My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company

2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.

4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.

5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.

Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.

One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.

3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?

Here comes the biggest one,

4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?

I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.

Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".

Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢

Actual pro tip: don't push only when you are done with code. Always push when you are done with coding session. Minimize the possibility of data loss and always have your code on the server.

I was having dinner with two girls, one a project manager and the other some finance reviewer or something like that. We were discussing our line of work and I was talking about how bad quality code affects everybody and the finance reviewer girl goes like (and I quote) "In our company we use polymorphism, inheritance and encapsulation so it's not a big problem. So our database has a parent class and we only use the parent class". I was at a loss for words. I mean, if only more programmers just did that, right?

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

FFS stop squashing commits. If “updated comments” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame. If “fixed null check” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame.

There is no reason to have “ticket-234 service revision” beside 1000 lines of code. How does anyone justify this loss of git info for the sake of “clean history”? Nobody looks at your history and says, “That is bloody clean git history I should write home about it.” People do however look at the code and say, “I wish I knew WTF they were trying to do on that line.”

What's wrong with this code?

std::pair<float, float> foo() { return { 0, 0 }; }

"Nothing," would you say.

That's because you're normal.

But the most stupid C++ compiler ever (M$ VS)
issues an ERROR that converting 0 to float incurs possible "loss of data". So you have to write "0.f".

BTW, "0." is a double, so you really have to write "0.f". Or "static_cast<float>(0)" if you like ugly, impossible-to-read code.

Been working for a while with some terrible code with no documentation that I just inherited from a previous employee

Topic: multi-threaded program in Python

Goal: kill both parent and children with keyboard interrupt

Intuitive idea: check in children processes if parent still alive

Implemented idea:
- parent creates socket connection
- keyboard interrupt kills parent and thus the socket connection as well
- children receive some specific socket error from the loss of connection
- children catch the exception and are killed
In Python 2, of course

I, too, like to inflict pain on myself for fun

I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.

And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.

I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.

After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.

I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?

I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.

Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.

Oh well 🤷

Different perspective.

So your friend wants you to make the next big Facebook or Google because they know you can code....lots of rants like that and it gets me as well when I'm fixing printers for family and friends. Thing is these people genuinely just want to do something cool and succeed so they can have a good life. They see what we can do and wish they had the same talent. They have an idea they think will be great, they don't know what we know, and they don't know that it could be the most amazing thing ever and still never take off.

They don't realize to be Facebook or Google you have to sell out your values, morals, and soul. They just think if we can code we should be millionaires. So on that philosophy after just over a year the devRant creators should be rolling in cash right? But pretty sure I saw they are still operating at a loss.

I'd love to be able to have the time to work with each of them, teach them, and guide them through that first failure and let down of realizing that coding doesn't buy a magic ticket to a new life.

// Like anyone ever really fixes a printer //

Programming on paper (any benefits?)

For the programming exams we have at our university we have to write code on paper (like full code, not pseudo).

I feel that writing code on paper really limits my ability to express my programming knowledge, in comparison to writing code on the computer.

However, I cannot think of a real benefit of doing so. I mean most programmers (if I may generalize) have bad handwriting. Which is a loss-loss situation for both the examinees and professors (who have to read the exams).

Are there any benefits for writing code on paper?

Holy duck, I lost two days on a convolutional autoencoder splitted in two separate neural networks to encode and decode separately, it reconstruction had some strange behaviours. I was giving as input an image and then saving the encoded compressed representation in a new image, in this way I could decode it with the decoder whenever I want saving space.
How much retarded am I?
The internal layer's weights hadn't constraints so in learning phase the convolutional filters can contain any number, positive > 255 or even negative and I cannot save it in a new image as they are so they were clipped automatically between 0 and 255 with an huge information loss.
It's so frustrating when you rewrite the code in any possible way, you obtain the same wrong result and then you realize that was a borderline behaviour of a third part library.

