Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.

Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.

Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?

Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.

If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?

I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.

(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

Although I love developing I always thought that there was something missing.
I learned Java but didn't really like it. I had spent quite some time with web development and enjoyed it but I felt like developing with JavaScript was too high level and I felt the same for Python.

So I started learning the most awesome programming language: C

I just love that I have so much control over everything and that the language is so compact and gives you just the right amount of tools you need.

I also love physics and electronics a lot and it feels awesome to first build something and then program it.

I am looking forward to design a PCB (printed circuit board) and write code for an AVR microcontroller like the Atmega328 (most arduinos use this one).

Picture of the project I am working on.

Step 1: Turn off any intellisense and debug tools.
Step 2: Code all day without running the code.
Step 3: Push everything to the build server and avoid looking at the result.
Step 4: Go home.

LIKE A BOSS!

Hello Monday:
0.Arrive late due to traffic.(Apparently a car hit a cow crossing the road)
1. Try upgrading php5 to php7 and break stuff in the process and waste 2 hours fixing things.(Poor connection so ssh sessions hung occasionally)
2.PHP fixed,open Gmail and get over 100 emails from clients about the server being down(because of (0)).Ignore all.Find a snaglist of over 20 TODOs.
3.Open Android Studio, update to 2.3 and everything becomes broken.Each time i open it ,it crashes and i have to "Report to Google"
4.Spend the next 1 hour reinstalling AS.It finally works.
5.Open Project and the libraries are broken.Spend another hour upgrading build tools.
6.Leave SDK to update and decide to check my Google Cloud console.$50 bill pending.Shit.
7.Try XCode. Remember the project is still in Swift 2 and I have to upgrade it(Would take eternity).Immediately closes xcode.
8.Gives up on life and decides to log into Devrant.

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!

Imagine yourself exploring Medium, looking for some new awesome tools to try out.

You accidentally find the new, promising programming language. It called Blow. It promises itself to be “idiomatic”, “minimalistic”, “simple” and “handsome”. And it also compiles to Electron. You decide to give it a try.

It has its own package manager, simple and idiomatic – every package is “blow add” away. But it’s only three packages available: the “blowsay”, just like “cowsay”, the “this”, printing The Blow Manifesto and “blue”, which is simplistic, simple and minimalistic idiomatic handsome functional frontend framework built with simplicity in mind.

You want to build a todo app, so you type “blow add blue” and press enter.

Following Medium articles written by some guy wearing Ray-Bans, you managed to finally put a todo app together, after seven hours of straight up coding and fighting that simple and idiomatic syntax, trying to make it do what you need. Alright, it’s time to build it.

It has built-in task runner named “job”.

So you type “blow job todo”.

You spending three hours more doing “blow job this”, “blow job that”, trying to blow job everything you see. You’re tired and mad at those damn blow job hipsters created that. You literally suck at programming in that.

Everything falls apart. Things doesn’t work. And after another “ENOENT 0() 0x628 NOT_SUPPORTED”, you give up, admitting that you’ve really sucked at this.

How a regular convo with non-devs usually go:

"So what do you do?"

"I'm a software developer."

"Oh, so you're like... a hacker?"

"No, I build apps."

"Nice! So like facebooks and stuff???"

"Not exactly. Different things, mostly tools. It depends."

"Ooh...cool...Like what?"

*proceeds to spend what feels like an hour trying to explain what I do for a living in the simplest terms, while the person just blankly stares and nods, pauses, then finally tells me their crazily infeasible app idea.*

"So whadaya think?"

"Hmm...sounds good 😀👍"

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Background: I'm not drunk yet, BUT I'M WORKING ON IT.

okay.

I just finished a second sprint on my React app. The first was to build a merchant onboarding flow. The second was to do substantial cleanup as I learned more about react/redux, and to create a "supply order" flow -- basically purchasing marketing materials and services. I finished that in a week, and I'm pretty proud. api-guy wanted it done in a day. i laughed. he probably could have, but it would have been a copy of the code in a new repo with some lines changed.

ANYWAY. it's all done and It's super pretty and works amazingly well. It has both the onboarding flow and the ordering flow, with a nice pop-out sidebar for navigation, namespaced actions, etc. Everything is pretty clean. I even added a cart to the ordering (despite everyone telling me not to) because wtf, what if someone wants to order TWO items? dumbasses. So I made that. it's sexy.

Anyway, it's all done and shiny and fancy and wonderful and I'd *love* to share screenshots if only it didn't give away where I worked. :<

... but the point of the rant!

After the first sprint, I made a copy of the repo so I could rework it and add more functionality without touching the original. (Hey! That's what a branch is for, right? Why didn't I branch it up?
well, read on)

I knew we were going to have multiple separate flows for this app: onboard, ordering, merchant tools, admin tools, support, etc. So, I wrote its server portion (the webpack builder + http server) so it would serve the same app at whatever url the user hit, and set a cookie containing that host+url. This allows the app to serve different content (basically showing/hiding content) based on the URL and future login roles. If someone hits /order, it would hide everything but the order flow. If they're a merchant, it would show all the merchant views plus ordering, etc.

tl;dr This way I can use the same codebase for multiple sites, drastically simplifying development, branding, and what have you. This new app could obv also be a drop-in replacement for the original onboarding project because of the above.

HOWEVER. this apparently isn't good enough for api-guy. He's terrified that adding/updating future components will affect all the existing content somehow.

so.

now we have three repos for basically the same codebase. 1) onboard aka "surfboard", 2) ordering, 3) merchant tools, aka "ferrari" (the "future" app).

Except.
1) "surfboard" is a very old version of the code. 3) "ferrari" is also old, since 2) "ordering" has newer content in it now.

... and somehow this is better?
fuck if i can figure out how.

His reasoning is "well, you won't be touching surfboard or ordering for 6 months, so now you don't have to worry about it." Sure, except, you know, it'll be a pain in the ass in 6 months now when I have a crapton of code and branding to redo. ffs.

Oh. We also have three Heroku pipelines for these three repos. for the same codebase.

and now you know why i'm drinking.

Absolutely :|

Build systems
Testing tools
Performance tools
Debugging tools
Automation tools
.
.
.

:|

It's more than a story bear with me.
Open source world is big enough to scare a beginner like me, which happened when I started with my first contribution in the year 2015. So many platforms, lot of organisations, freaking images of coding languages, pull request, issues and bugs- these all were enough to freak me out.

The only thing which motivated me to stay and know about the open source technology was to develop my first program using python. I was in great difficulty as when I started writing my program I was stuck after almost every two to three stages of compilation, so I needed guidance. I started my search on Github by creating my repository, pushing my code and following developers. I was amazed to see such a good response from people around me, not only they helped me to debug and fix the issue but they also helped me to understand and build my program from a new perspective. Daily discussions and communication, new issue build up and solving them by the traditional way of GUI further motivated me to learn the Git using the command line tool.

I still remember the year I worked on a repo using the command line tool, it was amazing. Within months or few, the fear of open source tools, community, interaction all just flew away. With this rant I will like to suggest all the beginners and open source enthusiast to just step a foot ahead and ask openly to the world- "I need help" and believe me you will be showered with information and help from all the world.

Happy contribution.

