Front-end developer's to-do list :
☑ Climb Everest
☑ Learn how to speak mandarin
☑ Become god
◻ Vertically center something in CSS

Programming in a tree. I usually climb up here and read, but I decided to code, and I didn't drop my laptop :D

I covered the screen with my hand because my code's ugly, and I don't want anyone to see it lol.

-Some run marathons, I run Python
-Some have energy drinks, I have Java
-Some fight in MMA, I fight with CSS
-Some see new places, I C new Places();
-Some are quick, I am Swift
-Some go camping, I Go Compiling
-Some can judge objectively, I can judge Objective-c
-Some climb mountains, I Scala Structures
-Some live adventurous lives, I live a BASIC one
-Some go ball, I COBOL
-Some watercolor, I Pascal
-Some look for diamonds and emeralds, I look for Ruby and Perl
-Some write novels, I TypeScript
-Some banter, I SmallTalk

Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

Dev gets hold of me, says my service is down in QA. Works if he hits it locally, works via Postman, but via the QA app server it gives a 401.

I’m like, look, if it works everywhere else, there’s something wrong on your side in QA.

He insists, no, I must help him, and begins CCing all the managers telling them this system has been down for days.

So I eventually climb into his system, check the credentials they’re using in the QA environment, and sure enough, the password is wrong.

Microsoft Internet Explorer is my least favorite enterprise software. We are forced to use it. I hate being forced. This is like being asked to climb a mountain with a broken leg...not fun, painful, hopeless, threatening, discouraging, slow, and ugly, and infected...it is downright evil corporate bullshit.

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="styleshit" type=trash/css" href="die-die-die-you-evil-bastard.css"/>
<![endif]-->

Just push it over the edge with a chrome sword stuck in its back. I will just sit here by the fire with my pet fox and watch the opera as I listen to vivaldi.

People points at something on my monitor: My nuts climb the tree to hide

People points at something on my monitOR BY FUCKING TOUCHING IT: My day is ruined and my disappointment is immeasurable. And fuck you.

Official statistics say that people who touches a monitors screen while im nearby, lives significantly shorter time than people who dont.

When I discovered Clean Code, design patterns, TDD and BDD. It just clicked. Ever since everything build so easy and obviously. I no longer have most of the code problems folks rant here about.

That's when it came to me: it's not enough to know how to write code. To climb off those amateur shoes I must adopt those methodologies, so that the code would be decoupled from me, from my style, and I've got to let tests drive my code rather than vice versa to have a flexible and reliable codebase that is cheap and easy to maintain/extend.

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

I've noticed something odd lately.. every time I mention mains electricity in certain EE forums, people tend to go "you are a madman for wanting to use that 🤨".

To which I think in my head, sure it's a dangerous thing, after all the angry pixies that dance back and forth are kind of angry (120V) or actually insane (230V) depending on where you live.. but to mindlessly tell people to not use it at all, as an electronics engineer.. what's up with that?

I mean, it's a matter of respecting its power, right. So whenever I work with it, thick gloves, keeping my exposed lines as tiny as possible, keeping them around for as short as possible, properly insulating anything permanent, and even asking my landlord to install a defibrillator for when things still go horribly wrong (to which she agreed because it'd be useful to the other residents as well, yay 😁) are kinda mandatory.

And that's for the same reason essentially that precautions are taken when climbing a mountain by having climbing shoes, connecting yourself to pikes jammed into the mountain over a strong metal wire in case things go wrong, etc etc. And for the same reason that you don't climb a ladder in high heels and so on. Obvious, right.

Point is, inexperienced people indeed shouldn't be working with mains AC at all and that's the reason that I've avoided it in the first year or 2 of learning about electronics. But mindlessly telling people in EE forums that they're a redneck for working with the imminently lethal AC.. what's up with that?

Maybe I should just go find another electronics forum like the EEVblog forums over some random (kinda dead) electronics chat on Telegram though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What is with the +1 chasing in here? Votes should be given for good rants and comments, not to climb the count-ladder if that somehow would make you elite community member. Posting a picture you found elsewhere just to earn free stickers or a stress ball, and pollute the incentive the swag were meant for originally.