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

After a lot of work I figured out how to build the graph component of my LLM. Figured out the basic architecture, how to connect it in, and how to train it. The design and how-to is 100%.
Ironically generating the embeddings is slower than I expect the training itself to take.

A few extensions of the design will also allow bootstrapped and transfer learning, and as a reach, unsupervised learning but I still need to work out the fine details on that.

Right now because of the design of the embeddings (different from standard transformers in a key aspect), they're slow. Like 10 tokens per minute on an i5 (python, no multithreading, no optimization at all, no training on gpu). I've came up with a modification that takes the token embeddings and turns them into hash keys, which should be significantly faster for a variety of reasons. Essentially I generate a tree of all weights, where the parent nodes are the mean of their immediate child nodes, split the tree on lesser-than-greater-than values, and then convert the node values to keys in a hashmap to make lookup very fast.

Weight comparison can be done either directly through tree traversal, or using normalized hamming distance between parent/child weight keys and the lookup weight.

That last bit is designed already and just needs implemented but it is completely doable.

The design itself is 100% attention free incidentally.

I'm outlining the step by step, only the essentials to train a word boundary detector, noun detector, verb detector, as I already considered prior. But now I'm actually able to implement it.

The hard part was figuring out the *graph* part of the model, not the NN part (if you could even call it an NN, which it doesn't fit the definition of, but I don't know what else to call it). Determining what the design would look like, the necessary graph token types, what function they should have, *how* they use the context, how thats calculated, how loss is to be calculated, and how to train it.

I'm happy to report all that is now settled.

I'm hoping to get more work done on it on my day off, but thats seven days away, 9-10 hour shifts, working fucking BurgerKing and all I want to do is program.

And all because no one takes me seriously due to not having a degree.

Fucking aye. What is life.

If I had a laptop and insurance and taxes weren't a thing, I'd go live in my car and code in a fucking mcdonalds or a park all day and not have to give a shit about any of these other externalities like earning minimum wage to pay 25% of it in rent a month and 20% in taxes and other government bullshit.

So today it finally happened.

Npm modules broke my system and / or endangered the security of my system.

Installed a global cli utility
That utility depends on package A
That depends on package B

That fucking install a bin called sudo

Yeah.. You heard it right a bin called sudo.

This bin goes in the global module folder that is piped in your path variable.

Now everytime you type sudo you are running somebody else code instead of your system utility.

I am shivering and at loss of swear words.

Opened an issue on the cli that started this matrioska game of horror.

Who the fuck tought that a bin called sudo would be a good fucking idea?

Oh and yes is even an harmless package that try to provide the sudo experience for windows (I went in to check the code of course..)

And I frigging need that cli for work

For now I aliased the sudo in my bashrc still i feel vulnerable and naked now.

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].

> Moment you thought you did a good job, but ended up failing
> Times the bug wasn't actually your fault
> Times you took the blame for a junior or other dev
> Times someone took the blame for you
> Times you got away with something you shouldn't have.
> Most valuable data loss
> The bug you never fixed
> Most satisfying bug to fix
> Times where a "simple" task turned out to be not so simple
> Debug code left in production?
> Moments you wish you could undo
> Most satisfying optimization
> Have you ever been ranted about?

Why is web development such a headache?

I'm writing a responsive wesbite from scratch. All goes perfect, even cross browser.
It all works, adapts to screen size etc. Nice! About to get this code into production.

Me: I'll test the iPhone 5 viewport size before I push the code...

Responsive Developer Tools:

FireFox: nu uh, there's a magic random 1px margin to every element on your page now, which you cannot find in your css or in the computed tab. It's magical.

Me: weird, what if I change the viewport size to the iPhone 6's dimensions?

Issue persists.

Me: hmm, what if I add or substract one fucking pixel from the viewport width or height?

FireFox: What 1px margin? Don't know what you're talking about ... There never was one...