You've got to love Android development.. :D Just grabbed my laptop to start working on an idea I just had. Launched Android Studio to do some quick coding..

Update for the repo's..
Update for the IDE itself..
Update for gradle..

Started project. Need to update my build tools..

I.. I.. I just wanted to do some quick coding :D

*edit* Just tried to run the project.. "Acceleration driver is out of date, please update Haxm" .. Damnit..

Installing Ubuntu in VMWare. After the installation, proceeded to install VMWare tools to get the full resolution.

Shitloads of errors. Kernel build failing, gcc exiting with error code other than 0, all the copying failed. At the end of the process the executable says:

Enjoy,

---The VMWare Team

What the fuck am supposed to enjoy? My broken fucking Ubuntu in a VM?

Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.

Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.

Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.

Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.

Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.

So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.

Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".

WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF

Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.

I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.

Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.

When I realized I could use my powers to build myself the tools I need

Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.

I did it alone and with almost no help.

I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.

-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding

I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

Quote from Docker site: "anyone with Docker and an editor installed can build and debug the app in minutes"

Really? I'm two days in and still can't get this damn thing to work. And no solution in sight. Command line tools... sheesh.

I still don't understand the effect devRant has had on me...

When I first joined I was quite happy just being my old 2D game developer self but now all I want to do is build CLI tools, interpreters, root through source code I don't understand and not shut up about arch... Not sure of I'm down the right track or not now

Coworker: hey can you do this?

Me: sure *couple hours later* it's done.

Coworker several hours later: that thing you did completely changed. Can you update it?

*checks the platform we use so non devs can create web pages* All of my code was erased and I have to restart and add even more functionality. Why the actual fuck would you hire web developers if you're just going to have other employees use a poorly built tool to build pages. Every fucking time something breaks in the shitty fucking app, I have to fix it. Or if it doesn't do some crazy functionality, I have to hack code in there to do it in the ugliest way. Fuck tools like this. Fuck companies who make money off of these tools/use these tools. And fuck the developers who make these shitty tools that give real web developers so much frustration.

Android really gets on my goat. They are moving things so far that they are actually doing more damage than good.

Upgrade my build tools to v25? sure! Now all my BLE code is borked, thanks for nothing.

Go to the documentation? Lol, that's deprecated fool!

At least now it can all fail to function in Kotlin, a wrapper for Java 6. Instead of keeping your tools up to date you just create another layer of obfuscation. Well done, so proud.

The more time you spend on devRant the more you notice how people:
1) cant understand that other people use other tools
2) cant understand that they actually enjoy using those tools
3) cant understand that they can ship good software products and code using those very tools.

Just build something you think is cool using the tools you think works best for you.

whatever your stack is, if I cannot just build and run your app in 20 years with the same ease as you're doing it now, your stack is trash.

this is a part of the reason I don't use any tools to build my frontend now and just use simple files.

Tools are just tools,
Build a house with a blueprint,
But don't use one tool to build a house.

Sincerely yours,
CompanyWhoUsesJavascriptForEverything

A question for the people who say Macs are superior...

WHAT THE FUCK

I'm wrestling this iOS signing issue for the fourth day. How the fuck do people manage to build anything using tools broken by design and sold to them for the price of their mother.

From NAND to Tetris..

This book is IMO the best book for those who want to venture to the lower level programming.

This books retrains you’re thinking, teaches you from the bottom up! Not the typical top down approach.

You begin with the idea of Boolean algebra. And the move on to logic gates.. from there you build in VHDL everything you will use later.

Essentially building your own “virtual machine”.. you design the instruction set. Of which you will then write assembly using the instruction set to control the gate you built in VDHL.

THEN you will continue up the abstraction layer and will learn how a compiler works, and then begin written c code that is then compiled down to your assembly of your instructions set to be linked and ran on your virtual machine you built.

All the compiler and other tools are available on the books website. The book is not a book where you copy and paste, run and done.... you kinda have to take the concepts and apply them with this book.

Then once you master this book, take it the extra step and learn more about compilers and write your own compiler with the dragon book or something.

Fantastic book, great philosophy on teaching software.. ground up rather than top down. Love it! It’s Unique book.

A simulation sandbox game engine where you literally have to use tools and power tools to cut through raw materials to build things

$Me: I want to start creating my own android app.
$Me: Let's start by installing android studio
*Goes to download AS*
$AS: That'll be 4gb of your disk space
$Me: well nevermind then

Really? 4gb for a fcking IDE and some build tools?

Why the fuck does Apple hate developers so much? I just want to test and play around a bit. Why do I have to own a fucking Mac? Why do I need to pay 99$ a year just to install a debug build on my own device?! It's literally impossible to get into ios development without being rich or having some kind of plan for revenue...

Testing my app on Android:
Install Android studio -> plug in phone -> run code in Android Studio or simply install the resulting apk on your phone.

Trying to test my app on my iPad:
Google how to build app for iPad -> reading that you have to own a Mac to run xcode when you want to build Code for iOS -> searching for a workaround -> find a way to build my app online -> setting the tool and building it -> Trying out 5 different tools to sideload the app, no one works -> finding out that you need a developer account to sign the app for testing purposes on MY OWN DEVICE. I really would appreciate it if I would be able to install personal stuff for testing and LEARNING without being forced into insolvency. Why are people putting up with this kind of bullshit?

Programmers nowadays have to...
… write 100%-covering unit tests;
… set up continuous integration, linters, hinters, style checkers, …;
… follow style guides for every language;
… meet impossible deadlines;
… meet impossible management/customer/end user expectations;
… read through terrible code others made;
… read through terrible documentation others made;
… make terrible documentation themselves;
… fight with the IDE;
… fight with the build tools;
… deal with unreproducible crash reports coming in from everywhere;
… debug code written at 2am (by themselves AND others);
…
…
…
… KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM.

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Visual Basic at high-school, pascal and C and Java at University. VBA for macros on a job. html+css+js learnt o er a weekend to pass the screening for a new job, then ruby and php on that job to build internal tools. Now I am into python for data science. It has been fun.

So someone posted their btc wallet details (system automated message through a custom tool) to a paste in alternative.

Was the login for an ssh. Wont confirm or deny ssh-ing into it, but another guy who saw the same thing messaged me, sent a screenshot. Account had 127k usd worth of btc in it.

Called the radio station it belonged to and gave them a heads up. Probably should reported it as well but people already seen it so it'll get taken down soon enough.

Here I am broke, busting my ass and reality throws this in my lap. But I ain't never been no god damn thief. Hope the radio station it belongs to doesnt get robbed by someone less honest though.

Honesty is probably half the reason I've spent half my life broke trying to find or make opportunities.

And frankly I've heard real horror stories of good faith reports (whitehat style pentesting, etc) and the people that report it get fucked hard by authorities. What can you do though.

Enough navel gazing though.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who build these sort of account reset tools anyway?

Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.

I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more

Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.

They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.

They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).

I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.

Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.

I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.

Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands

I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.

I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk

Fuck Java and its related build tools.

Decided to throw caution to the wind and actually try to build a Java project, from scratch.

Install intellij, except it keeps complaining about the missing JDK, openjdk is installed but it doesn't like it.

Ok, whatever, I read that it's supposed to come with its own and so I point at that, no dice.

