I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of awesome people early into my career.

At the company I worked where I met @trogus, I became friends with a few people, including Tim, that I think were my favorites. It was a really fun bunch and though it may sound immature, but a lot of the times it felt like we were kids so for me coming out of college it was awesome.

There's so many stories from working with that bunch that come to mind for me. One of my best friends there was this guy "Dirty Devin." He started around the same time I did. When I first met him he seemed really boring and professional. After getting to know him, and after he'd been at the company for a few weeks, his actual personality started to show and he was like a child (in the best way possible) and was absolutely hilarious/made the work place a blast.

Our office had a ping pong table and neither Dirty Devin or I had ever really played. We started playing against each other and we both very quickly got really good.

I also met a guy named Botond (he's the one in the photo). He was very similar to Dirty Devin. Lots of crazy stories but the photo is actually a really funny one - we both got to work a few minutes early one day. And we couldn't get into the office. We kept trying to enter the door code and it wouldn't work. We kept joking that we must both be fired. Turned out that they had fired someone the night before and didn't bother to send out the new door code :/

And of course, Tim. I think we clicked pretty early on and had the same friend group at the company.

In my college days i was designing a bootloader for avr microcontroller , i had the idea to flash code wirelessly to avr over bluetooth and also cross compile the compiler for android device so that you can code on android, every thing went well just one thing didn't, i saw that code of certain size is executing properly , greater than that size gives me wired outputs so i have to dump hex from the avr (that is flashed the by bootloader) and compaire it with the original hex of code it got messy as you can see, most fun part of this bug is that error can be anywhere cross compiler may be fucked up , the bootloader may be fucked up , or it may be my bluetooth module , after 14 hours of staring at the hex code i figured out the mess in bootloader instruction that was changing the page address for flashing .

when it worked it was 3am in night i literally burst into tears of joy next day bought myself a cake to celebrate

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.

The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.

Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.

At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.

To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.

The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.

We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.

Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.

After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.

We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.

End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.

We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.

We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)

PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

This was a fun thing that just happened:

I was sent a timed questionnaire by a potential employer for a software engineer job. I'm like okay, I will do it on Monday (today) because that is when I will have a free minute.

Well I sit down to do the thing and I had had a few beers, because the Ballmer Peak is real to me when I have to answer bullshit programming quizzes.

Well F me right in the A, it is a 38 question true or false logic quiz. And I am no longer a college kid trying to get into grad school so I have no patience for that crap, and apparently less with a little beer in me. Long story short, there was no comment section for me to rant in so I decided to go on YouTube and watch cat videos instead.

Okay so this is just a rant about my personal life because if I post it any where else no one will really care.

So I graduated from a vocational high school where I learned about basic IT and networking skills but I mostly focused on my programming. and I LOVED that school honestly the environment was so amazing and everyone and everything about it was amazing. then I started college recently hoping for the same thing and its just depressing me, and my depression is coming back and I cant stop it because I cant distract myself from it. My friends are always off playing Monster Hunter Ultimate and Im just wishing theyd hop back on Warframe so we can play again.. They say they will but they really wont so im usually just playing alone or going online which is sometimes fun if you have people that talk back.

so i took myself to the official warframe discord to find people that would help but everytime I ask I just get ignored. So Im stuck playing alone.

while thats happening Im not really getting any messages from anyone besides my girlfriend which is nice but she isnt able to really keep up a conversation and shes often busy with school as well. when I try to talk to any of my friends they arent really interested to talk or just send short replies that obviously tell me to go away. one friend in particular she and I used to talk everyday not even in a romantic way just straight up besties for life, but after one of my relationships ended she basically took her side and never talks to me now. Ive just been really lonely and wanting to just have my friends talk to me again or just have some programming friends I can chill in a discord server while we code but I cant bring myself to ask anyone on the specific server im in for programming..