Stop mass +1'ing some random guys every comment, and earn the votes by contributing with stories, lessons learned, proper rants and supportive comments.

Buy a fitness tracker which reminds you after an hour of inactivity to get up.
Get up, walk around or even better climb some stairs, get back to work.

Climb into bed, feel something wet under leg. Wtf? I check. Bloody slug...

There was freaking slug in my bed...

Clean it out, change sheets and all (at 4am, I got lost in the code) and then see another one climbing up the side of the bed

The commonly touted "best" experiences are when you just get told "wow, this code is amazing!"

I hate those code reviews.

The best ones are the ones where I get my code completely ripped apart by 10 different people in 10 different ways. Some of them might be amazing. Some of them might be arseholes thinking slating other people's code is how you climb the career ladder. But they all generally teach me something, and they all cause me to stop and think "hmm, have they got a point, or is my original design better?" The discussion that comes from those reviews is also often very interesting; and (when done well) the whole process can become somewhat of a teambuilding exercise for everyone involved.

So one day on tech huddle my tech lead got frustrated, don't know why and told me - "the tasks you're doing can be done by interns"

I felt bad. Ofcourse I was putting my 100%.

That day I decided to put the resignation. I didn't discussed with anyone about it and sent the resignation email directly.

After serving 2 months of notice period I was able to land a better job successfully!

I called the lead on the last working day in that company and shared him the news about my offer letter and a little about the company.
His first question was - "Did you cleared all the interview process?"
In my mind - "That's only why I'm sharing the news here with you man! Stop thinking of me as a noob."
I replied with - "yes, if needed/the new company try to get feedback about me then please be honest atleast there by keeping your ego aside."

You shouldn't pull someone's leg if you aren't able to climb higher!!

Lesson I learnt;
DON'T STAY AT A PLACE WHERE THERE'S NO VALUE OF YOUR WORK AND THE DEDICATION TOWARDS IT!

Working in a startup isn't that easy, mostly for those where there's no work life balance.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

Anyone else have trouble with real life common sense?

Story time:
Yesterday Evening a dog chased my best mate's cat up a tree. Being the genius I am, I decided to climb after the adorable bugger. Fell from about 8-10ft onto concrete slabs on my back.

Main thing first: I got lucky, CTs and X-rays showed no lasting damage. I'm back home and safe now.

What got me was going through the hospital having to hear the story of how I fell out of a tree onto my back and head like an idiot... from medical person to medical person.

I was lying in the bed, thinking "I swear I'm competent!? Why do people trust me!?"

Does anyone else have any weird skill black spots, or common sense break downs?

Biggest hurdle I have overcome is <b>myself</b>.

All my expectations, worries, fears, and doubts definitely caused major hurdles I had to crash through, trip and fall into, or they downright exploded into balls of fire as I would stand dumbfounded and burned by flames of regret.

Learning I was the blocker to greater achievement, success and ultimately happiness was a very hard lesson for me to learn, and a lesson and discipline that I still battle with today.

It is difficult to climb the seven story mountain of madness with heavy burdens, plodding with little progress.

Free the weight, and the natural warm air currents will lift high the spirit, and the body will follow.

"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly" ~GKC

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

I work in a consulting firm.

I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.

I entered as a junior developer.

On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.

On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.

On my third project. i left due to office politics.

Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.

My passion has dried up.

I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.

Ok everybody, listen up.
For a long time, even before I knew devrant, I failed an exam and had to retake it. It was, and I think this is fair to say without exageration, the worst thing that had happened to me. Put me deep into an anxiety crysis that it was very difficult to escape from. Months of hard work, at the sacrifice of many other valuable things, helped me to climb out of this hole. It was a struggle, but I finally made it. Earlier today I retook the exam. It was great. Thank you for standing by in this difficult time of my life. We live in a post-thisfuckingexam-time. Many of my rants on here were influenced by this issue. Now they probably wont ever be again. Thank god, and thank me for keeping it up.