Ultimately I stumbled upon a stackoverflow post saying to just download the tgz JDK and just use that, I knew I could do that, but I wanted to use the tools the P environment suggested, but gave up.

Ok, so now I've got intellij and JDK installed, and I want to start my automatically generated project.

Except I now need gradle, fine, whatever, and now gradle complains it can't find the JDK...

Fucks sake... I was happy using Lein and Clojure, I didn't realise how fucking complicated it is to set up a Java IDE these days...

- build a self-service shell script to manage your environment in all kinds of ways with a single script and different switches

- ask tech manager for a server to keep that script [and others] at so coleagues should not bother setting dependencies up on their windows workstations

- be asked to list out all use cases

- be promissed your consolidated tool will be torn apart and replaced by 8 other tools depending on use-cases. Meaning 8 different browser windows open at all times to manage your single env

- be assured that this kind of improvement will take months and is doubtful to pay off

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

So i recently had to go back to windows while testing the notification feature in devRantron. Doing this only reminded me why i switched to linux 5 months ago. After having to restart my pc, reinstall c++ build tools multiple times, regedit and switching back and forth from powershell and cmd i managed to install a NPM package. Linux is <3

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

Used a starter to scaffold a new project. Have never used that starter before but it has more than 1400 starts on Github.

Two days after.... so far so good. The created project structure used some tools I haven't used before, some are good, others are not so good, but anyway I am towards the first release of my codes. I have done countless 'npm run build', 'npm run test', 'npm run fix', etc., but.... my fault, I haven't committed once since starting the project, thinking I would commit when the next function is implemented, next test case passed.... after all, what could go wrong anyway?

Finally, one last test case passed, I think I will commit and run 'npm publish'.... but wait, had a glimpse of the scripts section in package.json, there's a command named 'all'. An voice came out of nowhere was talking to my subconscious mind, "all.... build, lint, prettier, test..... yeah you should run all... it's another build script, the worst you can get is just some harmless error messages.....", and my fingers typed 'npm run all'...

Time stopped for a few seconds, file structure in project explorer was shifting, files & folders were disappearing & appearing, what's happening... and I looked at the 'all' script closely for the first time....

WHAT THE HELL, WHO SHOULD PUT 'git reset --hard' IN A BUILD SCRIPT WITHOUT ANY PROMPT????!!!!!!!

MY PLAN WAS TO COMMIT AND GO TO SLEEP, IT'S 1AM NOW!!! WHERE CAN I RECOVER THE LOST FILES????

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

"customers don't know what they want until we've shown them"

Is it just me that feels this a lot? I build a lot of tools for my own use at work, and then suddenly everyone wants it after seeing what they can do...

Being able to build automating tools and scripts. It's cool building your own tools, and even cooler if you like the process.

Hey Guys
A few Questions I have to decide soon, for tools I never used:

1- How do you guys keep information about several accounts and stuff? Must have some protection to not be easily accessible (started using Google Notepad and Evernote until I find better... don't really like them)

2- Firefox: Is there a way to store groups of open tabs?
Like I have one windows with 6 or 7 tabs for movies (youtube and such), other for general stuff with 5 or 6 tabs, other with Arduino shit, and I'm going to pick Vue soon and another language to build native apps and that will be a lot more tabs, It would be nice to close them all and open them all at will or something.

3 - What Is your favorite browser? I'm using Firefox, but there are so many new good ones... Like Brave browser with Tor incorporated, or Puffin for Android (which uses a VPN with their own server by default)

4 - For windows users, do you have any tools to help with workflow installed? which ones you use and why?

5 - What I'm using: Google Notepad + Evernote to save stuff, Windows 10 and Firefox, (Linux Mint in VM) and I just keep my shortcuts in folders... I don't use the Windows taskbar for a long while since its so full of shit.

6 - How do you do your backups? Right now I'm just putting my code and important stuff in Dropbox.

I'm an old school programmer... Stuck in 1990's Ideas and there is so muchhhh shit these days that I would prefer your opinions then just googling.
Guess that's enough for this post. Thank you guys

Co-worker: "I'm getting files from customers which are in multiple types and encodings. Is there a way to force them to send only us-ascii so my tool gets only one kind which is easier to parse?"

Me: "Welcome to programming with arbitrary sources; you'll just have to build your tools to figure it out and not break (just rely on dozens of existing tools which you refuse to use)"

Use the CLI they said. It would be fun they said.

This app seems to be mostly web developers so I have a question that will either spark interesting discussion or a blood curdling flame war. Either way:

I'm trying to build a blog site for myself. I'm not a web developer, for the most part I write C software, but I have written web software before. I want to write it, not use a CMS. What are some techniques and tools I should be aware of, so I don't break my keyboard in frustration?

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

A new currency is emerging in our industry. It is called "blame".
Who is to blame if we don't meet the deadline?
Who is to blame if the rushed release has x bugs?
Who is to blame if nightly build breaks, because our CI-Server is an old hunk of junk and "management" didn't approve the upgrade?
Our customer blames the delay in HIS infrastructure on us, because our system requirements are too high.

Blame blame blame. This currency is the new idol of our management team. Everyone gets blamed. They manage their "blame" ledgers instead of approving the tools we need or give us reasonable deadlines. Why Lord, oh why are there SO MANY MORONS in managment? You know what, dear "managers"? FUCK YOU., FUCK YOU SO HARD YOUR MOM WON'T RECOGNIZE YOU. YOU COULDN'T POUR PISS OUT OF A BOOT WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON THE HEEL.

Me: "Need help with build config problems, please help almighty documentation page!"

Docs Page: "Nah fam, I got 4 headers about problems with no text, a blank code example, and 2 error 404 pages."

And that's why I don't like build pipelines.

Back at <biginternationalorg> I witnessed a developer deliberately build an xss vuln into a company web application, so that he could plug a JS file in with all of his passwords hardcoded. Bear in mind, this is an org that provides services to both the UK and US military, and if you have access to some stuff you have access to the tools you need to impersonate high-ranking military folks.

I know its like, twenty different passwords, but that's what a goddamn keychain is for! If you don't trust windows keychains, do what I did and run a VM with a Foss keychain installed! Don't build a vuln right into a public facing web app, that's just stupidity.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

It takes ages to get visual studio with all required tools to generate windows build of an ionic project. Windows for dev(atleast for mobile web) is not at all smooth.
Hate Visual studio..... Load project takes its own time. Build takes ....never mind.

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.

I'm so fucking fed up with the npm ecosystem. Every single god damn time I've had to do anything it always takes DAYS to figure out how to get anything working and I always have to try multiple tools or libraries to final get it half way sorta.
I'm so fucking annoyed right now. They always turn out not that great, have lacking features or trivial oversights in functionality and ALWAYS have garbage documentation.

I just want to build a fucking npm library with TypeScript to be used with node. That's probably the NUMBER 1 use case so how fucking hard can that be?

So obviously I start out with tsc. That's quite simple, compiles all my stuff and shits out .js and .d.ts files. Okay so how do I use them via es6 import? I don't fucking know, because it doesn't work no matter what I do. The 'module' option in tsconfig is absolutely useless btw. It does *literally* fuck all. Nada. Absolutely nothing.
Okay I'm far from defeated, maybe I'll just have to bundle it. So I waste two days finding something that half works (I'm using fusebox right now) and at last I get a stupid es6 module as a single bundle... But what about type the declarations? They are nowhere to be seen and of course there's no option for that. Because Fusebox the pile of shit that's oh so well Typescript integrated apparently doesn't think TYPE DECLARATION FILES are needed. What the actual fuck.

