformed everyone! I absolutely love what they offer, even as a free service. They integrate all features in one product where you would otherwise relay on different products.
Whats important to you when it comes to VCS?

Just moved this weekend into the first home I've ever actually owned. Bought a scotch older than myself to mark the occasion, but I want to save it to share with my brother sometime during Yule (that's an agonizing abstinence for me). But at least someone gifted me with a Macallan 12 yr for housewarming that has been hitting the spot quite nicely.

Got my PC set up already to unfortunately go back to work tomorrow. Speaking of which, is it like "Recruiting Season" or something? I have been hit up like crazy about other opportunities, at a time when my company that i've been with almost 4 years seems to be floundering to get its shit together.

I guess I haven't paid much attention in the past to whether I get hit up with "opportunities" more at the end of the year or not. But its something I'm seriously considering right now. 2020 was mostly stagnant for me, and ending the year with moving is a high note. Would not mind continuing this trend of change whilst I still have to wait for the world to be able to resume "normalcy" a while longer.

My first ever dev project was a website I setup with my dad, it was for my uncle's company. 😃

You can barely call it a dev project because we did it in WordPress and the only thing we touched was a bit of HTML and a bunch of CSS 😅,
but it was really fun working together with my (programmer) dad and it motivated me to study programming as well.

The site turned out ugly as fuck, but the standards for websites are very low where my uncle is from so that wasn't a problem. 😊

I earned 90€ and bought myself a new mouse (Logitech G502), which I still use now 4/5 years later. 😎

I applied for a position as an engineer for a nonprofit organization that helped kids across the country (and the world) and got the position. The people across the organization were wonderful and, without a doubt, mission driven to help kids and it felt good to do the work. The agile teams worked well together, every team had their roadmaps, and management always emphasized family first. The organization was making crazy money so we were given all the tools we needed to succeed.

Then, within a few months of my hiring, it was announced that the non-profit organization was being bought by a large, fairly well known for-profit company which had also been recently acquired by a venture capital firm.

The next thing we knew, everything changed all at once. We went from building applications for kids to helping this company either make money or build value for their owners. Honestly, I did not know what my day-to-day work was doing for this company. The executives would tell us repeatedly that we were expensive and not a good value compared to their other teams. It felt like we were only being kept until the systems were integrated and their had access to our decades of data.

You might think I'm being paranoid but a year after the acquisition, we still did not have any access to any of their systems. We operated on a separate source code solution and were not given access to theirs. When requests came from them that would facilitate them connecting applications to the data, it was to be considered highest priority.

The final straw for me was when I was told my compensation would be cut for the next year. We were strung along for the whole year leading up to it saying that the company was evaluating our salaries compared to others in the industry. Some of us figured that we would probably even go up knowing that we were underpaid for a for-profit tech company because we chose to work in a non-profit for a lower rate to be able to do worthwhile work. Nope! We were told that we were overpaid and they talked about how they had the data to prove it. One quick look at LinkedIn would tell you they must be smoking something that had gotten stale in a shoebox. Or they were lying.

So that was my rant. If you think you are protected from the craziness in tech right now just because you are writing code at a nonprofit, you might be wrong. Dishonest executives can exist anywhere.

So I wonder if anybody on here has ever come across the LG G3 flickering screen issue.

