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The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.
I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.
Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.
I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.
I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.
I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).
One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.
The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.
Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).
Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...
But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.16 -
90s devs: "Did you know about GOTO/CONTINUE for control flow? it's so convenient and powerful!"
00s devs: "GOTO is an antipattern. But did you know about try/catch? You can use it for control flow, just write a lot of exception classes, it's so powerful!"
10s devs: "Using exception blocks for generic control flow is an antipattern. But have you heard about event listeners and observer patterns? It's so powerful!"
Developers are so good at repackaging and reselling square wheels by giving them fresh, impressive sounding names.
😡18 -
My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.
Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg
...
The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.
M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?7 -
I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.
A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.
Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."
A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.
Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.
KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."
KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.
It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.
I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.
Oh crap.
It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.
I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.
L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."
*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.
Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.13 -
Had a fun little conversation with a potential employer...
Him: We use git for version control. To work with our team you'll be expected to do the same and be proficient at it.
Me: Not a problem. I am well versed with all things git! May I ask, what does your work flow look like?
Him: All of our source lives in a single repo and everyone commits straight to master.
Me: 😐...
Him: Conflicts will not be tolerated.6 -
It's not motivation that you need, it's dedication.
You see, motivation is temporary thing, that sudden flow of dopamine running through your body that you get after some success or after being admired by someone or simply after good sleep and nice morning shower.
But the problem with motivation is that it's just temporary thing. After a while (hours, days, if you're lucky weeks) it just wears off and you're left pretty much where you started.
But there's one thing that remains and that's persistent. It's called DEDICATION. If you dedicate yourself to something, you are willing to do it no matter what it takes from you. Even if it frustrates you along the way or makes you angry, you wanna be able to say "It's finished. I'm satisfied with it" after you finish it. You are willing to crawl to the finishing line but no matter the obstacle, just knowing that you're getting closer to the finishing line is gonna motivate you. Your dedication is gonna become motivation generator. And that's the key. You need the passion and dedicate yourself to it.
But hey, sound simple but we all know the struggle. Sometimes it's even hard to recognize dedication from motivation. And sometimes you just go "Ok. Fuck it. I'm done" and leave it and that's okay AS LONG AS you get back to it after a while. As long as the inner you, the dedicated you that got you here in the first place, goes "Dude, it's tough. But it's alright, we refreshed a bit and now we're gonna fucking make it" (nope, I don't have schizophrenia) and you listen and get back at it.
Dedication is tough. It's about self control and understanding yourself deeply and balancing your mind. It's nirvana of success. It's the ultimate balance. But you can get there. If you want. Badly.
TL;DR You need dedication, not motivation. Punish yourself and reward yourself. Not too harsh and not too much. Just so that you don't lose track.
But most of all, GOOD LUCK YOU AMAZING FUCKS!5 -
After 16 years of porn addiction, I've finally realized that the only way to stop any addiction, is to take control of your mind. Nobody can help you, except make you realize the source of the problem or factors that cause it.
It's strange to describe how the mind works, sometimes we need stuff in our lives because we need to spend time on something to avoid the emptiness.
Free yourself from the things you love the most, in my case I love playing video games, it helps me feel complete, but in all honesty, I don't need it. I like drinking energy drinks, but in the end, I don't need that too.
My point is that once you find a way to deal with the things you can't live without, you find a way to live with it.
The only reason I watch porn is to reduce stress or have something "fun" to do.
As Bruce Lee once said: Be formless, be shapeless, be water my friend.
I like to think that he means to let the urge flow within you, but don't let it control you.15 -
FOR FUCKS SAKE, CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD!
Today we had some presentations on a class, I was near the projector, so I volunteered to control the presentation flow.
Fast forward three teams, arrives this guy, lets his laptop and and I open it... SMELLS, FUCKING SMELLS BAD. Add to that grease and dirt all over the keyboard... I just pressed the right arrow key with the bare tip of my finger...
It's not that hard to keep your workstation clean. Most of all, odourless.4 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
EEEEEEEEEEEE Some fAcking languages!! Actually barfs while using this trashdump!
The gist: new job, position required adv C# knowledge (like f yea, one of my fav languages), we are working with RPA (using software robots to automate stuff), and we are using some new robot still in beta phase, but robot has its own prog lang.