Tldr: i wrote an exam today.

Sitting at work. Just had a convo about older versions of Visual Studio. I was like "you youngins with you intellisense and backwards compatibility. In VS2005 we had to climb 15 miles in the snow. Uphill. And when we only had 200 compatibility issues with VS2008 we thanked Microsoft for the privilege. What Linux? You think my school provided Linux? Linux is for earners. Top sellers. Leaders of men. Cross-platform compatibility meant that it worked on a Dell with Windows and a Gateway with Windows. I tell you those were dark times."

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

I didn't know you could climb macOS

There's this thought that keeps popping up in my head more frequently recently.

We are people who do heavy mind work. Our quality of life directly depends on our ability to come up with solutions. We've been training our minds for years, for decades, to get to the point where we are now.

Now stop for a moment. And imagine. You wake up one morning and you realize you can no longer code. You forgot all of it. You still can copy-paste answers from SO, but you don't know what questions to ask to get to those answers.... Your mind has pulled the DROP TABLE PROGRAMMING;COMMIT; stunt. From hero to zero in just 1 night.

You have no clue what happened, no idea whether you will recover. How does that affect your identity? Would you still try to climb the programmers' tree to the sweet spot you are in now? Would you choose some simpler profession instead, considering your age and time required to master that other profession? If you choose another profession - what would it be?
What would you do with your personal projects? You can't continue them yourself obviously... Would you let them die with the loss of your skills?

How closely is your profession related to your identity?

Now that I consider myself a person who's quite good in the field, this is becoming one of my fears. Sadly, it'll most likely come true someday. Either some accident or just old age, or even diseases/conditions at younger ages - there are so many things that could mess up your mind - the sole tool critical for our profession [to the picky ones: lumbers can't swing axes w/o hands, postman can't deliver mail w/o legs, politics can't lie without tongues, and we, engineers, cannot build with our minds even slightly off].

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

My LinkedIn is usually pretty quiet. Recently I've received quite a few messages from recruiters. Some of them put numbers in and I look at them, well, the market looks hot.

I like where I am but doesn't hurt to have a look around eh? So I went through some interviews and shit. No preps, not trying to please anyone, being completely honest. And out of the 3 I tried, 1 got to the final round.

Before the final round, the recruiter kept harassing me (it's their job really) about what my "bottom line" is. She said they really liked me but I'm not up to their expectation as a senior role. So they want to proceed with a non-senior role, then climb my ladder up. I told her, I don't give a shit about the title. The she said for that, the salary will be "adjusted" (reads reduced). I told her, look, I said I wouldn't bother if the offer is anything less than X amount of money. Then she said but this company would offer 10% bonus, which will add up , mind you, "close to" X. She said she wanted to know so we don't waste the director's time (as the final round is to meet the bloody director).

I said, if I need to disclose my bottom line before going to this, which is pretty much my negotiation, then let's call it off. No point wasting my time either.

The next day I received the last call from her. They fucked right off.

I know everyone here already knows. But let me experience be another example of how a plague recruiters is. I don't have any experience like this before but this is probably a fucking lowball case too.

Dang. I feel like I'm just not cut out to climb any ladder.

When we discovered a production bug. I feel bad about making people working on that part look bad by not catching it.

My manager has no issue with pointing out that I should have caught it. Beating a horse while it's down.

I mean no shit. Of course I know I should've caught it. How does making me feel worse about it help.

Feels like I'll always be in a tough spot no matter where I am on the ladder.

Or I'm just fragile. I acknowledge that, too

u know when zucc held that motivational interview of when u do something big or new and u need to expect failure by just running through the walls?

well i ran through at least 10,000 walls by now in this one project and i think i stumbled upon the biggest trump-big-dick-tower-level-mexican-wall i have ever seen.

i have to halt here and learn something entirely new in order to climb this wall bc its complex as Ffffuck

After all those years, I finally understood what makes Half-Life 2 so immersive.