And that's where I'm now. I need the fucking .d.ts files so I can use it as a module with import. Do I really need another fucking piece of shit tool that bundles these files? Honestly fuck all of this. "Oh the Javascript ecosystem is so great" YEAH fucking great, alright. Where 90% of the ESTABLISHED tools and libraries (we don't talk about the landfill of all the other shit) flat out don't do what you need. Again, how fucking hard can it be to make a npm lib with typescript? That should be NATIVELY SUPPORTED. If not by npm atleast by typescripts tsc.

FUCK NPM. FUCK JAVASCRIPT. AND FUCK THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM

If only compiling a medium to big C/C++ library wasn't a fucking nightmare still in 2016, with all those slightly incompatible build tools that fail miserably on your machine...

Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer

so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit

- Code reviews are good for you
- learn and understand your tools
- ask and listen
- if someone writes code for you, delete it and build it again yourself

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

Co-worker put up a pull-request for his work, with no build file, no readme, no gitignore, and shell scripts for running the app (but not compiling it). O_o

The guy has been using atom editor even though we have license for Intellij for everyone, which .. whatever .. if it works for you...

In our daily stand, people offered to help him add the build files and he was like, "No, I know how to do it, I was just trying to avoid using Gradle until I had to."

It just made me think, "Yea I know you have all these nice screw drivers and hammers, but I'm going to keep using my hands and this stick so I can avoid using tools until I have to."

Made a dockerfile for a reproducible build environment today. It's been a few months since I had this much fun working, so refreshing.

This counts as devops right? In that case I might take a better look at devops sometime in the near future, I think I might like it. I just did it out of necessity (didn't want to bloat my system with build tools and sdks) but I ended up liking it. For some reason devops seems exceedingly boring to me, which prevented me from looking into it until now, let's see if I can overcome my laziness and learn it.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

How come Rust is the most loved programming language? I wanted to give rust a try in my windows machine and when I run `cargo run` or `cargo build` is shows: linker `link.exe` not found
Okay, how to fix it?
you need to download 8GB+ of bullshitty visual studio C++ build tools just to run a simple rust programs! WTF!

Previously when I installed rust, it didn't need all these bullcrap. why now?

Like many others: Linux, GNOME, the GNU build tools, Firefox, blender, ...

A few I haven't seen mentioned:
- Liferea
- Kdenlive
- restic/borg backup

I mean, seriously? Skipping over the line that disables certificates checks... Did you forget where the button to run the build is?

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.

I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.

Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.

Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.

But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.

So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.

But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.

I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.

Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.

The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.

By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.

Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?

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v0.0005a (alpha)
- class support added to lua thanks to yonaba.
- rkUIs class created
- new panel class
- added drawing code for panel
- fixed bug where some sides of the UI's border were failing to drawing (line rendering quark)

v0.0014a (alpha) 11.30.2023 (~2 hours)
- successfully retrieving basic data from save folder, load text into lua from files
- added 'props' property to Entity class
- added a props table to control what gets serialized and what doesn't
- added a save() base method for instances (has to be overridden to be useful beyond the basics)
- moved the lume.serialize() call into the :save() method on the base entity class itself
- serialized and successfully saved an entities property table.
- fixed deserializion bugs involving wrong indexes (savedata[1] not savedata[2])
- moved deserialization from temp code, into line loading loop itself (assuming each item is on one line)
- deser'd test data, and init()'d new player Entity using the freshly-loaded data, and displayed the entity sprite

All in all not a bad session. Understanding filing handling and how to interact with the directory system was the biggest hurdle I was worried about for building my tools.

Next steps will be defining some basic UI elements (with overridable draw code), and then loading and initializing the UI from lua or json.

New projects can be set as subfolders folders in appdata, using 'Setidentity("appname/projectname") to keep things clean.

I'm not even dreading writing basic syntax highlighting!

Idea is to dogfood the whole process. UI is in-engine rendered just like you might see with godot, unity, or gamemaker, that way I have maximum flexibility to style it the way I want. I'm familiar enough with constructing from polygons, on top of stenciling, on top of nine-slicing, on top of existing tweening and special effects, that I can achieve exactly what I want.

Idea is to build a really well managed asset pipeline. Stencyl, as 'crappy' as it appeared, and 'for education' was a master class in how to do things the correct way, it was just horribly bloated while doing it.

Logical tilesets that you import, can rearrange through drag-n-drop, assign custom tile shapes to, physics materials, collisions groups, name, add tag data to, all in one editor? Yes please.
Every other 2D editor is basic-bitch, has you importing images, and at most generates different scales and does the slicing for you.

Code editor? Everything behavior was in a component, with custom fields. All your code goes into a list of events, which you can toggle on and off with a proper toggle button, so you can explicitly experiment, instead of commenting shit out (yes git is better, but we're talking solo amateurs here, they're not gonna be using git out the gate unless they already know what they're doing).

Components all have an image assignable to identify them, along with a description field, and they're arranged in a 2d grid for easy browsing, copying, modifying.

The physics shape editor, the animation editor, the map editor, all of it was so bare bones and yet had things others didn't.

I want that, except without the historic ties to flash, without the overhead of java, and with sexier fucking in-engine rendering of the UI and support for modding and in-engine custom tools.

Not really doing it for anyone except myself, and doubt I'll get very far, but since I dropped looking for easy solutions, I've just been powering through all the areas I don't understand and doing the work.

I rediscovered my love of programming after 3-4 years of learning to hate it, and things are looking up.

As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.

I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.

I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.

As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.

And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')

Is it just me or is Java really uninspiring as a language? And are there any Java build tools that don't sound like 90-year-old women? Maven, Gradle...

Gotta love it when CMake manages to change the way it handles GLEW in the latest build and breaks the QT moc inclusion directive in the previous. I absolutely detest the current state of cross platform build tools and environments. The amount of ffing time wasted on this crap is just beyond me.

First patch for buildroot submitted and added applied to master!! 😁

I had the impression that git (like, more than "git add ." was just too complicated and that making patches was some sort of dark magic using some obscure unix tools.

Well, it turns out that is actually pretty easy, fun and exhilarating!!

Looking forward to build up until I'm making contributions to the kernel! 🤓

Why is installing the C/C++ compiler and build tools such a pain in the arse on windows? Just wanted to use the spacy package which uses CPython now I have to install gigabytes of shit and move some dlls and exes around just so I can install the fucking package. What the fuck is wrong with this shit.

since everybody seems to hate gradle i would like to say how much i like gradle for its possibility to build even big java projects from the commandline without the need of a a lot o scripts and especially the possibility to create a wrapper in order to use it even when its not installed on said machine.
it is the only reason why i am learning java now (i fucking loathe eclipse at the moment).

and regarding its speed. i had both. windows and linux. and for some reason i could only verify its slowliness on windows.

Project set up with JS build tools takes more time than fucking project development itself

Me: Yea, I'm having a good day. Sun's shining, Birds are singing. I'm really enjoying my lunch.