The problem:
- this language is kind of like ASM (i think so, I'm venting here, it's ASM OK), with syntax that burns your eyes
- no function return values, but I can live with that, at least they have some sort of functions
- emojies for identifiers (like php's $var, but they only aim for shitty features so you use a heart.. ♥var)
- only jump and jumpif for control flow
- no foopin variable scopes at all (if you run multiple scripts at the same time they even share variables *pukes*)
- weird alt characters everywhere. define strings with regular quotes? nah let's be [some mental illness] and use prime quotes (‴ U+2034), and like ⟦ ⟧ for array indexing, but only sometimes!
- super slow interpreter, ex a regular loop to count to 10 (using jumps because yea no actual loops) takes more than 20 seconds to execute, approx 700ms to run 1 code row.
- it supports c# snippets (defined with these stupid characters: ⊂ ⊃) and I guess that's the only c# I get to write with this job :^}
- on top of that, outdated documentation, because yea it's beta, but so crappin tedious with this trail n error to check how every feature works
The question: why in the living fartfaces yolk would you even make a new language when it's so easy nowadays to embed compilers!?! the robot is apparently made in c#, so it should be no funcking problem at all to add a damn lua compiler or something. having a tcp api would even be easier got dammit!!! And what in the world made our company think this robot was a plausible choice?! Did they do a full fubbing analysis of the different software robots out there and accidentally sorted by ease of use in reverse order?? 'cause that's the only explanation i can imagine
Frillin stupid shitpile of a language!!! AAAAAHHH
see the attached screenshot of production code we've developed at the company for reference.
Disclaimer: I do not stand responsible for any eventual headaches or gauged eyes caused by the named image.
(for those interested, the robot is G1ANT.Robot, https://beta.g1ant.com/)
4 -
Worst exp. on a collab/group project?
Had a few, here is one.
Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)
They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."
I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.
A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."
We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.3 -
Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.
So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.5 -
Casually debugging some cuda code today. Something's not working so I add a breakpoint in the suspicious kernel. For some reason I set the display GPU as the active device from my code *GENIUS* ( I have two GPUs installed, one for compute, one for the monitors).
Starts cuda debugging... Control flow reached the kernel and eventually the breakpoint. Suddenly the whole system freezes. Mouse doesn't move, keyboard seems dead. I realize I have unsaved code on the open text editor😲 *panic*. Keyboard shortcut to stop debugging doesn't work *panic^2*. My colleague says I have to hard reset the machine *panic^3*. I don't remember the last time I saved *panic^4*.
I take a deep breath. I reset. *sidenote: WINDOWS DECIDED TO FUCKING UPDATE ON REBOOT* Once I login, 50% of my code was lost. I didn't save 😢
Fuck you Nvidia 😢
7 -
I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.
Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.
But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle
There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.
So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:
Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.
Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.
The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!
The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.
Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.
4 -
We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.
I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.
It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.
That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.
Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.
The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.
The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.
And the answer will be
1. regulated tech
2. an end to television media as we know it
3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime
4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.
5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.
I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.
And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:
* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault
* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.
* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.16 -
The good: use the hardware watchdog in your application control flow.
The bad: don't use a watchdog.
The ugly: trigger the watchdog from a fucking timer interrupt.3 -
The first project I used Source Control with.
At my university, we were told that it would be a lot easier, and that we were required to use SVN, and not Git. Me not knowing much about either, decided to learn from two people who used Git.
Confused as I was how it all worked at first, we spent a couple hours trying to work out a work flow, and how we wanted to use it.
Eventually, I was like "Guys, I got it!" And explained how we should do it. Then then said
"That's how Git works"
We decided to use Git, and at the last minute shoved everything onto the school's SVN server they had for the team.
Been using Git ever since. Looking back, not sure why it was so hard, but I am glad to have found Git instead.2 -
Serious question: If a highly intelligent being, better than humans, is about to code something, how would they probably do it?
Will they use the same concepts like control flow, iterations, types, operators, object inheritance, etc?
If they are quantum capable, how can they code with booleans when it can be both true and false at the same time? Will they code truthy and falsy with another dimension like time-space temporality?