Honestly idk if anyone on devrant really looks at my posts and thinks "oh look Bubbles posted again". I feel like im not good enough to be here because Im not nearly as good as all of you, Im mostly just here asking questions or posting extremely fucking long posts no one wants to read. and yet this is still where most of my interactions are and I love that this devRant community makes me laugh or feel better about myself sometimes. and I thank all of you for that and I remember your @ 's all the time.

honestly the only real highlight of my week was when my teacher of my vocational class asked me to come back as an unpaid intern to help teach his new programming class and It made me happy but other than that I havent been too happy.

if anyone actually got through this holy shit youre awesome and thank you a lot its appreciated.

Made a bunch of bad decisions.
This one is the absolute worst.
Studying biology as a main subject intstead of computer science in high school.
Indian people in here would know, studying PCMB is no less than being a dare devil. 🤣
Why did I do that ?
I didn't want to get into medicine.
I just wanted to study it for fun.

And thought, I'll be able to study all of computer science in college 😶.
Its totally useless now.
How much of biology do I remember now ?
Not much.
Studying CS would have been much more beneficial for me.

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.

My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.

I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.

That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.

I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."

If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.

Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.

So one year ago, when I was second year in college and first year doing coding, I took this fun math class called topics in data science, don't ask why it's a math class.

Anyway for this class we needed to do a final project. At the time I teamed up with a freshman, junior and a senior. We talked about our project ideas I was having random thoughts, one of them is to look at one of the myths of wikipedia: if you keep clicking on the first link in the main paragraph, and not the prounounciation, eventually you will get to philosophy page.

The team thought it was a good idea and s o we started working.

The process is hard since noe of us knew web scraping at the time, and the senior and the junior? They basically didn't do shit so it's me and the freshman.

At the end, we had 20000 page links and tested their path to philosophy. The attached picture is a visualization of the project, and every node is a page name and every line means the page is connected.

This is the first open project and the first python project that I have ever done. Idk if it is something good enough that I can out on my resume, but definitely proud of this.

PS: if you recognize the picture, you probably know me. If you were the senior or the junior in the team, I'm not sorry for saying you didn't do shit cuz that's the truth. If you were the freshman, I am very happy to have you as a teamate.

At the first company I worked for out of college, the CEO was a bit like a child. Whenever he came up with a new feature he wanted to add to the product, it had to be done asap otherwise we were going to "miss the boat." Every single time.

So rewind to a few years ago. It's a normal day at work and then suddenly my team lead and the CEO call my team into the conference room. The CEO starts telling us about this industry conference (we were in online dating) that was happening and this flashy new company dating company was going to be showing off this awesome search feature.

Naturally, our CEO concocted a Hail Mary plan of how our company was going to upstage this company and get all of the press to write about us instead. Basically, the "plan" was for us to build a brand new search feature of our own, in the week before the conference, and then he stated that the press would "have to write about us because ours will be better."

Everyone on my team knew it was ridiculous but we were pretty young and naive so we busted our asses to get this search feature out the door in the short week. The Friday before we stayed until like 2 AM. It was a little bit fun because the people on my team were cool, but the whole situation was absurd and no one, except the CEO, thought this had any chance of working.

Annnnddd in the end we didn't get an ounce of press, the search feature was pulled from our site, and the "awesome" company that we were so worried about getting all the press is out of business. But hey, we did get it done!

This incident is from my college days.....

I saw one of my friend was arguing with his project partner. He was pretending to know everything in programming better than his partner.

Just for fun, I asked him to implement single linked list by using arrays/pointers (I gave him 20 mins and told him to do in any programming language he is familiar with). He was not able to do, so I suggested him to use Google and see if he can find something which can help him with implementation....

Within 10 min he came with a solution which was working fine. So I asked how does he implemented, and what does the methods do.... As expected, he was blank and I got to know he copied entire solution from Stackoverflow.....

