Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.

- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.

- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.

- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.

Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.

When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.

When you are a Dev but you don't want to be single

Girl: what's your profession?
Me: I am a writer
Girl: Cool! What do you write?
Me: I write code😎

Where's the who write this code

My Crush who is a bookworm: what do u do?
me: i am a writer
she: wow thats soo cool
me: (excited inside)
she: what did u write recently?
me: code
she: 😐

As most of you already know, I'm a writer. I've noticed the similarities between writing and programming:

1. Tabs vs spaces.

2. Both typically spend all their time with a single project.

3. Coffee... (Unless you're a tea lover like me.)

4. Both typically have no life.

5. Debugging is hell for programmers and editing/revising is hell for writers.

6. Strict clients for programming and strict editors for writing.

7. Semicolons... They're useful but everyone despises them.

8: Emotions. Programmers are angry at their code. (Why won't you work?) and writers feel depressed about their writing. (Why did you die?)

9. War of the programs. For programmers: Vim vs VScode vs Atom vs Sublime and etc. For writers: MS word vs Google docs vs Libre office and etc.

10. Online forums. Stack overflow and Writer's digest.

11. Typing... Typing... All day long.

These are only a few similarities. I've noticed a lot more than this.

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

Future pickup lines.
...
(Some random conversation)
...
Girl :- So what do you do for a
living ?
Me :- Umm, I am a writer.
Girl :- Oh ! Wow, Awesome. What
do you write ?
Me :- Well, you know.
Code. I write code.

I write code,
I am a writer.
I fight with bugs,
I am a fighter.
I optimise code,
to make it tighter.

Just found out that Windows has a built in Code Editor. Saves your ass if the only alternative is Notepad!

Theres a debate in my company about whether or not to be using RxSwift on iOS apps. I'm not 100% convinced. Today we had two submissions for a coding challenge come in. One uses nearly all the same Rx modules this company does, one was vanilla Swift.

Just by chance noticed the vanilla app writer contributed ~5k lines of code to the challenge overall. Including libraries, the Rx one contributed ~45k.

That to me is just bat shit crazy. It would want to be the most amazing, time saving, bug reducing thing the world has ever seen to justify that volume of code.

I have been very inactive in these last couple of months but I really need to rant right now:

I am working on a project, which is also part of a contest, with a few of my friends. I asked one of them to write a bit of code and some documentation about it, here's the result:

He wrote half a page of text with plenty of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors but here comes the even worse part:
Instead of just leaving the code in its own file he copied it into the word (libre office writer) file as well. Now I have got 3 pages of non-indented code with a few comments flying around here and there, weird variable names and a lot of commented out pieces of code.

Bloody hell I feel like I am the only one in this team taking this contest serious.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Thought I'd share another one with you. Last year I saw a turorial posted on LinkedIn about how to create a captcha in ASP.NET. The turorial itself wasn't that bad but it made me laugh so hard because the writer thought of a neat way to input the desired captcha code to the handler that generated the image. Guess how? In the query string. That totally defeats its purpose. How on earth did he come up with that. So much for securing your form submission through captcha. Of course when I commented about it he didn't reply. I hope no one actually used that tutorial.

I want to have the abilities to code on a computer like an artist paints on a canvas or a writer tells a story on paper. But when I sit at my keyboard, I feel like I have writer's block and get frustrated -_-

!Dev

As a something-designer and content writer, you would say I am pretty much used with people stealing my ideas and then bragging with them, right? Well, yeah, but not when I am fucking backstabbed by my OWN FUCKING ASSHOLE-FIANCE (hi, hun).
In our little depressing family, I am the one with ideas. One day he starts to work at a little very basic app and he starts bragging with it at me (mostly disrupting me while working). So I start giving him ideas based on what he experienced at work and what he could add to this management app so nobody will get the same shit as he did + several things + I basically designed it from scratch, how it should look, what it should do, who should access what etc. Anyway, he starts implementing them and then I told him „Well this is nice, how about we sell it”. I advise him on what kind of possible clients he should search for and how to negotiate and etc. Well, he goes to a meeting with somebody interested in this application, after, he calls me back AND HE HAD THE NERVE TO SAY THIS TO ME :

- Good news, MY APPLICATION would lead us in*blabla* market.