Me: ok, weird (sets viewport size back to the iPhone 5 format for testing)

FireFox: I present to you: the magic random 1px margin.

I'm at a loss. I really am. Been clicking and unclicking almost every responsive part of my css I could find for this page and it just doesn't want to work persistently. And I swear to god that it worked a week ago in that exact viewport size. It's so frustrating.

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

When depression set in, I thought pain relief lied in getting duller. People I called “stupid” — who lived simple lives filled with alcohol and lack of any talent or purpose — weren't suffering. Better even, they denied the existence of depression.

My “wish” was granted when they prescribed cariprazine. In two months, I lost my ability to read, let alone code.

Before that, even depressed, writing a simple email/password auth was a matter of ten minutes in any of the languages I knew how to do web in (JS, Python, Clojure, PHP). But on cariprazine, I remember myself not quite getting what an HTML form was.

Tell you what… you should never wish to become dumber. When I was smart and depressed, the pain was real, but it felt like… let's say a breakup. When I was dumb and depressed, it felt like being raped with a red-hot soldering iron. Or like being skinned alive. Or like when 100% of your skin is a third-degree burn. The pain weren't listening to me, as my mouth was glued shut as if I was Keanu in the first Matrix movie. You can't say, do or think anything, at all, to ease your pain somehow. You can't even realize that just DMing or calling someone is probably a good idea.

Instead of you vs. despair situation from when you were smart, now it's just despair that is actively melting you, so you two become one. Even time loses its meaning. There is nothing out there but suffering.

If you're smart(er than I was at my lowest), DO cherish it. Losing that will spell disaster. So stay away from substances that can facilitate that loss.

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

So, I'm looking into something and end up on Stack Overflow. Someone posted the question:

"Does minified javascript improve performance?"

This question was old as shit, all they way from 07/25/09, and about an Adobe Air application. (Remember that? Me neither...) It had a great, accepted, and still accurate answer, posted the same day the question was asked. Now, fast forward 8 years and on 12/08/17 (A mere 7 months ago...) the following answer was posted. I don't know what they were thinking, but here it is, complete and unabridged, with my comments in square brackets:

"I'd like to post this as a separate answer as it somewhat contrasts the accepted one: [Somewhat contrasts? More like completely contradicts...]

Yes, it does make a performance difference as it reduces parsing time - and that's often the critical thing. For me, it was even just simply linear in the size and I could get it from 12s to 4s parse time by minifying from 3MB to 1MB. [First off, your parse time should NEVER be THE critical thing, but secondly, and more importantly, WHO THE FUCK HAS 1MB OF MINIFIED JS ON A PAGE!!!]

It's not a big app either, it just has a couple of reasonable dependencies. [THERE IS ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOTHING REASONABLE ABOUT ANYTHING HE JUST SAID! What dependancies is he using?! You could use minified and not even gzipped jQuery, AngularJS, Vue, Ember, React, AND Dojo libraries on the SAME PAGE, AND have 118k of application code, AND STILL NOT HAVE HIT 1MB QUITE YET!!!]

So the moral of the story here is: Yes, minifying is important for performance - and not because of bandwidth, but because of parsing. [Javascript should NEVER take longer to parse then to download, even on a low powered device...]"

So, yeah, I'm at a loss for what this guy was thinking, but the thought the people like this exist, and that my browser might one day be subjected to their horrific nightmare of code terrifies me...

After examining my model and code closer, albeit as rudimentary as it is, I'm now pretty certain I didnt fuck up the encoder, which means the system is in fact learning the training sequence pairs, which means it SHOULD be able to actually factor semiprimes.

And looking at this, it means I fucked up the decoder and I have a good idea how. So the next step is to fix that.

