well that was insightful.

nixcraft being nixcraft.

i share your rant bro. (well, not actually because i don't use apple :D)

from the comic series "saturday morning breakfast cereal".

behold! wk21 "it's like facebook but..." rants are coming.

A Fellow Ranter said I should introduce myself, so here I go.

Me = {
Gender = "Male",
CodeOfChoise = {"lua", "PHP"},
Age = "28"
Location = "404"
}

No really here we go, I am Rex, I am dyslexic and forget code really badly but it does not stop me from trying to have fun with some ideas, I use mostly PHP these days but when I want to make a quick windows tool I use a app called AMS or AutoPlayMedia Studios what as a nice lua scripting language back end.

I been coding on and off for many years since I was about 15 and I been in love with computers since I was about 6 (don't tell my wife).

So far I like the site, its better then Twitter and Facebook as it's code related and fun to read and some stuff gets the cogs a turning.

I don't have any real foot print in the dev world, I get by but I not here to be loved, or to be big in any field, I am here because I enjoy my tech.

I leave this little introduce me with a question, what was your first or first memorial computer.

Mine was the Acorn A4000 Mixed with parts from the A3000 and A5000's :) she was a little bit of a mix match.

the new fanboy corner on my room wall :)

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

remember, to them, we're just cogs

easily replacable machine parts

meanwhile they're "extremely special" because they've thought of the next 10 iterations of microsoft fucking excel

"HR tech startup" give me a fucking break dude

i rant that i live in a dictatorship with an idiot president who bans whatsapp and facebook to prevent protests (in reaction to having arrested opposition party members of parliament), and github (yes, github) to prevent the spread of a minister's leaked e-mails. now the government is seriously considering shutting down vpn services to prevent by-passing the bans.

on the other hand, it's a nice time and place to continue ms studies on ad-hoc networks - that is of course if i can avoid being arrested or killed before i even start my thesis.

that feeling when your new toys from aliexpress get delivered earlier than expected... i feel so happy unpacking those sensors, capacitors, heat sinks, microchips, breadboards and all. i feel like i have a geeky shopping addiction, i probably won't have the time to play with them from all the work and other personal projects, but still i hoarded enough electronics to invade the world with a drone army in case i have a few weeks me-time.

'yes' in linux shell has become my favourite command when i discovered it. it has a careless touch to it, like "yeah whatever just do the thing".

also, i like glutMainLoop. a saw doll inside my head says "let the game begin!" each time i type this function.

packet received. thanks for all the fishes.

oh what a fine young mkfs. thank you my dear, have a nice day yourself.

maybe it's time feature is added for devrant simple community dev projects. there could be games, parody websites, you name it. projects could be hosted on github, and indexed at a "projects" tab here on devrant, so we can choose something and start rolling with our pals from devrant when we get bored at work :) @dfox (inspired by rant from @Notebookdeviant)

didn't anyone go for the "#define true false" joke? i didn't actually see it in action, but it would be a pretty harsh one.

So a month after being rejected for a position because it is was the holiday season and the cogs were turning slowly...

Fucking bitch (ceo of corp) contacts me and invites me for another talk

Look lady, I landed another job while you didn't want me at that timeframe and your cogs needed oil... Tough loss ain't it lol 😳🙈

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

I would like to stop and genuinely thank the devs and anyone that contributed to NW.js for allowing users to work outside the sandbox. Fucking sandboxes these days make developing editors and tooling a bunch of bullshit hassle. I understand why, but it makes an entire class of software that much more difficult to develop.

And on a semirelated note, I decided to go with nw.js because unlike electron, I don't have to tell users "just install these two gigabytes of npm dependencies *from off the net after already downloading the main application*, dependencies that could break at any time at all for any reason."

Does anyone even bundle their dependencies any more or is this something only clinically insane people like myself do?

Because last I checked most users still don't know how to debug console autobarf when a single command goes awry due to something obscure like a version conflict between two brittle cogs in the organ grinder known as package management.

Edit: also, nw.js startup times and memory requirements are relatively sane compared to electron.

This is an anti-rant...

I had a problematic arch-dwm setup which i've been struggling with for a looong time, and when i thought i still needed quite some time to solve all issues, yesterday i somehow managed to hit the right solutions for each problem in a single evening. My setup is now in its most stable and usable state ever, and rsynced to a flash drive. I am no longer forced to use windows for my daily needs.

Praise be to holy gnu and holy tux! Do you think maybe i should sacrifice some electronics for the souls of st. ritchie, st. thompson, st. stallman and st. torvalds?

i found this beauty on diaspora (in tribute to the comic artist frank franzetta)

p.s.: i asked the artist if i can use it here, but got no replies. i hope it won't be a problem for him/her.