A thought came in my mind:
Just by knowing copy/paste won't make you a programmer....... <\>

Alcoholic Programmer

Last year, I had an inevitable programming session while I was drunk. I didn't struggle at all. I programmed like composing a poem. Btw I have been programming for last 18 years and never enjoyed this much after college programming labs.
Since then I've been drinking before complicated logics and never disappointed.

Tl;dr. Programming is fun, but programming is unparalleled when drunk.

/* Not a rant, more like a story with a good ending */

Le me finally got an interview for a big company, started preparing for technical questions, white board test, basically anything related ti a technical interview. The role was for a graduate software developer as i just finished my college and is my first ever interview with a company.

At the interview, he sat down and said " it will be a friendly and a very informal type of interview " and then carried on to ask me about my interests and past experiences and shared some details about the company and technology they work with. At one point i started ranting about some problems i was in due to javascript's nature of compiling even though syntax isn't right and we both had a good laugh as well about it. Idk but i felt like the interviewer made me feel really comfortable so that anything we were having a chat about was without stress, as i was nervous the whole time before the interview for being my first expereince ever.

After leaving the office i felt like this was too simple for the role i applied for and thought the company might not be interested, 4 days letter i got a mail that they are offering me the role as the feedback from interviewer was excellent.

Pretty wierd but fun experience frankly.

For the first time ever, I’m writing an academic paper while worrying it will be too long, as opposed to being too short. The difference with this paper is that it’s on something I’m passionate about. I’m having fun writing this one - I’m getting paid to do something that doesn’t feel like work. It really makes me think about what job I want to get after college. I understand it’s possible to work without feeling like you’re working, and that’s something I really want.

A fun story on how I lost my end of year project :

Last year was my first year of college in computer science. To get to my school, I need to take two different buses with a kilometer distance between them.
The day that I had to send my end of year project, which was worth 25% of my final grade, I thought that it would be fun to use my skateboard to get to the second bus instead of walking. So, I got out of the bus, started skateboarding towards the second bus and, about 20 meters later, my wheel got stuck on a small rock which was big enough to make me do a front flip. I landed on my back and broke my left arm.
An hour later, at the hospital, I tried to send my project to my computer science teacher but I quickly realised that my spectacular fall destroyed my laptop's HDD and my end of year project.
And this is how I learned how important it is to back up my files in the cloud.

College Senior Thesis is done. Wrote the whole fucker as a Spring Boot Microserivce and my brain is fucking jello after 4 straight months of work.

I need something lightweight, I need something fun to code as I wind down at the end of the year.
I think I'll play around with Node.js and Typescript and learn about this docker thing people keep talking about before I go back to Java exception hell.

I'm not ready to be a Jr Dev next year. I'm too young to work this kind of job for the next 40 years.

Convo I had 5 minutes with someone a just met at school

Them: what are you studying?
Me: computer science, what about you?
Them: so you know how to make websites?
Me: yea I have a couple years of experience in web dev but I like IT and automation more
Them: can I send you my white paper? Would u be ok with making a website for it?
Me: ....... potentially?

Thought it was weird they wanted me to do that for them when I just met them

Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.

===================

My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...

===================

Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.

===================

Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:

GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10

the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!

===================

that's it, it's over, why are you still here

So...
I had to do a minor project for this semester. It was to be made in a group of two people and everything ( work ) was shared between the both of them.

I had a friend who was my partner ( faculties decided who will be in each group ). She doesn’t like programming nor does she come to college but I hoped she would do fine and be helpful ( she is a decent person actually ).

She never bothered to come to college, or even ask how the project was going... except one day before presentation 😒😑.
Thankfully, my guide removed her as my partner... she was detained because of extremely low attendance... and I had to work alone... that was much better though 😁.
Minor project was kinda fun by the way... and since I did it alone, I was able to do it at my own pace and without any issue of synchronization between partners ☺️☺️

A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.

I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.