I'm also fairly certain, using a random forest approach, namely multiple models trained on other variables derived from the semiprimes, I can extend the method, and lower loss to the point where I can factor 400 digit numbers instead of 20 digit numbers.

dev vs QA rant (n + 1)

So our QA is done by China team so naturally time difference is quite irritating,

I cannot change code
I cannot debug for issue

So today I fix a critical issue and before pushing it my seniors send the to the QA
> QA unavailable
> I wait for QA because nobody notifies if the code is tested and I can work ahead
> I get review that my issue fix generated another issue (page gets redirected)
> I'm angry and astonished, I check on same link, same circumstances and no such issue is found
> My seniors say read the issue properly and I do it, no positive response when I contradict the QA
> QA leaves for home on Friday and critical issue still remains in live

I cannot believe the laziness of QA, I mean it's their loss at the end of the day.

> top of that I waited 2 hours for QA to check the issue

It feels like half of what I do is just tell people that their code sucks and it needs to be replaced, then I drag them through the 5 stages of grieving the loss of an application that has them trapped in an abusive relationship.

1. Denial:
The unique and complicated needs of our business lead to this unique and complicated architecture. This is all here for a reason, and it's all needed.

2. Anger:
What do you mean it's going to take 6 months to rebuild this? We made MVP in 3 months!

3. Bargaining:
Surely we don't need to throw it all away! There must be something worth salvaging!

4. Depression:
Stake holders and going to think we're not getting anything done! This is a nightmare 😭

Six months later...

6. Acceptance:
Holy shit thank god we got away from that glass tower before it shattered and cut us all to pieces! Side note: development velocity is on fleek. #profit

I don't know how much of this can be considered data loss but one one of my uni classmates frustrated by some hellish tasks (cleaning some old code files probably) decided that everything in that particular directory won't be of any further need, so she procede to rm -rf it.. only to discover that the terminal opened in that dir was another one and her current one (the one she bashed that unforgiving rm) was in fact a standard freshly opened term where any term would open.. in the user's (only user) home dir... such a face she had when all her codes, homeworks, projects and everything went to oblivion 😂😂 jokes aside it was a good thing that the semester was almost finished, all hws submited and no important data was there as she dual booted with ubuntu and some windows, but funny thing how such a honest mistake can ruin not only your day, but maybe your entire semester

You know that feeling that you get like 1% of the time when you feel like you're coding probably the best piece of code you wrote in your life and then you remember that without exclusion every piece of code you wrote in the past you end up considering a stinking pile of shit thus resulting in a total loss ego-rection?

*sigh*

is this the ego death junkies talk about?

Hello dear fellow programmers,

Lately I'm faced with an issue: i can't code. It takes me a really long time to get my codeengine running and it stops on the first occasion, it either be a cigarette pause, a question from a coworker or what ever.

I love code and I have a blast when I start but I have a hard time starting it.

What to do? I'm a bit at a loss here

Not a data loss exactly but a loss indeed.

It was my first week at my first junior developer job, I was just learning git and completely messed it all up. I lost around 3 hours of work.

I didn't want to ask anybody for help (because of that useless junior feeling, you know...) and wasn't as good using Google as I'm now.

So I re-did all the work. Thankfully, I have a decent memory.

If there's something to learn here is ask for help when you've used all your resources and still think you need it. Nobody is going to have a bad opinion about you ;)

I'm learning Kotlin while trying out Android Things and that sparked my interest in learning more about Java platform again. I tripped upon the news that Oracle had change their commercial plans for the platform by going with the rolling release model and limiting LTS releases for paying customers.

Java SE 8 was one of those former LTS releases that was on my computer, leaving me vulnerable, despite that version still being the most compatible with many applications, and that's been on my computer well passed the date they cut off public support. And I'm, like, "WTF!?"

Luckily this is when open source shines at it's brightest. Both the home brew and corporations, such as Amazon and IBM, alike - mostly the latter - both agreed to create their own LTS releases using the OpenJDK code and all disturbing to the public FOR FREE with no strings attached and the sources opened. I'm sure Richard Stallman is smiling with glee.