From the very beginning, as the game teaches you things about itself, you discover that every model is made with you in mind. The barrel is just tall enough to jump on it, but not taller. The big crate's size is calculated precisely for you to jump onto it from a small crate. Ladders are comfortable for you to climb on. Everything in this game world designed around you, the human.

…except for combine constructions.

They're awkward to walk around. You keep lowkey clipping into them. Half-transparent armor fence looks like you can jump over it, but you can't. It's just a bit taller than that, on purpose. Combine towers are hard to climb onto. You keep bumping into things. Once you locate the ladder and climb all the way up, you bump your head into the ceiling. You don't have much room for movement on top. Combine walls have an inconclusive, uncomfortable physics model that is very annoying to interact with. If you run into it and jump, you clip into it just enough to stop your movement instantly.

This hammers in the message — combines aren't human. Their constructions aren't meant for humans. This was my biggest discovery the last time I played Half-Life 2.

HL2 is a strong contender to be my favorite game of all time.

!rant

Does anyone know what the **day-to-day** differences are between working in IT (banks, hedge funds) vs tech (Google, Facebook, Netflix).

In my mind, I see Hell and Heaven. And there's a giant wall in between called "technical interviews + algorithms and data structures".

I'm on the Hell side... And not sure if I should climb the wall 😔

Is the wall even that big?

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

This is good to remember this one once in a while...

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

A note to those snake-like bastards who suck as much arse as they can to climb to a lead position. Nobody likes you. You're a cunt. I hate that word, but that's exactly what you are.

I am done with .NET and it's bullshit error messages.

"Validation error happened! Please see Entity.Validation.Properties to see what the error is, then consult an oracle, who'll summon a demon who'll answer only three questions . . ."

FUCK OFF and just give me the error. I swear to god exceptions in NET always lead to some stupid fucking scavenger hunt rather than just letting me know what the fuck went wrong. This isn't the first time I've encountered this either, where it tells me there's an error and there's a mountain with a shaman at the top who'll provide me with the details if I can just hire a sherpa who'll help me climb it.

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

One evening I put on my Quest2 and have some fun with the Climb2. I fell off the cliff a few times. Next morning my 5yo wakes up with shitty mood and tells me he had a dream how he was on a hill and fell off. It wasva bad dream.

A few days later I was watching The Troll on Netflix. I like this king of genre so I was enjoying it. Next morning my kiddo wakes up all excited with 'daddy daddy, I've had a dream of a mountain!'. 'Did you fall off this one too' - I rush to ask. He says: 'no, but the mountain stood up and it was like a man!'

he's been asleep both times. I was with my headphones during the movie and on 1bar of volume during the climb. He's never seen neither the game nor the movie [or any troll, for that matter]. And I'm not making this up.

How... How the hell did he do that. Do we after all float in some wibbly-wobbly ether we can communicate through?

What's your work secret to staying healthy (emotionally, mentally, physically)? I climb flights of stairs while my Jenkins job is building.

what am i going to do today? whatever the fuck the SYSTEM throws at me... or what my manager wants me to waste time on... ah , programmer life when one has a conundrum of doing what you like to do but not end up doing that because there are other mountains to climb with squirrels eating your nuts...

Our business partner just tried to deliver a motivational pep-talk to the dev team that ended up sounding more like a sermon. Instead of hearing we did a good job, we heard we could be doing a better job. Never mind that the project is rushed, lacking funding and built on an unstable codebase inherited from a proof of concept demo. I just lost all respect for the guy, who I thought appreciated how hard we've been working. Apparently he's just another administrative cog who wants to climb the ladder of success while standing on other people's hard work.

Right, no more extra miles for this project. Time to just coast on and see it sink in its own excrement.

I like to compare OSses to playgrounds

OS x: a grass field with a fence with a watcher that keeps you from doing something possibly dangerous(/fun) . It's safe but not a lot you can do

Windows: a grass field with a fence, you can climb the fence if you want and do dangerous things if you aren't carefull. less safe but you can do more

Linux: a terrain of your choosing, you can do whatever you want, but it can quickly become dangerous if you don't know what your doing.