I bought a LG G3 about 2 years ago. Fantastic phone.. Until all the issues started appearing.
First of all, the glass started lifting off on the left side of the phone, exposing the backlight layer, because the phone somehow managed to bend (insert iphone joke) inside my pocket. I was okay with it since it was a minor visual thing and didn't affect anything.
About 6 months ago the phone started lagging like crazy, and it kept getting worse and worse. It's so bad right now that Twitter will rarely fullscreen images, apps crash all the time, and occasionally the phone freezes to the point where it won't even react to the lock button.
About 2 weeks ago I started getting messages that my sim card was removed, and the phone starts rebooting itself. This would sometimes happen 10 times a day.
I was already pissed at all of these issues and in a desperate need of a new phone, but on Sunday a brand new issue appeared!
The phone's display randomly shut off, then wouldn't want to turn on, and occasionally turn on just to fade out or flicker away.
I of course went to google to see if anybody else has this issue... And it turns out that youtube is full of videos about it. Apparently the overheating issue these phones have slowly ruins the solder on the chips, which in turn creates a poor connection and causes these issues. The only way to solve it seems to be to reflow the chip, but others that tested that only got it to work for around 2 weeks before the issues started reappearing. I haven't tested it myself yet, but after disassembling, fucking around with it, and putting it all back together 3 times I sort of got it to work to the point where I can use it for several minuted before the displays fails. While writing this rant the display only quit on me once at the very beginning.

What I'm wondering is, why is it that nobody at LG decided to address the heating issue by perhaps throttling the CPU more? And I heard the G3 isn't the only LG phone with these issues?
This crap made me lose all my trust in the company. I wanted to upgrade to a G6 or V30, but because of this crap I think my next phone might be a Xiaomi.

This rant is now so long that it's barely even a rant or on topic. I think I should end it here since I have nothing more to say other than the LG G3 is a beautiful but crap phone, oh, and the new iPhone 8 is a flop

Story, !rant.

So after previously telling the story of my laptop in the rain, I thought I should follow up with this one. (this is couple months later)

My laptop was bought second hand by my father (who doesn't know anything about computers) and the poor thing had a tendency to overheat. It worked fine, but under heavy load it would only last a couple minutes before it shut down.

So once I was cleaning out the fan (as dust accumulated in there) and I ran it under the tap, to get everything off. Sure, you might cringe at the idea but I thought some water wouldn't hurt it, especially after surviving en evening in the rain. So I cleaned it and let it dry.

A while later, when it finished drying I started to reassemble my laptop. After about 30 mins of fiddling with it, it was back together and ready for a fresh start! So I powered it on.

Sparks flew. Smoke started coming off the motherboard. More sparks.

😯

I pulled the cord. "Fuck, glad I caught it on time..."

I waited a while longer. Turn it back on. "Fan is not functioning properly or is missing". FML. After all it had survived, a bit of water in the circuit that made the fan spin is what took it down 😑

Fast forward two years (without a fan, shitty days), and I bought a second hand Lenovo laptop that I adore. So I thought I'd sell the laptop on Ebay, but first I should fix the fan so that I wouldn't have to sell it for next to nothing. Part number was hard to find, and bought it from somewhere in Europe. Four weeks later, the fan arrived at my doorstep.

Took the laptop apart (have I mentioned how hard that was?) and replaced the fan. Felt good to fix what I had ruined two years back. Put it back together (after applying thermal paste, I'm not a monster) and powered it on.

"Fan is not functioning properly or is missing"

😑

After checking the connection a couple times, I realized that what had given out was the motherboard connector for the fan, after the water incident. Wasted 40 dollars and several hours of my time for nothing.

The laptop that survived hours in the rain was taken down by a wee bit of water. So sad.

My father bought a keyboard connected to screen and both working together as computer, that was computer full of video games... One of this games idea was writing code to control the hero movement... Then I started to write codes...

Anyone with 2 monitors (or more) with laptop as the primary source. How did you connect everything together? Also, I use Linux (Antergos)

I bought 2 monitors. I was able to connect one of them to my laptop with HDMI. Now, my laptop only has one HDMI and no VGA. So I can't really figure how to use 2 monitors with my laptop (also extending it and not duplicating screens).

I've come across HDMI splitter. But I don't if it allows extending screens

!rant/story:

Aaayoo issya boi the OG rapper straight outta Compton, wassup?!

Nah, for real, though.: How are y'all doing? It has been a long time. I hope y'all are having a great time (can sense some peoples' incoming negative comments due to corona).

I built my completely new first gaming rig like a few weeks ago after my school laptop stopped showing any signals.