College days
Me and my friend sitting in Lab

Me - Dude I am not able to install simulator in this PC, it's asking for some password
Friend - Try typing random password, admin123, admin000, admin0, admin etc.
Me: (After 10+ attempts) Not working :(
Friend: (Saying to faculty) Mam what's the password for this PC, I need to install simulator.
Mam: Wait, Computer specialist will come and do it for you

** Waiting for 10 min **

Specialist came and starts installing it one by one. After 3 min

Specialist: (After realizing that he can't install it for all 50+ PC's)
Everyone select Administrator account, and press enter, then you will be able to download it.

Me and my friend staring at each other laughing so hard ... !

After 1 month, the password is still same :P
Fun fact: It is Technical Campus.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

My college years was actually quite helpful.

I'm from a college that value academic proficiency over industrial skills. There are only 2-3 courses top that are focusing more on coding or software development. The others are theoretical and focus more on the math behinds everything (with fun projects tho, so they are not boring at all).

The importance is that, you could easily learn coding and software dev practice from good examples in your workplace, probably way better what you can get in college. But chances are that our daily job rarely touches hardcore algorithm and mathematical principal behind. Where when you actually need it (bi-weekly scenario), your knowledge and research experience in college comes to play.

And of course, by all means, that was an enjoyable college life!

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

Can anyone suggest me a cool Machine learning project for my college project?
I need something that is fun and cool.

Saw an ad on a news/media website looking for front end developers.

Fresh out of Practical Engineering college, which is basically a rapid 2 years teaching academy, I knew the manager previously and applied for the job.
In my standards I failed the "interview" miserably, but nevertheless they still took me under their wings and taught me everything.

1 year later, I'm the lead web and android dev and currently learning AWS and iOS.

it's a fun experience and the unexpected responsibilities have taught me alot.

Not my 'first' but the first outside of stupid little toy projects.

I got an internship back in 2016 while I was in 11th grade. Mine was sort of a college doing community outreach, so yeah, not really impressive of an internship.

But my manager handed me a Micro:Bit. At the time, there were like 1000 in the U.S. the U.K. was brainstorming, including them in school curriculums. My manager just told me to experiment and see what I could do with it.

Minimal requirements Minimal guidance outside of ideas now and then (he had doctorate students to manage so I get it lol), so I started just doing stupid small things with the micro python, the language the minimal back then documentation reccomended, like a 'lowest of poly' crazy taxi thing.

But by the end, I hacked together some HORRIBLY written C++ to get 2 of them to communicate. 1 always powered and gets a state from the other at regular intervals. The other is powered by a hand crank and sending the direction of the crank to the other.

I forget what the end goal was. But it was fun to learn, and thinking back, I did a lot in just 8 weeks

My manager gave me the first Micro:Bit on my last day. I don't do anything with it anymore. But it's a fun memory.

It was also around that time I found DevRant and needed you guys to knock my ego down a few pegs when my head over inflated, lol.

!dev

Sorry about another non-dev rant, but I can't help it :p

I have seen a post here on devRant a few minutes ago talking about being a millionaire, so I thought I'd write a lil something for people thinking of chasing that.

As I said in a comment on that rant: as Jordan Peterson (aka Lord of the Lobsters) said, in order to be successful you need to be an industrious person, i.e. you gotta work hard, very hard. Most success stories are from people that worked very very hard (Elon Musk is one I can remember off the top of my head) and had to put their life, friends, family in second place. To this day I remember watching a video on a 30 year old millionaire, he said he didn't have friends for about 6-10 years, he just worked, worked and worked. If that's what you wanna do with your life do your thing, I'm just saying that's not it for me.

A few years back I wanted huge success (being famous, being rich), but I've come to realize that's not what I want. Being famous must suck, people recognizing you everywhere you go and shit, and being rich comes with a price (pun intended?), which is working every minute of your time for 10 years. That's not gonna make me happy, I have realized that I want to get married in my early 30's at max, have kids, buy a comfortable house somewhere in europe, have enough money to be able to give my family a good life and be able to buy and tune a few cars (that's a dream of mine btw), and maybe even try to start a company of my own (I don't like the idea of having a boss). And I think that to achieve these goals, all I need to do is be a bit smart right now: invest in fixed income, don't buy expensive shit, live with my parents at least until I get out of college and get a relatively decent job.