!rant
I'll move in with my girlfriend in August. So it's time to get a cleaning robot!
To either iRobot Roomba or Neato Botvac.

Which would you suggest and why? From the readings I've done so far, when it's about performance it's Roomba 980 >= Botvac Connected > Roomba 880, but then again the Roomba 980 is a lot more expensive.

Is there a dev, as lazy as I am with hands on expirience?

Note: there will be only a small carpet below the table in the living room and the appartment will have 4 rooms: living, sleeping, kitchen and bath. As the house is a little older, there's a "obstacle" the doors between the rooms to climb of about 1cm.

Thanks for suggestions in advance. On another note: I'm planing to get connected lightbulps and speakers, so we'll be able to control most of the stuf from our smartphones. So far I don't see any advantages, incorporating a vacuum bot in there, as long as you can set a scedule, any thoughts on that?

The feeling you get when your manager is expecting you to climb the Mt Everest and you don't even know how to use a pickax

!rant // more like a warning
If you use tty (no X or graphic env) and use tmux as terminal multiplexer -> avoid using mpv in it.
.
When you use -> mpv --vo=drm "video name" in tmux session and want to pause video -> cpu usage will climb up to 100% on single core.
(can make laptop warm)
(I don't know what exactly cause this but my theory is, tmux cant redraw after video is pause and it keep trying forever and end up using cpu 100% on single core)
.
Solution
- use mpv on another tty which you didn't run tmux.
- example : tty1: all stuff, tty2: mpv.
And cpu usage will be normal after video is pause.

The radio tower climb on zwift was pretty tough to scale.

Sorry for that one.

Anyone else use zwift on here?

hi

November 28/29 2018

I was in a different world. I experienced this different world. It is beautiful in the beginning and hell after. It is everything u need compared to our engineering world but dangerous with potential. This world kept killing me for 3 months. It was hell.

February 23/24 2019

I was in another world. Same as the first one but this one was better. I experienced everything u would ever need to experience in order to find the vision and purpose to go forward especially in sofrware engineering world. Motivation and the REASONN to go. Climb. Because of over 3 month suffering the pain was suppressed in the secondary world dimension.

March 31 2019

I am back into our world. With slight side effects from the previous two. I am left in scars from war. To travel to the other worlds is to invest extraordinary amount of time energy and effort. U have to vibrate at a different specific frequencies in this universe. It fixed me to continue but broke my focus.

I am here to tell you that u should travel to these worlds with extreme caution. You will know when to do it. You will know what i am talking about. When you do it, pull back quickly and continue in the software engineering regime. This message is abstract and cryptic. You will understand it when that day in your journey comes. Everyone will understand.

Never have the focus broken.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is Elden Ring lite and i fucking LOVE it! It’s Elden ring combined with that classic action rpg vibe I grew up with! And the climb the enemy feature is damn SICK (nothing screams being a fucking man like climbing the back of a huge beast and plunging a sword down its skull)

Here’s to sticking a sword up an ogre’s ass!

I went to do the "transport-tracker" Google Codelabs that uses JS/Firebase/Maps, and I didn't pick up on how really outdated it was lol... it took me about an hour of ehat seemed like an endless climb out of a shit factory....but I passed my NPM "massive errors" trial by fire with flying colors, got everything working mint, and managed to get most of everything (minus the docs) updated/cleaned up. Holy fuck that was crazy, it's amazing how many things change in such little time!!!

Anyways, the main reason I'm here is.... should I push the used-to-be-old-and-fucked-up codelabs I fixed up and made current to Google?? They are pretty important concepts that cover a lot of ground, so I feel like labs/tutorials should be refreshed by up and comers every so often but I don't know if there's a reason why we leave em to just rot and die haha

The thing about startups is that you have the opportunity to be involved in a lot of different things. I easily get bored with repetitively doing almost the same thing day in day out.