Errors on the build I started before lunch:

everyone glorifies ethereum and its smart contracts, but the actual build tools and overall development environment around it sucks balls.

when testing a contract locally with truffle develop and metamask, you have to reinstall metamask after every transaction because it gets out of sync with your local chain... people are seriously okay with working with this shit?

To use Unity with VS you have to get Unity Build Tools as a plugin.

Alright, I'll download that.

Oh but now there's an error with connecting to unity, I need to get a newer VS and switch to the 2018 version of the engine.

Ok fine that's annoying but I guess I might as well upgrade.

Oh now there's no Intellisense? I guess I need to reload my project.

Oh what's this? Some major build error due to a missing component from Vs 2015?

This is getting stupid, fine let me install it.

Oh but to install the component you need to rerun the installer for VS, fine I'll redownload that.

Oh but apparently the installer _I JUST DOWNLOADED A FEW SECONDS AGO_ is outdated and needs to be upgraded. I can't _not_ update the installer and still install the components because that would be stupid, why would we let the developer decide what versions to use obviously they don't know what they're doing I mean it's not like they know how to use computers?

To get simple code completion, let's force developers to download an installer that then needs to be updated to install a component for this giant IDE that also requires the 2015 version of the IDE to be installed alongside a special plugin and patch designed for a specific game engine.

All this. For fucking code completion. I can't even get Intellisense to work in VSCode without fixing the issue since the C# extension in VSCode just binds to Visual Studio tools and runs the same shit with a different GUI.

When you do the drag and remove of the react-native app on the phone and realise on the next build it doesnt work because i need to remove app from settings because it got disabled

Its Friday, i spent less time that younger me would have finding that. I consider it a successful debug session.

I started by looking at existing code and then began to build my own tools and projects, then rebuilding until eventually I got to where I am at the minute. It's a constant learning process.

/rant on

React Native is BS for Android. Outdated as hell Gradle builds (1.x for certain plugins I mean wtf) and it targets outdated SDK and build tools... Why no simply code for system your software is meant to work :P

/rant over

In seriousness, I get the concept of build once deploy on all platforms ala Electron but better but hell why is the tooling so outdated?

I live in a country where Dollars are of very high value, I got a job fteelancing and made some money, after that a friend's brother approched me with some fantastic ideas (I guess he thought of them because 'Hey, he made money, I can too') like building an online game, I told him that i wasn't either a designer or a game developer and he told me that I could go and learn... Yeah like if I can learn game development in a week or be a designer in the same amount of time. When I said no he told me if I didn't want to build a porn site, I kindly rejected again and told him that I like to build tools that are useful for other people then he said that he just wants to make people spend money on internet like if money was going to rain quickly. I didn't even ask but I'm sure he wasn't going to pay me for development. I'm sure that when I see him he's going to tell me more "Fantastic ideas"

Spends 9 months on the side developing a library for analysis of a specific programming language. No help, entirely my own work. There's various tools built upon this library. Incorporates project management, an effective build system capable of parallel and distributed builds, a packaging system...

Beta release the library. Wait four months. Ask the community for who's been using it so I can get feedback and other comments. Majority of the comments follow a specific pattern.

"You don't support X, how dare you!?"

One, this is free software, pay me if you want specific things.
Two, I'm the only developer of a project usually undertaken by a small team.
Three, yes it does you fucking invalid... Every fucking time someone claims it doesn't support some feature, it's something I've already written and validated. I swear to fucking God users can't find something themselves and instead of checking the Wiki or asking for help, they blindly assume they can't make mistakes and it must be my defect.

What the fuck! Sick of this shitty build system we have. Apparently once you have used it too many times the same way, a bug kicks in. So you rhn another of their shittty tools to "update" and now it says you have no buildtools. Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!! Fu&#! Fu&#! Fu&#! Fu&#! F f f fuuuuuuuuu&#!

So I salvaged some computer that was about to be thrown out by IT because it works perfectly fine and would be a waste to lose.

The (current) problem is, there is no built-in wi-fi adapter so I had to order a usb adapter to plug into the machine.
Fortunately enough it supports Linux but cones with a cd with the _source_ of the driver in it and we are supposed to build it. Now what's the problem with that?

First problem: building needs all sorts of build tools, starting from gcc and make. Since it's a fresh install, though, I _cannot_ install those normally because -- you guessed it -- I don't have a WiFi connection, which is why I needed the bloody adapter in the first place, so I spent hours trying to fetch the binaries from the apt register using another computer and bringing them over via USB.

Once that was (more or less) successful, the next problem came around; Second problem: the instructions clearly state to run make, but there is no fucking makefile anywhere so that obviously fails spectacularly. What _is_ there are some bash scripts so I try running those.

Now, just when I think it's finally done (one of the scripts has been running for a while and seems to work) the compiler dies with an error: the fucking driver won't build for the current kernel version. And not just that, but it is clear nobody is using basic things like include guards because gcc kept screaming at me about the same macros being defined over and over due to header file re-inclusion. Like, seriously? Come on!

Long story short the fucking adapter is going back to the seller, let's see if the next one I order more civilized.

Alright got an idea I have for my game engine that I'd love some input on...

So the engine has emphasis on user made content and openness to that content (EG. open source dev tools and no licencing of art) but I also want to try and build a basic ecosystem with the engine and one way I'm doing it is with cross game mods (Take a mod from one game and drop it in another and it just works... Famous last words) but something I want to try is a companion app for the engine itself...

So it'll have a custom written save system baked in engine to make progress saving and the like simpler for the end user, thinking about building an app for smart watches and phones that would connect to the engine and actually back up and sync local saves to the app and vice versa as long as they have a connection (Hotspot your phone, bluetooth or wifi) but allow you to manage some data within the app by building a basic API to let devs show the user information about the save and the game by adding description, thumbnails to distinguish games and the like...

Just want opinions if it may be a good idea to invest some time into and if anyone has idea's that could make it better.

I like Xamarin, but they treat Windows like crap. What is more ironic? EVERYTHING Microsoft creates or sells treats their own platform like crap! Skype on my Android has been updated constantly while Skype on PC absolutely sucks. Every developer tools like Visual Studio don't target Windows apps as much. You spend YEARS hyping us up for the Universal Windows Platform, then toss it to the side and give away Android apps. What's worse is that all of that was preventable. They could easily improve the UWP and build an ecosystem around it, but nope. They kick their fanbase, and every other end user involved in the platform, to the curb. Microsoft, nobody trusts you anymore! I've been a fan since July 29th, 2015. I owned a Windows Phone. I own Mixed Reality headset. My Android has every one of your services on it. Why? Because I spend day after day hoping for your reception. But while you are busy "Hitting Refresh", thousands, if not millions, are being ticked off by how we enjoyed the Windows platform more than you did... Get your head in the game! Your developers hang in the balance.

Hi I’m a Python Developer, tired of doing internal applications using Excel as a UI. I’m thinking of proposing to turn most of our projects into internal web apps instead. Has anyone gone through this sort of problem?

My team is quite pro at using Excel, so naturally they prefer to use the tools I build from Excel. Some of those tools are also used by external teams, but they are not as capable with Excel, so they need supervision and guidance.