Do their code simultaneously modify the hardware or bio-hardware as it iterates over the outcome of the code?
Does input and output even relevant to them?
How do they represent infinites?
Do they have similar github workflows or they telepathically update the source code?
Do they embed their program in their DNA? Then pass to offspring the codes they already created?
Do they code using a language or do they use some frequencies and material science that simultaneously show real world output?
And do they have their version of devRant?16 -
Literally removing the sleep(10);
Nah jokes aside, reworking my entire code from scratch based on what I drew up on a board.
Sometimes visualisation of processes and control flow can really help you write better code.9 -
During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.
SOLUTION
We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.
Any feedback conserning this project please?
8 -
A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.
He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."
I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)
I really wanted to reply ...
"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."
But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..
Frack..people suck.1 -
teach meta language concepts: what is an operator, literal, constant, statment, control flow. the recursive nature of staments. then go into objects/methods vs structs/procedures. then teach some java. then go into reflection concepts. then use reflection for something simple. then teach a bit of perl. then let them build something in python. Anyone who can pass through that will know how to Program in whatever you give him/her.
I wish my teachers talked about the meta programing, instead on focusing on the minutia. -
Fucking Power Apps and Automate/Flow:
You want to make an app?, great!
- Easy UI and editor, you can make a decent app in a day
- Best data integration in MS space bar none, connect to anything under the planet no problem.
- Deployment on mobile and desktop instantly and at scale, you better believe it.
- Wanna take from sharepoint, manipulate the data and throw it at XRM, we gothcu.
- Source control? FUCK YOU FOR ASKING GO DIE IN A FIRE.
- Proper permission system, Yep, based on O365 and azure AD
- Just let me get the source code please?: BURN IN HELL MOTHERFUCKER
- Integrated AI, indeed we have it. And chatbot frameworks on top of it, no problem at all
- ...
As a tool it is aimed at non technical people, not by making it beginner friendly, but by making it developer hostile. And whenever you hit a wierd quirk in the editor you wish you could just go edit the source code (WHICH YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE SNIPPETS OF), but you are never allowed to touch it.
I am so very tempted to make a version control layer on top of it myself, scraping it via scripts and doing the reverse on upload, but it will be janky as fuck.1 -
I quietly refactored an entire NodeJS express in-house framework that was written in Java style (dependency injection, inheritance, inversion of control) and split it into typed, composable, parameterized, testable middlewares in 2 weeks (including some complicated ones like a custom Openid Connect flow)
Now comes the hard part: convincing the Java-devs who wrote it that it is useful2 -
ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.
people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.
ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.7 -
Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194
There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?
Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.
The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.2 -
My best friend has been working to learn python and I guess he hasn't see control flow statements.
The problem is we have a girl name "elif" in Turkish and it's his ex's name (+4 yrs, bad ending)
What should I do :D2 -
Read everything and by looking at the source code by example, changing stuff and seeing what happens, reading tutorials, books, watching videos. Then coming up with an idea I want to do that doesn't seem too difficult but gradually building up knowledge of commands, memory, input and output, variable types and manipulation of said types, learning program flow and control and making stuff one project at a time.
-
Learning C/C++ started to become fun, mainly because I've managed to do seemingly cursed stuff lately.
For example, today, I learned you could totally call a class member function using a type-matching nullptr variable. The 'this' variable is so null that it will crash as soon as the program hits 'this', though, but the control flow does go into the function.
It's not *that* cursed once you learn the behind-the-scene stuff, but that kind of weird s#!+ is funny, even amusing for me, who've mained languages other than C/C++.11 -
Help. We're starting to feel the effects of unnecessary micromanagement.
We're a small startup. The kind with less than 10 devs spread across different domains. We've been fine with a Kanban approach as the velocity/flow of deliverables don't necessarily warrant a Scrum approach yet.
Our boss has been wanting to adopt Scrum-style sprints, even shoved and assumed that were doing these sprints and demanding Scrum-style reports (and meetings!!!) when they are, in reality,
1) unnecessary
2) a waste of time
Absolutely none of the team members want this. But our boss insists on having it. We like our boss, but lately things are getting out of control
What can we do to mitigate and prevent this?3 -
so far, a pretty nice tutorial book about making a parser and interpreter, but when i saw this, my thought was "don't you fucking dare..."