"rose" of alphonse mucha is my favourite desktop item for the time. she watches over me as i code at home.

in the workplace, i have no access to internet, am not admin to my own computer and am not allowed to install anything (due to security reasons). i also happen to have quite some spare time so i'm writing nokia's good old snake game in visual studio and opengl so i can amuse myself both coding and playing. in a way, company pushes creativity and productivity even for slacking.

this is a repost organization post. each time you are going to post a classical joke, please find it from items below, and write as comment, the number of the repost. and people will give you ++'s to your comments as if you actually reposted the post. also, feel free to make additions to the list. syntax is:

"(n): [repost context]" for a new item (please do not mess with the order)

"-- [n]: [personal comment]" for simulating the repost.

here we go:

(0): the comic strip about rescuing princesses in different languages.

(1): in case of fire git commit, git push, leave the building.

(2): wanna hear a udp joke? i don't care if you get it.

(3): that joke about java devs wearing glasses because they can't c#.

--------------

An example repost:

-- 0: omg princess lol :)))

How to sow the seeds of panic in a dev organization. Pop up a message that your BitBucket license has expired and you can't push code changes until it is renewed. Happened today. Amazing how fast the corporate cogs can turn when productivity is on hold and you still have to pay the devs.

With pandemic work from home should be understand by the old school type of management. We have VPN duh!

my 4th gen. amazon kindle has been one of my favorite work buddies so far. i spend most of my midday breaks with it, kept me pretty good company so far.

on a 5 day rock festival vacation... a band with songs i barely know is on and i'm a bit high... there's a cool set of animations playing at the stage background and i spent the whole concert trying to figure how i could write each animation in opengl. i'll give them a shot back home, if i don't forget.

rust anyone? i am a c++ person, and it caught my attention as having an oopish-but-actually-functional new programming paradigm whatever... also (don't know if it's just mozilla's successful marketing) i had the impression that people see it as the new whiz kid in town. do you recommend indulging in it for the sake of trying something new?

Anyone else here ever feel like an insignificant cog in a large machine that's easily replaceable?

I feel like the company has gotten so big that I don't have much say or impact anymore. Everything we do is determined by the dudes at the top.

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

If you want the ridiculous behavior “required” by POSIX, you must set the environment variable ‘POSIXLY_CORRECT’ (which was originally going to be named ‘POSIX_ME_HARDER’).

You just read a line from GNU's official coding standard document :D

does anybody here use diaspora*? for those who don't, it's a free (as in freedom) social network and protocol thereof, and it employs a decentralized, distributed approach. you can choose a "pod" to store your data, and search for people and content inter-podly. as a decentralization/distribution/foss enthusiast, i love the project and check regularly, but sometimes i get the feeling that i'm all by myself there, as i have no friends yet and all the content i see is just my followed keywords. (so befriend me, maybe? :D)

unigine sim engine has the worst documentation i've ever seen. it was written in bad english, occasionally did not follow a word convention (i.e. functions doing analogous work used different keywords), most items were just reiterations of function names (made up example for clarification: getAngularVelocity(): gets angular velocity...). i had to use it for my first ever job, and had to learn in from scratch, mostly by trial and error. it's been months since i switched jobs, and they were rolling a version 2 when i left, i hope they improved on their docs.

i got a dev!rant nostress ball, because i didn't have any serious rants and used the app for fun purposes.

edit: do you think maybe it can also help in debugging, although it's nothing close to being a duck.

trying to make a live usb disk. i took shots at random combinations from 2 usb sticks, 2 oses, different tools or technics on each os... each failed with a different outcome. then i realized i should have kept a failure matrix so that i don't try the same combinations, or can trace the roots of the problem.

each time i need to build a live disk, a part of me dies inside.

i just learnt how much clearcase sucks the hard way. i always used git for personal projects and am used to finding a simple solution to any problem at most one stackoverflow away, i just messed up my local repo, and experienced people could not manage to undo it. i mean come on, this is a f**king versioning software, how hard can it be to delete everything local and re-pull from remote without messing up configuration files? either clearcase has some serious design shortcomings for my understanding of a versioning software, or it is so overly complicated that nobody actually knows how to revert this mistake.

So much work so little pay yet still holding the escape key...

Why some leaders are afraid of changes. Everything in the world change and adapt to the trend of responsibly remote working. We must count the productivity and not the negative impact of envious people that all they can do is sit down and pretending to be busy. We all know that the first step of success is to accept change.

i want to find the person who proposed to force mtp in android for file transfers, and bash them in the head with a plush android toy till they're knocked unconscious.

all i want is to make a file transfer between my phone and my computer, and rather than plugging my phone's usb, i find it easier to set up an ftp server over local network. and when that doesn't work, i might as well hexdump the file, and copy it char-by-char manually, than use mtp.

anybody else has a "polish notation fetish"? i never actually learned lisp, but since i first saw its style, i find writing functions like "+ 1 2" instead of "1 + 2" both aesthetically and functionally more appealing. i think the infix notation is just being kept because of well-established habits.

i've been using debian with xfce for 2 years, and i'm now planning to migrate to arch with xmonad for some freshness. i'm reluctantly peeking out of my comfort zone and sniffing like a cat, any tips appreciated.

What is important between attendance in work or deliverables.