There are multiple concerns that arise:
- I code on Mac, but they need to run it on Windows, so compatibility issues
- Some of their laptops might not have enough resources to run the tasks
- Errors are harder to trace and could be very user-specific.
- New developers might not be familiar with Excel and the way to integrate with Python

I would like to know your opinion or criticism

Question: We are planning to transition our old ES5 codebase to modern ES6/ES7 and even typescript.

What would be the build tool you would recommend if we want to start supporting ES6/ES7 and even Typescript?

Webpack, Vite some other?

This is a vanilla Javascript Project with large codebase it's been built using custom build tools like UglifyJS and UglifyCSS and of after lots of begging it finally got the green light to move to a more modern build tool and start supporting a more standard JavaScript Features.

Mainly I want to move to TypeScript but transition would be slow so the build tool would need to support .ts and .js as well, that is traspile both the .ts and .js into one final production build.

What build tool would you recommend for that?

Last night I was up until 3am because the fucking unity and the fucking Android SDK can't put together an structure without mi intervention.

It appears that since SDK 23 Google decided to move some libraries from tools to build-tools, but unity keeps trying to find that library in tools, obviously this error doesn't have any specific documentation and i spend around 5 hours downloading SDKs and trying to figure out what happen, till I found one tiny post in unity forum with only one answer.

I mean, on one side, this has changed since android 23 and the folks in unity can't change his fucking compiler yet, and on the other side, why the fuck Google change libraries from one place to another

Also, as a note to Google, your new system for SDK-only download its super shitty and full of problems, I don't know why you change it.

For the fucking love of God, a client is too lazy to adapt his CI Tools to support latest Ionic that he wants us to rewrite the WHOLE WEB APP in Angular1, just to support their legacy JBOSS + Maven build process. Fucking fortunately, no adjustments on the timeline.

If I only know the names of those lazy fucks, I'll put them on the Death Note.

TL;DR - an entire emulation of a closed source CMS to develop a theme

The longer version:

We are using a cms that is closed source, and we only have access to frontend files alongside twig files. The CMS is custom built but many aspects are in a very rudimentary state, for example it is nearly impossible to develop locally, we have to use an integrated text editor to code stuff.

So out of frustration, and for my development needs, I decided I would make an emulation based on Symfony 4. Also because my PM was pressing me to optimise our site. I wrote some custom JS to handle everything smoothly, a semi-sass framework and well-structured twig files.

I was also supposed to work with our graphic designer, but she didn't get any alloted time from our pm to work on it...

Now PM asks me to write a specifications document in order to make another company build the new version

I mean wtf, I'm so bored, I can actually enjoy my day by coding, and no, I'm just there to write the specs.

When I told PM I am currently building the new version, she's like "but we didn't validate anything", when she explicitly said I had a green Go to code it a few months back

Instead I have to make prezies and convert them back to PowerPoint because we have computer-illiterate people in the company who aren't flexible to understand simple tools.

Let's hope it won't get useless by Friday (I have a presentation to give, alongside my estimates and project management presentation)

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

What makes a good programming language isn't its features, but its build system.
Shit tooling makes for shitty development every time.

It's amazing how many nice build tools there are to make life easier as a web developer. Learning those tools themselves and figuring out why / when they are useful is always pretty confusing haha, endless configuration details. Perhaps more so for myself because I only stared Programming in 2014. But now that I have learned how to use them more extensively I couldn't imagine how much of a pain it would be to not have them.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.

I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."

Fuck you, webpack, just fuck you! Took me three whole days but finally you were the one who gave in. Take that and build!

Getting settled on a new team. They are using this custom built Dependency manager/Build tool. I’ve now wasted 2 weeks trying to get it up and I haven’t started my actual issue item yet.... sigh I wish I was on the team that uses Gradle.

Damn I'm tired of js build tools. Having just converted my build scripts to make is really making my day. Damn it's fast.

A simple CSS change turned into me trouble shooting my local environment for hours...next time I'm just going cowboy 😑

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

Use Maven, they said... it's better, they said... you don't have to manage dependencies yourself, they said...

...only now I've spent three days in hell trying to figure out why Maven keeps insisting on sticking INCOMPATIBLE JARs in my WAR that causes a breakage when deployed. No matter what I do it still sticks stuff in the WAR that shouldn't be there!

Like, I'm not a lazy cunt, I can manage my own dependencies! I know what's supposed to be there, oh, and by the way, everything fucking works when I build with Ant instead and I'm in full control of what winds up in the WAR.

So, basically, instead of the "hassle" of having to download JARs myself, I've now got the hassle of dealing with Maven trying to be more clever than me.

I know which I'd rather have, especially right now. ARGH!

You know, any time someone says "this is an industry-standard and that's why you should use it" my first thought is "hmm, which of these buildings is tallest and will ensure a quick death when I inevitably jump off of it?" MOST ESPECIALLY when the company just decides X is what everyone is going to switch to, regardless of what they're using now and regardless of how many YEARS it's been that way and working perfectly. Nope, doesn't matter, just get onboard the freight train, and if your productivity takes a hit, if you start missing deadlines dealing with shit you didn't have to deal with when using the "worse" tools, well, I guess that doesn't fucking matter, does it?!

And that's not even talking about the fact that the Maven build takes almost four minutes, which is just about 4x as long as the Ant build it replaced, each and every fucking time I make a change.

Look, I'm sure there are solutions and I'm sure I'll find them next week because I always do... and I'm sure there's some tweaking we can do to improve the performance... and it's not like this is my first go-round with Maven, though it's probably the most complex project I've ever tried to do with it... by my fucking dear god this is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare of my choosing.

I'm disgusted, tired and defeated, three things I never get when it comes to technology. Congratulations Maven, you're on the verge of breaking someone who doesn't get broken. Another day like the last three and I'm not gonna need Stackoverflow, I'm gonna need a bus schedule so I can figure out exactly when to step off the fucking sidewalk!

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Is it weird that I hold a high degree of respect for every sector in programming. When we talk about front-end, back-end in websites to the GUI support and logical end in desktop applications to cloud-based microservices, I respect clean, swift, and agile developers who who a structural mindset. For the founding fathers of assembly to high-programming languages like c all the way to high-high level programming languages like C#, JavaScript, Python, I respect them and thank them for their time and dedication in relatively stable libraries. I also thank the creators of OOP and FP as well as the developers that make great use of these paradigms. I come to realization that no one wants to fuck shit up; the great engineers of our past wanted to build some legit, non-trash programming tools, and we can't bash them for that. Respect, courteously critique, and build applications and programming tools to a standard that someone in the future would admire and be grateful for.

Other build tools:

Here is a plugin, use it . Be done.

Scala Build Tool aka SBT:

Build your own plugin.

Everything is scala...
You can create by the way funny endless loops when using the wrong syntax - yet it might compile successfully. And then when you load the plugin, it works. Till it is evaluated - lazy evaluation for the fun.

Error messages are at best cryptic.

*If* you manage to get a working plugin and *if* it runs...

Surprise. Surprise.

You might need to parse the log output of SBT.

Another funny surprise: Log output isn't configurable. You can configure the log level. That's it.

So after a lot of pain stakingly putting together a fucking shitty plugin, you can now grind the rest of your brain with ...
sed.

