I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

That’s it I’m done with writing documents like Software Product Specifications and Software Requirements Documents and Software Architecture Documents, manuals, data sheets and more in MS word..

I’m doing it all form this point forward in LaTeX... I can stay in my editor, it works beautifully with version control because it’s just text... I can split it amung multiple files.. it looks damn sexy. I can focus on the content rather than being distracted by formatting and spelling issues and the rest of that shit.. ALSO.. it doesn’t crash or get corrupted.. well at-least I’ve never had a text editor crash or corrupt my files.

Idk why I didn’t learn latex sooner and do the switch.

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

The biggest hurdle I overcame on my dev career was coming back to a full time job after a few years spent on a "hippie phase" combining work as an artisan, content developer and editor, and just a few freelance dev jobs. It was all a struggle to start again thinking of myself as "junior again" surrounded by people ten or fifteen years younger than me. But I kept myself over the tidal web and here I am, a Senior again.

If you guys remember, i was teasing from time to time, that i'm working on some Rust Project in my free time.

Well here it is, i put up a whole bunch of Editor Windows in it, to showcase it a little bit. (It also reminded me, that i need to update the Version to 2024.01).

It's essentially a toolkit, with which i can create all the content, that is later used as a data basis, that is being fed into the Client + Server Combo of the actual Game. My Plan for this year is to go beyond the Editor and create a first version of the Client + Server to be able to playtest the stuff.

And sorry if it kinda sounds like an ad, but i'm more posting it here to show, how nice it actually is to build stuff with rust.

Let me know what you think ^^

Recently, one of my customers filed a ticket because some iFrame he got from another company wouldn't display after putting it into the content editor.
I told her it won't work because the (third-party) editor prohibits JavaScript inside iFrame tags and their attributes for security reasons.
She said ok. She said she'd understood the problem. And then, she reopened the ticket four (4!!!) times for the exact same reason, once because she tried to use a fixed iFrame tag the other company sent to her... still containing JavaScript, of course.

But, yeah... She understood what the problem was. Is clear.

Devrant making responding to someone impossible by removing draft content if you accidentally click outside the editor is almost more frustrating than half the shit I actually rant about.

I will have just about finished a long response when something happens and it's all fucking gone.

My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are.

I guess my story is not really cool, but okay, I lost my job as a Digital designer (Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's degree in graphic design, I'm an impostor)

I lost it because I saved enough money to travel to Japan and I wanted to stay at least a month so the company didn't like it. after coming back I got a job as a content editor, I just copied old content from an old website to a new one, basic html and css, not even responsive design, then I got really into it, and bootstrap came along, the company opened a new department "Front End" so I got in, I learnt responsive design and Jquery, really loved it, I went back to Japan for a month and a half, keeping my job, I liked it, but I quit.

I now work as a remote front end and I feel stuck, I'm very comfortable as remote, don't wanna go back to an office, but it seems I'll have to, can't find any opportunities to improve remotely, and I feel like I'm missing what the "cool kids" are doing.

Worst: forced to work for 9 months on a shitty wp theme:
- colleague with no clue trying to make me do their work… check
- incompetent manager doing shit about it… check
- idiotic pipeline requiring to redeploy for every asset update… check
- micromanaging cto which for some fucking reason didn’t want to allow access to the writers, forcing the role of content editor on the devs… ducking check! Quack!!

Best: automated lots of processes in my free time, all stuff which I can reuse!

!rant

I love emacs dired mode.
Nothing better than the full power of a decent text editor to edit directory content.
I know quite some multi-file-naming tools, but they are all crap compared to dired.

That's all. Have a nice weekend, everyone!

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

Hey people. I am writing a script(not any computer's script, but just a simple dialogue-script) for an adventure game that I have been thinking of designing. But It's a dialogue based game , so i need someone with Fine grammar to edit it.(i guess it's kinda visible from this rant how aweful my English is )

I can't say it is open source ( kind of like my first amazing idea that i want to get recognized for ), but the thing is, i won't be earning from it and I will definitely give you an equal recognition for contribution.

Can anyone Help?

I got a new Drupal project to maintain. (🤬🤬🤬)

So I'm looking at the content and noticed raw HTML inside the content area. I first thought, the client is using a wysiwyg editor.. But no. It's worse.

He is transforming a XML with XSLT to HTML and copy & paste everything. The result are nested <html><body> tags and everything breaks.

Just because drupal is to hard to work with. I will burn everything and install WordPress 🤯🤬🤬🤬

Finally dropped our old useless in-house legacy content editor (built by another team) today. Going through the database and ripping out all the shit that we had to keep for legacy support is the most liberating feeling I've had in weeks!

Started as an apprentice to copy and paste some content in. Dabbled with the HTML editor in the process, it started from there

Partially-inherited a WordPress website today that 1) has a ton of outdated plugins (therefore causing Visual Composer to complain), 2 was upgraded to WordPress 5 without keeping the old TinyMCE editor around, and 3) uses a page builder that's built into the "page options" portion of the Edit view.

We also have to add a couple of pages with the project in this state.

(For those not familiar with WordPress, "Page Options" can't be previewed before the page is published/updated, even though anything inside of the actual content area can.)

We got some work to do. 😐

Did someone already thought about how color highlight can be better? It's been 4-5 years now that I'm coding on a virtual console that run on iPad with a monochrome code editor. Despite the fact that's remind me the old days when I was 8 years old, that doesn't stop me for coding with it.

I mean, is it really important to know that strings are red and numbers are yellow? How does that help me? They are both literal and behave to the user-content categories.

I was talking with my friend, and he says he likes to know if something is a keyword or an identifier. In C++, a lot of common keywords to define stuff and control the flow are often the first word and easy to spot.

A couple of months ago, I tried Flutter, and the editor can highlight ident blocks and give them different colors, but with Flutter, it's easy to get 10 or more ident levels, Does the color help? Splitting the code does.

I think, there is so much stuff that is more important than coloring the grammar of a language. For instance: knowing if an identifier belongs to which Rust Crate because, It's easy to stack 10 or more dependencies in one file that as better chances of names collisions.

Knowing if an identifier was recognized, if it used, if it's a local, a member, a global, a compiled value or a macro seems more important.

I would like to color block of code that is important or sensible. That will help my coworker about the severity of a particular place in the code.

What do you think?