BITCH, YOU BETTER SLAP YOURSELF `CAUZ EXCEPT FOR THE CODE THAT SHIT IS MINE ALMOST FROM SCRATCH. SO SCREW YOU AND YOUR FUCKING NEED TO SUCK YOUR OWN DICK.

(i said that to him on the phone)

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

I hate the overuse of arrow function everywhere even for super long expression. that `function` should fit to them more comfortably .

writer of code should aware that it take three time more to read expiration with arrow function inside

Working with Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp
where I work with CSharpSyntaxTree

I can compile the code in code.

So basically,

SyntaxTree syntaxTree = CSharpSyntaxTree.ParseText(@"
using System;

namespace InAppCompiler
{
public class Writer
{
public void PrintText(string message)
{
Console.WriteLine(message);
}

public void ALLCAPS(string msg)
{
Console.WriteLine(msg);
}
}
}");

Freaking cool!

Any other language: Hey fuckface, you can't name this variable by a single letter, tf is wrong with you? use some descriptive shit.

Golang: lmao fuck u

I really find it interesting how we use short variable names for items in golang. Kinda makes sense when you think of it. Most of these items come up in short methods for which the mental model lets you know and remember what you are doing, they even make sense when going through the std lib in which that shit is all over the place. YET years of going by other languages has made me squint my eyes a bit in frustration every time I see it.
Say for example that a function is implementing io.Writer. What would you call the method parameter? you could argue that writer would be sensible since it has it in the signature, but what about when the io.Writer in itself is a file or a socket or whatever? writer would be funny or strange? nah fuck it just w, it makes sense, but x wouldn't. I find these points to make sense even if i don't like them.

Would, now, this practice be acceptable in C? you are supposed to write the same modular code with C in which you compose large functionality in separated units of code, yet I am sure this practice of single name variables is something that C engineers dislike greatly.

Are go devs just doing this out of blind love for their preference in languages? and how would this work if mfkers add generics to go(I hope not, Go is simple enough to understand in order to extend functionality through the empty interface, but that is a preference of mine as well)

The more I use Go the more I like it to be honest, I think the code looks ugly syntactically, but that is subjective as all hell and based on my constant preference for a language to look like Ruby, which even though it might not be everyone's cup of tea it remains to my eyes as the most beautiful language in existence, again, an obvious personal preference.

markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.

md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.

i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.

They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.

Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".

They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.

All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.

VR/AR - inferior interaction with the computer, just like touchscreen are inferior to physical buttons
Microservices - having a stew of different coding standards will in the end introduce performance issues due to layers needed to reduce code entropy
Agile - programming was and always will be creation on existing technologies. Every library writer who follows Agile is making a hellhole for anyone above the layer of abstraction
Web freedom and Anonymity - At this point it should be obvious already, this fad took 30 years too long

Shit, I lost the rant again. Well let's begin from the top.

This is little bit personal but I'm not keeping any of this as a secret. I'm a hyperactive thinker at nights (ADHD). I must write this down, although it's well over middle-night at this point.

I just discovered that I might be better writer whilst I'm sleepy, hungry, out of affection of the meds or all of the above.
And may I remind you that I'm not a native English speaker or writer.

* Saved to clipboard, so I won't lose this again *

I've written now 2 long rants, 8 issue reports (devRant) and a loong collab posting in this one sitting, or rather laying. It feels like I'm writing perfectly without missing a beat. I know that's not right, it's the main symptom in ADHD; My brain is actually running slower than an average, much slower. That's a reasonable explanation for the “fast” innovation.
I'm running without restrictions of a normal human, I don't "overthink" every single word and rather go with the flow. That's what spell checkers are for.

* Save *

You can probably see what's happening. It's certainly also true when writing code. I left out the normal cleaning up (except for the grammar, found 10 errors).

It's pretty much the same thing as I'd imagine being drunk or even high.

I must not be the only one.

* Writing tags... *
* Update error count *
* Recover one part from memory *

Being victim of an arbitrary worplace's culture on dev experience and documentation makes me a very frustrated dev.