Cause yeah. You can now use regex to parse an sbt build log and extract the necessary information.

:)

...

So....

Are we there?

Mwahahahhaa.

Only if you haven't forgotten to either disable colored output for SBT... Or take an extra mile with e.g. less -R.

Otherwise you have ASCII control characters in your file. :-)

After getting that shit to work, you now have finally a parseable build log.

Just took days instead of hours.

But that's SBT. :-)

Does anyone work on a bunch of local NPM modules wanna describe their workflow for local dev vs deploy?

I’ve got mine but it feels a little trashy. It’s basically one npm script to link all the local modules for dev and another which will npm install them in prod - is there a better way without adding more build tools?

Soo since for the end of the year, I'll be stuck with my family, I won't be able to work on my main projet, and only have my crappy laptop (hey at least it runs Linux). So I've decided to discover python and build some tools with :D.
Since I see a lot of python fans around, I wonder if I could have some pointers, specialy for desktop cross plateforme app, good editors/ide, interesting libraries, etc...
As information, I almost never touched python before. But for the little I did, it was fun =]

Quote from one of the seniors here:

"Build as simply as possible, in case other people don't know what they're doing"

So, instead of using all tools available (I'm trying to introduce using AspectJ), we should build for the least knowledgeable developer and not teach them anything new.

I love how easy it is to build a native app these days thanks to tools like react native but also hate convoluted it becomes of you want to do anything “outside of the box”

Ugh. Where to begin!

If you gotta make a standard for everyone to follow, you better make it readily available. Even though you barely have any users, but if it's a standard, anyone can try to follow it tomorrow. Or else take it down completely.

There's a standard for learning tools handled by IMSGlobal (Don't ask who they are, no idea). So if you want to build a tool to integrate with different learning platforms, follow this.

OK now, to read the documentation you have to register for an account. As if this is bad, ....... wait for it ........, sign up has to be approved by an admin. My request is already weeks old but not approved.

OK. Google around and try to see if some alternative can be read than that shitty website. Apparently, they have a Spring plugin on GitHub that can be used as a Maven dependency. It has a small readMe attached so I can get something out of it.

And I'm using Spring, golden right? Not quite...............
turns out the stupid readMe is outdated. If you follow those instructions, you get errors. WONDERFUL!!

Now I have to dig through all the code files and try to make sense of what I'm supposed to do.

So were working with this company, and their designer gave us some designs for the app that they wanted us to build, everything was fine and dandy until we realized that there were 6 different font colors, including three different grays... And to top it off, the designs didn't have a color pallet attached, it had a list of colors attached, but most of those were never used in the designs... So we ended up eyeballing and using color inspector tools to get the colors from the design, just to later get told that we used the 'wrong' colors... 😢

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

Sometimes I forget how good I am at my job, then I'm listening to someone explain how to set stuff up and they're like "do this and this and that and install these build tools" and I'm looking at them confused coz I've already got a docker compose stack that includes everything they're talking about, and then I realise that difference is called "experience"

Tldr; Rust community could definitely be way less annoying, but it's way more annoying listening to everyone bitch about it all the fucking time.

rant()
Tired of the Rust hype? Too fucking bad. Quit complaining that people like well-designed languages more than shitty ones. Yeah, rust devs can be real fucking zealous, but at least the language is good. If you don't like listening to people say "why not rust?" ignore them or ask yourself the same fucking question ahead of time so you don't feel defensive when someone asks it later.

Read some shit about how "it doesn't matter what you build it with if the software is good, its all the same". Ever heard of "right tool for the right job"? Rust has applications all over the place, so people are going to talk about it a lot. Also, just no. Like, Python shouldn't be in the Linux kernel for a lot of reasons, so the tools you choose can constrain whether or not your software is actually "good."

Ever heard of "unsubstantiated trust"? Yeah, you might be good at writing C, but you can get that shit to compile with nasty fucking problems and C's a straight up foot gun in my hands. It's hard to write shitty functioning Rust that does what you say it does, which is less unsubstantiated trust.

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

Good times: Migrating a Jenkins build pipeline patched together out of groovy, python, bash, awk, perl scripts and God knows what else since I have only scratched the surface so far, from Maven to Gradle while not breaking day-to-day builds, integrations and deployments of features, hotfixes and releases. I'm actually enjoying the challenge but it's taking forever due to several issues:
- Jenkins breaks/hangs randomly because it's Jenkins
- Gradle can't handle sets of version ranges but Maven can
- Maven can't handle Gradle style version ranges
- Gradle doesn't have a concept of parent poms, you need to write a plugin and apply stuff programmatically. But plug-ins being part of the buildscript{} don't fall under depency management rules :clap:
- Meme incompatibility issues of BSD vs GNU versions of CLI tools like sed, grep etc

21 Veracode flaws in the code, 21 Veracode flaws!

Patch the code, run a new scan...

...146 Veracode flaws in the code!

(this is why build tools that auto-manage dependencies are a Very Bad Thing(tm) - couple that with aggressive remediation windows and oh boy, nightmare fuel!)

Do you know any open-source and free (as in beer) mockup/wireframe tool for webdesign?

I may soon have two websites to build for little businesses, but I'd like to be able to create mockups for approval before diving into the code. As I was looking for tools, I was surprised to find no free and open-source software for the job. Everything is on a free trial model which I'd be glad to pay for if I had the money, but since I'm really just beginning, I'd rather use something free, and preferably open-source.

I'll use Gimp if nothing comes up, but since it's not intended for this kind of usage, it's a bit more time consuming to create something of quality on it.

Thanks a lot.

Ok... Able to pry myself away from fallout 76 and fire up for some programming...

Van't decide whether I want to build my game engines debug and root dev tools how I thought, thinking of building the engine to almost behave like a VM but not quite, it still is compiled just like a normal game but has a built in developer terminal that actually acts like an extra operating system/BIOS that can be left to boot the games assets and everything like you would have for an end user or the startup can be interupted to initialise the terminal prior to everything being loaded...

Following the osdev Wiki tutorials to actually build the dev terminal itself but just unsure whether or not to impliment this system the way I think or not... Opinions?

Got a call about production was going to fail. They thought it's the application server.

I'm the end it was bogus file mods which were scrambled by the backup tool.

Why we didn't find out earlier? Because the java application was coded like this:

-------

String content;

Try {
File bla = new File
content = ... Read operation
} catch (IoException | SecurityEx | RuntimeEx ex)
// nothing we can do here
}

doWork(content);

---------

Why the fuck do we have code reviews? Why not just log or throw a Runtime Exception? Argh... I thought it would be better in enterprise applications. Perhaps I should tell them to not just use pmd, also spotbugs and sonarqube. But the department for the build tools does not have enough employees. Dang.

Anyway. Earned some money for that.

Now it's 2018 and I still get money for the same kind of bugs as 2008.

How can not one, not two, but many many things JUST be so wrong!? like..
Windows. (Yes. THE OS). Why? well... we begin with the garbage, right? the BLOAT.
cortana
mspaint
internet explorer <- wh..WHA?! wh?!?!
ms edge <- okay.. (I saying okay as in a figure of speech I would like to remove it honestly)

why can't I remove internet explorer, and they make another internet explorr called microsoft edge - you guessed it - I can't remove ms edge either.
What's next?! :D
bloat umbruella version -0.1? :D <- a new internet explorer. for 2042.