...but he does. flow control via exceptions.
shame.
14 -
mann... either i am dumb or my team is a bunch of excited monkeys.
for last 6 months my senior and this contract dev (both in Android) have been fussing about adding coroutine flows in our codebase: how our codebase "needs" it and how flows will help our codebase become "better"
when i asked them why, they gave me even more shit about hot flows cold flows, state flows, and how ots the latest "solution" from google.
So today, while going through another existential crises in my free time, i decided to understand what these "flows" are.
and from what i understand, it is mainly for cases in which there os actively changing data and we want to get latest updates without any event or trigger, like those streaming datas , chat messages, location etc.
but we are a freaking insurance app! user presses a button and we make an api call! what is the fucking problem here that isn't being solved by good old livedata and coroutines? There isn't any "live" api in app as far as i know and even if there is the code should be modified for 1 such api.
why fuck the whole codebase for a usecase that isn't applicable for 99% of APIs?
also, if a flow is going to auto trigger and call api, how are we supposed to control it? like say there is a offers api(there isn't) which gives us the latest offer products to show user for 5 seconds then refresh. for this i will simply returrn
flow{
while(true){
emit (offer api results)
delay(5000)
}
}
but this is an infinite polling api! how to stop it when say user pressed a cross button or did some other interaction?
it seems useless as fuck.. i can achieve a more controllable polling using the same while loop in different location or some other solution that won't require me adding this wierd api5 -
please i need your advice :)
I need to reform a service that offers legal advice and thus serves around 5000 Microsoft Word legal advice documents for the end user and every year there are 200 more documents created and published and changed manually.
So i had this idea to use a CMS, Git and continuous integration for
- automatic spell checking
- automatic assigning the copy text to translation bureaus, and get translations back.
- version control the texts and translations.
- document generation in multiple formats
- checking the text flow in the document (no overflown text)
- Checking for accessibility for the handy caped
- Deploying it on the Website
Do you think this is feasible? Can something that was made for code also be used to handle copy text documents? In my head this would save so much work but i'm no expert in CI/CD.
Thank you for your advice!8 -
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?1 -
I am starting a testing project at work and we have nothing in place.
Should I use a tool like browserstack and try to hold my selenium tests there or bite the bullet and use something like spec flow to write the selenium tests by hand? The advantage being full control, easy way to integrate with CI and easier to integrate to existing workflows (no need for visual studio and a browser open to work on in parallel).
If I do that I will also need some way to do cross browser testing which I guess will require me to export the tests somehow to a cross browser treating service like browserstack. -
You know as far as I can tell the message seems to be no ones ever going to live again
You know all this tech minimizing the work flow in a civilized dystopian society could be used to gradually starve and reduce the population with a purpose and obsolete a work force so only a breed of moron and their slaves become necessary and by breeding selectively and filling good and decent people with woe take control of the population in general so all that’s left is slave and master both of which mimic decent or ordinary humans but via developmental poisoning are in neither case human3 -
Constructs that would help my team mates, but they don't listen to me:
1) classes in general
2) DAO
3) using dates from the API instead of date.now
4) not using exceptions for flow control
5) Stop using StackExchange verbatim, learn from the answer, not ctrl+c,ctrl+v
6) use datatables and read/write once to the db, not each "row" -
Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.
I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.
It would not receive non manual software updates
It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.
Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol
Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.
The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.
Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol1 -
We had to choose a workshop class for middle school and I chose computing because I was already familiar with all the components, but the last year we learned QuickBasic so that's where I learned programming logic. Later in highschool we had a bit of Visual Basic and HTML. Then learned some C and Java in college.
The truth is that I never learned any language in-depth and I've been winging it with the basics for longer than I should. A good understanding of loops and control flow lets you get away with a lot of things. -
My friends were wondering if I could teach them the basics of coding. What order should I do it in? The basic things I want to teach them are input/output, data types (numbers, strings, arrays, etc.), flow control (loops, if/else), functions, variables, and maybe oop if I'm in the right mood.
Also, would python be a good language to start with? It's definitely the language I know the best.6
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