In my current company, I have been working on the same mobile app for close to two years. It’s the same basic thing, build UI, make API calls, and fix bugs. I am so bored that I’m fit to climb a wall. Anyways, I’ve started applying for backend positions.

But then startups are volatile and things are almost always unorganised.

The number of times I have been contacted by companies because they have seen my website and Github account saying they are interested in someone like me, to later be rejected because my lack of experience from working on any companies.

I know they want seniors but how is one supposed to climb from junior to senior when companies only want 5+ years experienced seniors.

I know the fact that I am a junior dev, but I would like to say don't judge a book by its cover. It's the skill not # of years that matter, no?

DevRanters, which one would u choose?

Marginal increase in salary and climb up the corporate ladder.

OR

Substantial increase in salary but climb down the corporate ladder.

Once a React aficionado, twice the frustration we endure,
In the realm of libraries, React's problems seem impure.
With Svelte's elegance and grace in our sight,
Let's vent about React, as day turns into night.

Boilerplate Overload, a monotonous affair,
Classes, constructors, lifecycle steps we declare.
In Svelte's simplicity, we find a breath of fresh air,
Just markup and magic – a coder's love affair.

Complex State Management, React's Achilles' heel,
Redux, Mobx, and their massive code appeal.
Svelte's state handling is a cinch, for real,
No more tangled webs of logic to conceal.

Unnecessary Re-Renders, React's performance woe,
Countless updates, like a never-ending show.
Svelte updates what's needed, like a pro,
Efficiency and speed, in its radiant glow.

Verbose Syntax, JSX's verbosity on display,
HTML in JavaScript, causing dismay.
Svelte's concise template syntax lights our way,
No more endless tags, just code that's here to stay.

Lack of Truly Reactive Behavior, React's hurdle high,
Hooks to wrangle, state to satisfy.
Svelte's reactivity, no need to question why,
It just works, oh my, oh my.

Ecosystem Complexity, React's sprawling sprawl,
Choices galore, making us bawl.
In Svelte's world, simplicity is the call,
A coherent ecosystem, it has it all.

Learning Curve, React's mountain to climb,
Classes, hooks, context, a hill of time.
Svelte's gentle curve feels sublime,
A smoother path to code, so fine.

Tooling Overkill, React's complex array,
Build tools, linters, configs in disarray.
Svelte's streamlined setup leads the way,
No more intergalactic code buffet.

Debugging Headaches, React's mysterious realm,
Complex state, intricate components overwhelm.
Svelte's predictable model, a soothing helm,
Debugging becomes a peaceful realm.

In the end, React, a complex labyrinth we explore,
Svelte's elegance and simplicity we adore.
If only React could learn, its problems to deplore,
A brighter future, for React we'd implore.

I have this fixation with minmaxing core clocks, voltages and their respective curves (P states, basically). I'm still not sure how much it actually improves my experience, but I'll be damned if it isn't fun and interesting to mess around with these numbers and see them climb higher but remain stable.

Currently messing around with a Vega 64. They come in severely overvolted, and I'm trying to get it to retain its performance with less voltage aka less heat. I don't even need to turn on central heating if I'm running stress tests, the bloody thing runs at 80°C! So I guess you can see why undervolting the card is of interest

TL;DR Is there a hackerrank for Oracle PL/SQL?

At my work, we do not get raises, we only get promotions. Promotions are applied for, and then interviewed for. Highest score (plus maybe some managerial bias) wins.

33% of the questions revolve around PL/SQL (and just Oracle DB in general) and the better you explain yourself, the better you score.

Tutorials just don't do it for me. They're boring. I want something interactive. While it doesn't need to be competitive and challenging like hackerrank, I'm looking for something gamified like hackerrank where I can see other people and learn the technology intimately so I can climb the ranks at my company faster.

Does anyone know of something sort of along the lines? All suggestions appreciated.

How Did The Samoan Climb The Tree? He Didn’t. He Scared The Limbs Out Of It.