Anyway I might've steered off-course for a bit there, the point is: before you decide you want to be a millionaire, think what you actually want in life. If you want to be rich and are sure you have the willpower to work a 100 hours per week, do your thing, whatever makes you happy. But if you are going to work 60 hours a week and you're looking to be rich you're just going to be disappointed. You'll be chasing money all your life, sacrifice the (IMO) important things in life (friends, family, health, fun) and you won't get anywhere.

It's all or nothing, make up your mind before you waste your time.

Fun story:

I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.

I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.

I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".

Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).

LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.

P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files.

I was always somewhere in the range of not athletic enough to be a jock and not smart enough to be a geek during high school so it left me in a fun little purgatory between social groups. Ever since I was a kid though I saw my cousin make flash games for fun and thats where my interest in programming started but I never really did anything with it.

It wasn’t until I broke a bone during a football game and couldn’t play or workout for 8 months that I started jumping head first into programming and IT WENT DEEP. After tearing through and intro to java book I started reading and watching courses about data structures and learning how to make mediocre apps and games. It was terrible as any beginner usually is but god was it fun.

Then college came around and I decided to major in computer science, got myself a nice starting job at a typical big tech company with an actually decent team to work with and I still have the same love for it all since I started with it.

Amother one:

Seconf CS101 class. We had to write a program that multiplies two parameters in a method.
I asked the tutor for help because it was my forst timr ever writimg code.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? THIS IS BASIC STUFF YOU SHOULD ALREAEDY KNOW IN YOUR SLEEP. ANYMORE QUESTIONS? "

Went to the prpfessor and told him what kind of assholes are working for him. Found out that the tutpr is not tutoring anyone amymore because the found someone who is not an asshole.
College is fun.

Been a little inactive for a long time, but I could really use your advices fellow ranters.

I'm in my senior year of highschool and I got an extraordinary internship at a company (it's not possible to get a job in web dev in this country as a highschooler).
The pay is just a little pocket money, but projects are fun (web apps in js) and I can include this experience iny resume later on.

Basically the company wants me to go to uni/college. The teachers too. Oh, parents too.
I have been suffering in schools for my whole life, I really don't feel lile I could make myself go to school another 4 years.

And I also don't have the slightest idea of what I wanna do with my life, I have no goals currently and I'm afraid of that while I'm in this existential crisis state it is easier for people to tell me what's good for me.

Objectively this is a country of papers, so I guess it doesn't matter wheter it's web dev or the next super digital intelligence I do as a profession.

I also want to travel the world, but I need money for that Xd. If possible I'd love to move to another country, but still have no idea.

Thanks for reading through this depressing shit.

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

I am currently in the hunt for a job post college. However with the 300+ jobs I have applied to, I think I have also got that many phone calls from spammers. However, some of them are getting good. They use a CallerID (that isn't even the name or company they are) most of the calls are from stupid insurance companies. So I have started to play with them by pretending to be different food companies (PizzaHut, Papa Johns, ect.). I think this is more fun. What have your experiences been lately?

I've never been diagnosed but I'm certain I have ADHD, I get distracted extremely easily with absolutely "whatever" and it completely destroys my performance, I bet people think I'm dumb when in fact when I'm finally able to concentrate I can do things. It fucking sucks, feels like a curse. I realized I failed college because of this. Now I fear losing my job.

Right now I'm about to embark upon a great night of trying to catch up with shit I should have done earlier, which I *might* be able to focus on. I have no fun in life because I don't allow myself to, I somehow attained a relationship with someone and now that too is going to shambles because I spend so much time *trying* to do things and can't bring myself to doing them, and that time is stolen from that which I should spend with people I love and just enjoying life. I fucking hate this. I fucking hate it.