The specifications are the following.:
- Mobo: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (no iGPU)
- dGPU: KFA2 RTX 2070 SUPER OC
- 2nd dGPU: GTX 550 TI (this one gets a new rant/post)
- RAM: 2x G.SKILL Ripjaws V 8 GB 3600 MHz
- PSU: Be quiet 650 W (It was the platinum edition afaik. I originally bought the 600 Watt Gold edition, but somehow they sent me the 650 Watt for no additional charge... which is great for me haha)
- HDD: 2x 4TB NAS HDD in RAID1 configuration (to load all of my games around 2 TB right now. Got the two HDDs for 110 Euro including the SATA Data cables)
- SSD: One Intenso 240 GB SSD and a reused Samsung 256 GB SSD from my old broken Lenovo laptop
- Case: Be quiet Pure Base 500 black with a glass panel on the side

While building my first PC, it was one hell of a challenge. I knew how it all was working in theory, but to put it all together, practically, was a bit of a challenge, but it was a nice challenge. I learned a lot and have a performance gain I could only ever dream of.

I used to play my games first on a Toshiba satellite l750d laptop (around 40 fps in cs:go with the lowest gfx settings) and then on a Lenovo e51-80 laptop (around 30 fps max minecraft with no shaders and texture packs).

Now I play cs:go on Kubuntu with 400 fps at peak with ultra high graphics. It is unbelievable.

I couldn't trust the system when I turned on the fps display the first time I saw it.

Last week I hired a friend of friend to work on my projects. Hes a young and friendly guy. However he never worked in actual office and it shows. During the meeting he brings his phone and in the middle of explaining he pulls out his phone to respond someone back. Basically lacks professionalism and has this young person cockiness where he thinks he is competent to handle everything while in reality last week he did 2-3 hours worth of work. I want to set up some boundaries but I dont want to seen as a harsh dictator. On the other hand Im paying him over the top even though he doesnt have skills, but the least I want to is a decent attitude and effort. How u would advice me to approach this and teach him to get his shit together? Im already becoming resentful and next week if he keeps treating his work like a school project I will let him go.

Im really trying to setup a nice environment for him to work at, I rented a nice office in a hub space and also bought entirely new laptop plus monitor setup for him to work. I even took him for drinks and lunches but for some reason I start to feel that hes taking that shit for granted and Im being too good.

Hes not proactive, it seems that he will do bare minimum that I give him.

First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.

This is interesting from a troubleshooting point of view. I have a decent laptop I use to play Fallout 4. It was running just fine until recently. The game will spike GPU activity and crash. I found if I reduced settings and lower resolution it happens less often.

I kept searching and finally found someone saying it could be GPU thermal compound has worn out. So I looked how to change that on a laptop. The video I found it looked fairly easy.

I get into my laptop and I find all the screws for the heatsink/head pipe assembly. However there is a ton of thermal tape used everywhere holding it all down. I think if I am not careful I will break the heat sink. I did pull on the main part and it just didn't want to give.

Feeling a bit defeated as I put everything back together. I had gotten some decent thermal compound for this. So I fire up the game and it runs fine at the low settings. Then I raise all the settings to max with max resolution. This was crashing the game the last few days. It just runs and runs fine on those settings. GPU temps look normal (they did before, but I wanted to see). So, all I can think the act of lifting the heat sink a small amount may have reseated the thermal compound a bit. I am still going to price out a professional doing this, but I can play on max settings again. Maybe messing with screws on GPU and slightly moving the heat sink actually did something.

This confirms to me that something needs done about the thermal compound. The company I bought the laptop from offered custom thermal compound at time of purchase. So I am thinking they can do this for me. It will be cheaper to pay a couple hundred bucks to have a pro do this rather than pay $1800 for a new computer. This is only 2 1/2 years old. It has been a top performer up til now.