It isn't a total finger towards Oracle. Java SE is based on OpenJDK with no difference between the two anymore aside from loss of LTS support from the public - that's it. So Oracle still benefits despite the retaliation. Probably?

Did Oracle learn nothing from OpenOffice? If the point was to get users to pay for security then they've failed in the long run because Java is open source. People have used that fact to create their own free distributions that bypass their paywall, making the need to go through Oracle pointless. And I'm glad. Open source aside, security is a big issue these days and the last thing people need is yet another thing to subscribe too.

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

Wasted an hour or two on that...
After changing the library I used, was trying to test that my Java WebSocket client was reconnecting as I intended upon losing connection.
Me : Why are you making the rest of the app bug you stupid fucker? The old one was doing fine!
WS : ...
Changes code, looks on SO a bit.. Gets despaired.

Then it struck..
The "rest of the app" was connected to a sensor.. On the network.. From which I disconnected to mimic a loss of connection...
😭😢😂😂😂👌

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

Radeon graphics driver crashed again.

I hope one day they will actually fix it but the light of my hope grows dimmer every day.

Hire some talent?
Rewrite their code in Rust?
Do some static code analysis?
Better modularity?
Some code reviews? Proofreading?

I am at a loss of words. The crashes need to stop.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.

Persisterising derived values. Often a necessary evil for optimisation or privacy while conflicting with concerns such as auditing.

Password hashing is the common example of a case considered necessary to cover security concerns.

Also often a mistake to store derived values. Some times it can be annoying. Sometimes it can be data loss. Derived values often require careful maintenance otherwise the actual comments in your database for a page is 10 but the stored value for the page record is 9. This becomes very important when dealing with money where eventual consistency might not be enough.

Annoying is when given a and b then c = a + b only b and c are stored so you often have to run things backwards.

Given any processing pipeline such as A -> B -> C with A being original and C final then you technically only need C. This applies to anything.

However, not all steps stay or deflate. Sum of values is an example of deflate. Mapping values is an example of stay. Combining all possible value pairs is inflate, IE, N * N and tends to represent the true termination point for a pipeline as to what can be persisted.

I've quite often seen people exclude original. Some amount of lossy can be alright if it's genuine noise and one way if serving some purpose.

If A is O(N) and C reduces to O(1) then it can seem to make sense to store only C until someone also wants B -> D as well. Technically speaking A is all you ever need to persist to cater to all dependencies.

I've seen every kind of mess with processing chains. People persisting the inflations while still being lossy. Giant chains linear chains where instead items should rely on a common ancestor. Things being applied to only be unapplied. Yes ABCBDBEBCF etc then truncating A happens.

Extreme care needs to be taken with data and future proofing. Excess data you can remove. Missing code can be added. Data however once its gone its gone and your bug is forever.

This doesn't seem to enter the minds of many developers who don't reconcile their execution or processing graphs with entry points, exist points, edge direction, size, persistence, etc.

Hey guys, any WPF developers here?

I'm having lotsa trouble getting WPF XAML data bindings to work. Disclaimer - I'm new to OOP and thhe syntax of OOP is so damn confusing I'm never sure anything is the "right" way.

The task is to create test data for certain classes and output it in WPF. The code I have is a public static class that generates test data for certain classes and stores these objects inside a static List<Object> depending on the object. I couldn't figure out any other way to store all these objects to later be able to output them.

Then I found out that you can use ObservableCollection to automate a lot of the CRUD stuff. So I tried to change the Lists to static ObservableCollections. It mostly works and I even got it to output the data in XAML by using DataGrid.ItemsSource = TestDataCreationClass.authors in the MainWindow.xaml.cs. However, I can not for the life of me figure out how to do the bind through XAML only using the ItemsSource property. No matter what I do, it cannot find the Collection.

I googled for quite a while and every example seems completely different from mine so I'm at a loss.

If you need any more info or code snippets I'd be glad to provide them.

Any kind of help is appreciated.
Thanks in advance!