Also, I have this feature which I'm supposed to implement, and they tell me it's just an MVP which we'll use to test waters to see if people will use the functionality, it just has to work... which it does by now, but then they keep adding things before ever releasing. I feel so anxious about this and I didn't even take the job for good pay because I was desperate to leave another job which wasn't even in development. I don't want to fail this, I want to prosper as a developer. I actually wanted to do systems programming and game development, but here I am doing web shit.

Oh well. I shall throw myself unto thee.

Its been a month since i opened Android studio, and am feeling so weird doing the things now i do.

I had been learning and developing apps for almost an year( not exactly any big apps, but kinda in a learning phase, making prototypes, learning about the internal workings, reading blogs/articles,etc ) . Although i did got a few internships and earned some money, i didn't felt any good calling myself an Android developer with insufficient skills.

Frustrated, i just thought of taking a break, as my college was also giving a pressure of its own. Meanwhile i got a python data analytics scholarship from some 1 day competition at clg., So last September and October have pretty much gone into that. Python being an old friend seems like a pretty fun thing to do, and am totally into it (for now)

But java seems to let go of my hands even faster. Even though i used to waste much of my time reading how stuff works or checking out ui/animations , i did coded some stuff and made cool prototypes. i had a feeling that one day this all learning will be over and i will be able to code apps with ease... But now, it feels am going back to stage Zero. I feel as if i can't even write a hello world app.

I hope my poor little codebase is documented well enough to accept me back.
Don't leave me, java . We are on a break :'''(

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

People who have seem my rants know am a calm person.. But watch out for what's coming next:
AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH !FUCK YOU STUPID CHEAP PHONE!!
was coming home after tiring college exam, thankfully got my spirits uplifted coz of my crush's message...
So , we were chatting, i was having fun flirting with my little cuteness nd was telling her some tale about how me nd friends were partying some day....
She was so into it and was getting into her naughty mode when suddenly this asshole went off... Had got 15% notification just a second ago, thought "yeah i have some time to connect" but this shit went out from 15 to 1 in a matter of seconds!!!?!, nd that too without notifs.
Fuck man, i lost such a nice moment today X(

(Ps: am using this shit micromax phn just because my old phn is at service center)

I really do not understand why people do not use the defaults, I see a PHP code and I see all the PSR's violated, SOLID violated, and as it is something of years, unfortunately we did not get more rapporteur in a timely manner. I didn't go to college, but I must say, what the hell do you guys do in college?

Then many (the good obviously) programmers do not understand why they take so much the fun of PHP, if they see the codes that I see lately...

I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.

So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.

But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.

Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.

So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.

I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.

I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.

Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?

I had some fun times in college.

Me: This book is too outdated, we need updated information for the video capture card presentation. I'd do it but this time I'm busy.
Teammate: I'll do it.
Me: oh wow really? Thanks!

Next week...

Teammate: here, take a look. I updated the information
Me: Yeah, I can see that all of those 10+ year old models have some fresh google search information in them. Thanks.

Random learnings/realisations/hypothesis:

i have found a sense of happiness in weird symbiotic environment : being rich in a poor environment and live with a poor-but-secretely-rich lifestyle.

i call it the "sheep-hoodie" lifestyle: being a wolf in a herd of sheeps but not with a sheep's skin glued to your body. rather a hoodie so you can be a friendly wolf , ferocious wolf and a friendly sheep whenever you want to.

my 1 group of friends are in a sheep phase : struggling in their life , crunched on money, not saving a lot or focused on savings and stuff. At least that's what shows up from their discussions. however when we are together, i see that we are always supporting each other, and sharing resources/helping each other while having fun

my another group of friends have a wolf lifestyle:
they are insanely rich, if you want to party/do something with them at 'their' level, you gotta have a lot of cash to burn . they are wolves because they know how to sell their stuff, whom to sell and how to retain the info for success. i don't enjoy much with them as their solutions to life problems end up with something that involves a lot of money than effort.

