The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

Excuse the profuse amount of profanity below.

Fuck this fucking fucked up motherfucker of a fucking director. Money does not make you a fucking decent person, and you come in here and tell me that you pay my fucking measly salary so I must be fucking grateful.

Starts off with a boardroom meeting this morning. Wireless connection on my laptop takes two minutes to connect, I get told that I am wasting company time and that the salary of everyone in the meeting is quite a lot ("with me being the highest"- cuntface director) so stop wasting time. Fuck you man, it's a fucking wireless connection. I am building your motherfucking company applications and doing web design and for what, so I can earn fuckall and be told that I am fucking wasting time. I am presenting your fucking site you wanted, so give me a fucking minute extra to start up the fucking wireless connection.

The fucking mails are taking long to send, great, let's come down and fucking scream at the dev who regrettably said he would try and assist IT (by calling the provider). I literally just got told that I am the following. 1) Fucking stupid 2) He is going to close the dept down because I apparently fuck up (yet again cuntface, your fucking mailserver is NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM) 3) He is going to contact an external company to come and check my work. 4) I am fucking useless. 5) I telling him lies (yeah fuckface, I worked as a sys admin, I know what a motherfucking DNS server is and what it does. you don't - so don't fucking tell me that I am lying when I tell you there is a DNS fucking issue, because you don't know what the fuck you are talking about - to top that off motherfucker, I FUCKING BUILT YOUR FUCKING SERVER AND YOUR FUCKING NETWORK. I FUCKING KNOW HOW IT WORKS AND WHAT THE FUCK I AM TALKING ABOUT).

On top of that, I got pushed out of the way of my own PC, my code got some fucked up gibberish in it (because he was trying to minimise my editor and he typed some in it, and now I have to fucking roll-back. He told me I am wasting company time and he will take my shit away from me if I download something again. It is an open network. I downloaded JAVA and fucking updated Sublime. Jesus man. What the fucking fuck.

"why is your gmail open?!?!" because I was testing your emails from an external network. "DON'T FEED ME BULLSHIT" (even though the top mail states "test"). It's the whole fucking "my money determines my dick size" mentality.

That being said, I got told that I need to work overtime, without pay, to resolve IT's issue, even if I have to on the weekend.

That being said,my new Dell that I had just bought (my own) got thrown on the floor and he fucked out of my office. Stupid motherfucker. I fucking earn nothing but cannot leave. I will find another job, and when I do - you can go and fuck yourself and your fucking degrading opinions. I am not fucking stupid, so fuck you.Fuck your company and fuck you. Cunt.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

I am fucked.... 😫😫😫My new custom build pc is not starting up after lighting strike 😭😭 ... I had unplugged all the plugs from the socket but i forgot to unplug the wifi from the broadband cable.... So when lighting hit my building the current came through broadband cable and burned my wifi then through there it got to my pc... My motherboard, gtx1070 graphic card, ram everything is gone.... Except my hard drive and psu...

A huge new hospital opened up.
it looks very modern and nice, lots of new doctors and facilities.. but..

Why is everything wireless?!
everything's connected to different APs across the hospital!

Receptionist's pc? has a wifi adaptor sticking out to the side.

in-patient's smart tvs? Wireless, connected to their own ap

etc etc.

conveniently enough, the SSID's were labeled with where they were being used and didnt bother to hide it
"Office A" "Smart TVs" "DB".

now im not saying wireless is bad, it's convenient! but why make everything in the building connect wirelessly.

any kid who's feeling naughty could do:

aireplay-ng -0 0 [BSSID] wlan[#]
and it's good bye connectivity.

or maybe flip put wireshark or any kind of sniffer.

i dont wanna have to come here for surgery only to find out the machine's wireless too.

imagine it stopping halfway through your surgery.. Yikes..

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.

So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.

When building a new pc...

The philisophy I am following for building my new PC isn't "What can I do with this kind of hardware", it's "what CAN'T I do with this kind of hardware"

I stop shopping when my answer is "Nothing"

!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?

So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.

Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.

Just got access to OpenAI beta. This thing is seriously impressive. The attached image shows it summarizing a paragraph from Friedrich Nietzsche. Apart from that, I have tried summarizing a complex Math Algo which I found on Wikipedia, getting specs for building a new PC, and also improving my Startup Idea. The results were astonishing. I can't imagine what possibilities it can have in the future.

At the same time, I can clearly see why they are not allowing open access to their APIs. The potential for abuse is so high here. Especially when most of our population is full of digital idiots.

Guys help something has plagued my mind, I was thinking about building a new PC and swapping over to AMD from Intel and NVIDIA... But after Mac as a daily laptop I'm thinking about spending the equal amount on a MacBook Pro and living the dock life.... What have I become?!

(But still never touching iOS, fuck that shit, android for life!)

I am thinking about building new PC, so I made a list of components. What do you think? Any suggestions?
I don't know which GPU model/brand to get yet. Would like to play at 1440p >60Hz so GTX1070 is not enough if I don't wanna buy new GPU in a few years (probably 4-5 years as I always do).

- CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 2700X
- GPU: GTX 1080 Ti / GTX 1080
- HDD: WD Gold 2TB
- SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 250 GB
- RAM: Patriot Viper RGB Series 16 GB KIT DDR4 3200 MHz CL16 DDR4 Black
- MB: ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING
- CAS: NZXT H500 Black
- PSU: Corsair HX750

A long time ago in a decision poorly made:

Past me: hmm we're having trouble getting IT to give us a new build machine with the new compilers.
Past me: I know we'll just use one of the PCs that belongs to a member of the team to tide us over.

[2 months pass]

Present me: that's odd, Jenkins is really slow today.
[Several minutes pass]
Present me: holly shit fuck; it's building the whole weekends worth of builds at 9am on a workday and eating licenses like a cast away that suddenly teleported to an all you can eat buffet.
Present me: [abort, abort, for the love of fuck abort]
Present me: contacts IT, they can't find any problems, wtf happened.

Present me: discovers team member turned off his machine on Friday and builds had been stacking up all weekend.

Lessons learnt: disable power button on team members pc and hire a tazer guy to shoot whenever someone goes near the wall socket.

1 hour lost and no build results for the last 3 days.

It's looking like a bad morning

!rant/story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm about to buy a new desktop pc, looking for some that can run visual studio 2015 without problems, i also use netbeans and mysql. I was thinking in a amd fx 8230 e (8 core) with 16 gb ram and a 1gb video card ... or a amd a10 7860k(4 core /integrated gpu) also with 16 gb ram. What do you think guys? Whats better for software development? I'll appreciate some devs advice

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

So, I was building a new pc for gaming and dev, but I can't choose which cpu to put in.
So I thought let's put it here: i7-7700k or Ryzen 1700X?

Your thoughts?