Cortana. <- some might say "that's not Sooo bad tho". It might not be, but if if it is for me - I would like to remove it.

Okay. okay. moving onto the software.
`V`-Yeah you guessed right. on the first letter.
VISUAL STUDIO.

my face: 😲
I compare visual studio to windows xp to internet explorer to windows overall. they share so much in common...

forced updates,
fixes,
BLOCKS you to compile programs because of NUMEROUS REASONS LIKE..
comment out "CRC303030 whatever" to ignore this message.
you need the build tools vx.x.x.y.x.y.x.t..z.z.z.(100 billion digits later)..x.x.Z OR alternatively you could re-target your solution by (...) (and now today I had enough, I dont see the retarget solution - And I am sure, WHEN I SEE IT - it will just be another problem..

... 💥

I am surprised how windows can run so fluently, with all this crap. Fluently as in actually being running. I am a fan of linux instead though but..
(question to me would probably be why you use windows not linux then?) sometimes I code on windows.. 🤦‍♀️

and it is a pain.

workloads,updates,options,BILLION OF OPTIONS, BILLION OF BUTTONS, stuff I never ever use, takes time to reinstall,install,remove, - windows also needs to restart after each simple thing.... (!?)

sorry. this was nice to write this rant. PHEW! thank GOSH this site exists! 😘 😍

Heyyy DevRant Fam! :D, hope everyone is doing very well today! i would love to get some input/advice from my fellow developer friends here today... so Milo has gotten himself into a sticky situation... So recently i had a little opportunity to get some mentor-ship or internship through a family friend, and im sooo excited but nervous at the same time.. i sometimes think to myself am i really 'good enough for such a position'?? but however since I've never really experienced this sort of work, whats their to lose? or is this a bad way too think about it? :D

so ladies and gents, I'm really interested in the stock market and that sort of finance, and i think id be a good fit to build tools for traders, if i cannot get into that sort of position, why not work back office and have more of a support role? I'm always very happy to work my way up as I'm highly motivated!, however in the case that i manage to get into such a position, I'd love to know, what sort of things do i need know to be able to land such a position? if you can give me any tips or advice id be extremely grateful! :D

If you have managed to get this far into my post, I'd love to say thank you so much! and i really apologize for rambling on... i generally always do that.... and also i want to say thank you so much for taking the time to read my question <3 really means a lot to me!

just quick note letting everyone know as a hobby project I'm building a little list app where i can save my favorite stock tickers/symbols into a list and see the price changes over time (through alphavantage's API) :D

Kind regards,
Milo <3 :-)

Always liked to tinker with software.
And build stuff.

The latter started out the opposite, used to be a bonafide skid.
Until I learned that the most efficient way to break in, is to know how it's built.

My specialty? Mmh probably Laravel, MySQL, Vue & NuXT JS.
& React native.

Built quite a few things with those tools.

.net, asp, sqlsrv, Xamarin & uwp is in my toolbelt too tho.

Whichever tool is the better fit 😁

Fuck .NET and vsbuildtools
For days i've been trying to build a project on a build server without installing visual studio but this seems impossible.. the build tools dont install the required dlls and even after adding those manually from a dev Machine msbulld fails.
Fuck this

I just got hired at a small MSP and I’m just utterly fucking frustrated by the shitty tools and complete lack of client documentation. I want to implement tons of FOSS tools for these newbhats but they seem to like spending money on tools that only work half-assedly at best... looking at you LogMeIn!

I’ve setup Apache Guacamole a few times before and want to get each client a guac-srv setup for client’s server mgmt. or PowerShell Web Access for clients.

I want to build AWS infrastructure for clients cause we can use cloudformation or terraform to build infrastructure. But these skunk-taint licking dipsticks would rather support physical 2003 servers. If I didn’t need this job to pay my bills right now I’d be fucking gone.

But... they are very nice people.

Just technologically speaking, they eat lead paint chips for breakfast and like to piss on electric fences for the funsies.

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

So basically

-I have a project to finish due next week from an interview i had and i mentioned that i want a server side role, i am more of a PHP & MySQL (laravel).
-Also told them i am not very good at the front end
-So good so far
-They gave me the requirements
-BUILD A FU##ING website using
{
- BOOTSTRAP AND WORDPRESS
}
two let's call them tools i have NEVER used and also mentioned that

So here i am having my fking pulse over 100 trying to damn figure out how this bs works.

End my suffering

Have a nice day!!

Laravel use SASS,
SASS installed through NPM & compiled with Node-gyp,
Node-gyp need build tools each platform,
Build tools for Windows is Visual Studio.
So, I need to install Visual Studio to compile SASS?

GREAT!!!

today my friend wanted to publish his swift 3 library in cocoapods, set up proper github repository, made a releass/tag then tried to upload cocoa pods. first was success but somehow it turned out to be empty then we changed some settings in cocoapods (moved paths etc) then it started to give errors and such. strangely every fkin time different kind of error.
first realized he is using xcode 7 build tools which lacks support of swift3, then switchex to xcode8-beta tools but again that shit wasnt working. so i noticed that their app switching repo origin to their specs origin.
removed cocoapods from sys entirely, xcode7 as same as cocoapods and installed git cmd tools from homebrew to make it updated. started from scratch same shit also happened.

so i give up and fired chrome to look up issue, it turns out it was problem with xcode-beta and cocoapods entirely, even somebody just 30mins before us also commented on issue with exact same output problems
5hrs for shitty bugs fml...

With the current pace of gpt and dall-e, it’s looking more likely that a lot of development roles may go obsolete in the nearest future (3+ yrs).

I see the possibility of building full fledged websites and fixing bugs based on voice commands. The picture of this possibility is quite vivid in my head because it’s totally feasible technical-wise.

The only delay that may occur in this dynamics is the slow pace of its implementation by existing developer tools. Of which I think the reason is directly related to the cost of management of resource, quite the limiting factor here.

But imagine if a big tech like google creates a platform to build websites based on voice/text commands using advanced gpt inline with its access to existing corpus of data; that to me is “game-over” for web devs.

In my Java project, I added a wiremock rule to a few tests. Now my Jacoco code coverage in sonar dropped to 0%. 😩 Maven is running the goals, bit not creating the jacoco.exec file.

That's one of the worst things in Java. Once you understood the concept of immutables, the build tools start to annoy you.

Please don't use OS specific libraries/binaries/build tools...etc

I'm talking to C/C++ users here. once in a while I see something on github maybe im just curios maybe I find your niche code useful but then you use make (who the hell still uses make?) or your library depends on another library than can only be mindlessly installed in a unix environment. and the most obscene of all a solution file...

thank god for rust.

I was wondering - no one seems to be able to write good CSS, so what if we had tool to generate CSS visually.
E.g. imagine workflow of UI design tools inside chrome browser (while inspecting specific element) or your favourite editor.

Might actually build something like that. Would definitely help with problems I face. 🤷🏻

P.S. Best tools and practices for building extensions like this?

How the does it make sense that I need .NET Framework to uninstall VS Build Tools? The installer runs, but then fails. Just delete your damned files and registry keys.