So my lifestyle is to earn like them, but live like my broke friends. they think that am earning 20% of what i earn now, and am also in lots of debts and family crisis. someday my lie is gonna burst when i buy expensive stuff lol

--------
#2
i have realised that i have an OCD for silence and psychotic reaction to noise . for me ,
Silent Environment >> sex >> any relationship.
I might react so aggressively to noise while trying to focus that i may end up breaking the closest of relations with anyone

--------------
#3
thinking of having 3 twitter accounts just to fix the problem of devrant not saving content of dormant accounts :
- professional : an id where i will share my professionally stupid questions, achievements, debates etc
- personal/partial-anon : an id where i will share my personal thoughts and stuff. it might also include devrant screenshots / embarrising content that i make here
- true-anon : a full anonymous account for my(some) extreme thoughts, trigger content and explicit researches

my current twitter feed is a mix of first 2, but making 2 seperate accounts might give me more freedom(the level of devrant) to express myself than what i do now (as my followers are also interesting people but mostly related to tech)
guess i should move my tech content there than my personal content.

------------------------------
#4
making an early opinion about something should only be done to research for truth/content/conversion/hype . final opinion should always be made after you trust something with a research. for eg, initial opinion of Elon Musk was he being a bad guy, but now after seeing his crazy ideas and approach towards twitter, he looks like someone who can truly make it a money minting machine.

------------------------------
#5
A simple perception towards making money as not being a bad thing does wonders at a management level and life .
liberal opinion of twitter layoff and later changes were emotional and blaming, but thinking from a business approach, his company partners(and whoever he likes) now have special golden badges to feel like VVIP and have an orgasm, while he gave a dummy melon to every person on earth to pay for feeling like a VIP and have an orgasm.
a brilliant tactic to make money without anyone calling the minting of money as BAD. genius

------------------------------
#6
was randomly checkin Insta, saw an ex-collegue share a random deep thought quote, and i realised that i might have known her for just a week or 2 in college, but she had a very nice nature.

However, she was the daughter of a very rich ass dad and had almost everything in life. she gave a bit spoilt(for me) look, like someone who did ciggs or drink, but her talks then and our chats later just on chat gave me a very nice hustler vibe (the type of people i like: hustling and professional)

I indirectly asked her on a date and she agreed. so, this is something very interesting for me, as i am hopelessly single and full of judgemental opinions/ strict rules. share your tips and notes on how to have a successful date, and stuff that one must NOT do . much grateful if you do not come under rule 29 of internet and share your POV

Conducting a fun based coding event “Tasquila” in national level tech fest “Pleiades” conducted every year at B.V.B college of engineering and technology Hubballi-580031, Karnataka, India and event is gonna be on 22nd or 23rd of March ... looking out for participants and sponsors... any help would be appreciated... 😄😄

My family got our first computer when I was in the 1st grade and I really liked it a lot.

After some years I saw someone code and I was like "What's that?". After they explained me what they were doing I was totally hyped and started searching tutorial videos on how to do simple stuff on VB (this was in my 7th grade, I believe).

By the end of my 8th grade I was introduced to a Computer Engineer that lent me a RoR book and tried to teach me the basics.
(Fun fact: around this time I was doing a Habbo clone server with a friend of mine so that we could play with our friends without all the other people poking around).

In high school I took a Computer Technician course where I learnt stuff like VB, C#, PHP, MySQL, some basic CSS/HTML plus some hardware fundamentals.

After that course I tried to enter college and I failed on my first try, so I took a gap year were I worked as a dev for my family's computer repair shop. It was really a good experience to have time for myself while working on what I loved.

Now I'm on the 2nd year of a Bachelor in Computer Engineering (It's more about software than hardware actually), currently working with Java, C, IA-32 Assembly and PL/SQL. My goal is to get a Masters in Software Engineering after it.