(going through some stupid thoughts and just wanted to vent out. sorry for your time waste if you keep reading this)

i think there's something fundamentally wrong about my personality that makes me unloveable .

i only fell for 2 girls in my life, told my feelings to 1 , she rejected nd then i rarely ever tried. this was all 10 nd 15 years ago respectively . and after that, i rarely ever thought about love and relationships as my personal life was already a running hot mess that needed my attention.

however for last 3 years i have been financially stable, goal oriented, and an achieving job person. I feel super lonely, so I have been trying to look for love and companionship among the people i know.

First was this company colleague that i kinda liked and had a crush on. I liked spending time with her, she was also a mobile dev and we tought each other lots of things and in a few days i told her that i had feelings for her. She rejected. Very well, we are still office mates, i am kinda broken but oh well.

I thought that my mistake was telling too soon, so i learnt . My personal pride also took a hit, so i started working upon whatever things i can improve : i switched for a better package, i bought financially show off things, i started working out, blah blah blah. I have a shity face and a tiny body, nd that's god fault.

next was this girl that came to be known via common friends. She was cool, lives alone, likes to roam and go to places. My friends were busy on my birthday, but she was sweet and casual enough to meet me alone . i took her to my favourite restaurant and had a nice chat with her. then nexr week we went to watch the (fuckin) barbie movie . we were known for 3 months and have met many times together or with friends, so i kinda liked her. i thought this was some exclusive treatment to me on her end, so i casually asked if we are friends or we are dating, and she straight away replies "friends" . well , alright 💔

this is stupid. why am i born on this fucking world if i am destined to be just alone most of my life

This is the first project that I remember. There were probably others before it, but nothing really stands out before this.

My buddy and I got an Independent Study together in high school. Our goal was to write a video game. We harbored no illusions that it was going to be the best game ever or anything, it was supposed to be a project that taught us enough to move on to something else later.

Our chosen tool for this endeavor was Flash 4.0, back before Adobe bought Flash. I don't know why we thought it would be a good idea to do this. I think it was because we could let Flash handle all the graphical stuff and we could focus on the behavioral side.

I don't really remember much about how the project turned out other than we both learned a lot about what not to do.

Luckily, the teacher overseeing our Independent Study felt that the lessons learned were more important than the product, so we got high marks.

1987 at seven years old. Dad bought me an Atari ST. It came with a Language Disc, containing the ST Basic program. Didn't know what it was, but dad learned from the guy in the shop it was for making your own programs.

So along with a manual, together we wrote our first program:

10 PRINT "ST";
20 GOTO 10
RUN

In the corner window, the results unravelled. I was so excited. Never looked back.

So i'm currently working on my PiStation..
(look at my previous post if you're interested)
I'm imaging over RetroPie over to the SD card, screw back together the housing, and it boots up fine. As soon as i configured my XBOX-controller i got to the wifi-settings. And when i try to access my wifi, guess what, it doesn't connect to my f**kin wifi. So i double check my wifi-settings in the router i just bought to get over my roommates paranoia (that's a whole another story. Just in short, he's got no idea of IT-security and tries to be an admin, which results in a HUGE amount of bulls**t), confirm that the settings are alright, double check the PSK too, anything is fine. So i go through the whole process again, download the image (from their goddamn slow servers), open up the PiStation, image it over to the SD card, close it back up, anything boots up fine and works, except this f**king wifi. And the thing is, i COULD connect it with a patchcable, but i dont want cables going anywhere through my room. Currently imaging over recalbox OS, will keep you updated. I just want to play some old retro games ._.

!dev

Moved a while ago and I didn’t have a tv. By brothers put some money together to buy me a projector for Christmas.

It’s not the best one but great for what I need, it’s portable, dynamic screen size etc..

So earlier this week I bought a PS and lots of games..

Then it started..
speakers don’t work..

Unplug speakers, the integrated ones don’t work either.
Turning it off and on again didn’t help.
Pulled the power plug, after that the speakers worked again but the colours were fucked.. dark became green.
Unplugged power and plugged in again -> same issue.

Reset to factory settings -> colours were good again and internal speakers were fine as well..
plugged in proper speakers and it all started over again😒

I just wanna play splinter cell..