Often I do want to document, and by that, I don't mean laying an inline comment that is exactly the function's name, I mean going full technical writer on steroids. I can and WILL get very verbose, yes, explaining every single way you can use a service - no matter how self explanatory the code might look.
I know developers (and me included) can, and sometimes will, write the best variable and function names at the time, wondering if they reached the peak of clean, DRY code that would make Robert Martin have a seizure and piss himself, only to find weeks later after working on something else that their work is unreadable. Of course.
I know the doc's public, it's me, and I've done this.

But then again explain for the people in the back how the FUUUUCK are we meant to suggest improvements, when we are not the ones who are prioritising features and shit WITH the business?

Just email me when the fucking team recycles, and no new team member knows how to even setup the IDEs because this huge piece of monumental shit called CompanyTM is also run by VPN. Fuck, no one wants to access that garbage, you have no docs.

I once tried setting up a culture for documentation. I did an herculean amount of work studying what solutions were internally homologated, how steep the learning curve would be from what we had at the moment (NOTHING, WE HAD FUCKING NOTHING, jesus christ, I even interviewed SEVENTEEN other squads to PROVE they FUCKING NEED
DOCS
TO WORK

You know what happened to that effort?
It had a few "clap" reactions on a Teams meeting and it never reached the kanban.
It didn't even made it to backlog.

I honestly hope that, someday, an alien fenomenon affects the whole company, making their memories completely reset, only to have the first one - after the whole public ordeal on why our brains became milkshake -, to say: "oh, boy, I wish we had documented this".
Then I will bring them to the back and shoot them.

I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.

Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...

Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.

What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):

* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).

I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.

There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.

Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.

In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.

Microsoft should have pre-install Visual Studio Code on Windows Platform rather then Code Writer. What is the purpose of Code Writer, anyone?

Only half dev-related but AAAAARRRGGGGHH it sure as hell is a rant.
Doing a programming course, and I'm supposed to provide flowcharts of the code. I just spent over TWO FUCKING HOURS working on one in LibreOffice Writer, saving in between to make sure it didn't mess up. But of-FUCKING-course as soon as I do the final goddamn save for the chart, it just magically disappears. My hate for word editors burns with the intensity of all the fires of hell, and almost even rivals my hate for M$...

The more code I write the worse I feel as a programmer. Just me?

An 80's programmer once said to her son, my friend a writer, "Don't be self deprecating".

Time to refactor my thoughts.

Python's ast package is the coolest thing I've recently came across. If you're a compiler writer, you can translate your language's source code into python's ast. And your language has instant access to all of the python's libraries.

I am not a programmer, but I know a little bit of Python, C# and C++, but mostly basic syntax of latest two. Nevertheless it gives me higher ground, why?

I develop way od thinking which maker my life easier. I Havel intershop in Pharmacy and they print small papers with number which you show to get remaining drugs. Currently is number, 17592 which makes someone to type almost 40k numbers and erase also this amount. I use variable function in Libreoffice Writer and you have to type one number and it autonumber 64 (easily to expand but unnecessary) and save fucktone of time 😃 And this is why I thing that teaching programming is beneficial, because it develops mindset of resolving problems in easier way.

On the other hand in a few hours I wrote program for my girlfriend to draw randomly picture of herbal material (leaf, root, fruit etc) and ask for Latin name of this material, check if is correct and display necessary information. Programming was quick, most of time I prepare data for this software and this feels so fuxkibg awesome that I could use my knowledge to help my girlfriend and make something useful which makes me proud (code looks like blue waffle, but it works 😃). Fucking deadlines, but at least I could finish it 😃

So my girlfriend started working as a dev at her company. She was a technical writer and got promoted. She is now working in maintaining code from previous projects.

Now comes the questions
"how do this?"

Ahhhhh.... Now i want to really know how developers make softwares, ROMs, chatbots using ML and all these type of stuff.
- When i go through the guide for making ROM for a smartphone or a chatbot the writer asks the reader to take the code from github, everybody just give github link and move on. None tells how the developer wrote that bunch of code. I really want to learn core concepts behind all this. I know how to code but i can't apply it in real life applications. For me there is no bridge which connects coding to end products. I don't know what to do next?

I'd like to be able to travel back in time to ask the writer of legacy code whether they were taking drugs when they wrote it... #WouldExplainWhy