People who send an email saying "I'm getting an error message".

WHERE DID YOU GET IT?!

WHAT IS THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE?!

OH NO SURE LET ME LOOK IN MY CRYSTAL BALL, I'LL HAVE IT FIGURED OUT FOR YOU IN NO FUCKING TIME.

😡

"go back"
"now double the pixel"
*crystal clear image*
"ahhhh great we've got him"

Movies are sooooo logical

It's also my only finished project so far: an alarm clock
Made for ~2 days, because I couldn't get up on time.
Currently flashes light into your eyes and buzzes with a piezo crystal and has wifi

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

Just landed a new job as a developer for a company called NeuraLegion! They use Crystal on their stack, so guess what language I'll be using! But that's not even the best part. They hired me in part because they are using one of my open source Crystal libraries (a NLP library called Cadmium) and like the way I do things. So I am going to be getting paid to work on my FOSS libraries, whist sitting at home in my undies!

Holy shit I'm excited 😂😁

I’ve been working on a fun little project using Crystal and d-bus to control the lighting for Razer RGB devices. Making progress!

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---
<...>

< I log a JIRA ticket explaining what and how is wrong with the server with suggestions how to fix the problem so the app will not crash any longer (client own the server, has his own sysadmins -- I don't even had permissions to open syslog.. had to hack dmesg on their PROD server to pin-point the issue)
> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket

× app crashes again

> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket
> customer leaves a comment that their sysadmins are looking at it trying to figure out what might be wrong (ignoring what I wrote in ticket's description??? srsly?)

× app crashes again
< I post detail investigation details: snips from logs, screenshots, everything with crystal clear explanations.

> no reaction for weeks
......

well that's fun..

My favorite word to read in client-written requirement documentation: "Etc"

...Do I look like I have a crystal f-ing ball?

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

Apple’s new iPhone lineup has confusing names:

- iPhone extra regular liquid liquid crystal display
- iPhone extra small
- iPhone extra small maximum

Hey I got reminded of a funny story.

A friend of mine and me were in internships in the same company. The company was specialized in territory resources management (managing water for agriculture, money to build industrial zones...). He got the interesting internship (water predictory modeling) and I got... The repairs of a reference sheet manager that never happened to work. It was in C# and ASP.NET and I was in second year of CS. I expected the code to be nice and clear since it was made by a just graduated engineer with +5years of studies.

I was very wrong.

This guy may never have touched a web server in his life, used static variables to keep sessions instead of... well... sessions, did code everything in the pages event handlers (even LinQ stuff et al) and I was told to make it maintainable, efficient and functional in 2 months. There were files with +32k LoC.

After 1week of immense despair, I decided I will refactor all the code. Make nice classes, mapping layer, something close to a MVC... So I lost time and got scoled for not being able to make all the modifications as fast as in a cleanly designed code...

After 4 weeks, everything was refactored and I got to wait for the design sheets to change some crystal report views.

At this moment I began to understand were was the problem in this company.

My friend next door got asked to stop his modeling stuff for an emergency project. He had to make an XML converter for our clients to be able to send decentralized electrics bills, and if it was not completed within a week, they would no longer be able to pay until it is done.

This XML converter was a project scheduled 5 years before that. Nobody wanted to do it.

At the same time, I was waiting for the Com Department to give me the design views.

I never saw the design views. Spent one month implementing a golden ratio calculator with arbitrary precision because they ain't give me anything to do until the design were implemented.

Ended with a poor grade because "the work wasn't finished".

update of after i got fired: after the fuck developers company llc was left with no developers, there was a girl there that i didn't mention earlier because as i said: the story is more complex. she came there with good intentions but after she knew the cruel nature of fuck and shit she became notoriously mad, we're still in contact with her so it's nice to hear from her some of the gags that happen there, one of which my really intelligent ex-boss the wordpress DEVELOPER himself told her to finish one of the projects i was working on, and a friend of mine who is infamous of his coding shenanigans left it in my hands before he left as well a couple of months prior (well he was fed up before us, and when i told him to stay with us he said "dude just listen to the motherfucker's voice, i can't do this anymore", my lovely ex-boss has this equally lovely screechy high pitched voice that caused me tinnitus), it's an asp.net project, uses web forms, and a lot of apis, the database is sql server, standard shit but there's no original creation script and i fucked up the only existing database which was in a local computer he used to like calling a SERVER, now to the point: this girl is not a developer, she was however working as a reporter?? kind of like jaspersoft the human or sap crystal woman and she claims that she's pretty good at it, and she's a genuinely good person who was dragged to hell just because she wanted to be close to her daddy (she was working in a different city with more than double the salary she's given now), but she's rich and her dada convinced her to come. she's currently learning java ee on her own so she'd probably leave in the next two months, in her resume she wrote that she know php, well i know php you know php we all know php (the syntax) kind of like mr. shit who passed the sololearn php CERTIFICATE and couldn't stop telling his boss and his boss a.k.a my ex-boss goes "sweet!". going back to the punchline of this rant: she told us that he came to her and asked her to finish the project with php.

!dev

So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.

But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)

I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.

Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.

Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.

I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.

And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.

Software engineering gets more diverse every year with problems ranging from faking 3d shadows on 2d browsers to accurately mimicking chemical bonds on the electron level.

I guess we primarily will get advanced tools, to make more complex problems easier to tackle. Just compare manual punch card piercing pliers to the JetBrains tool chain.
Also I believe that the roles that developers embody will get even more diverse, people will have way more specific functions in their ecosystem.

A colleague of mine had to debug performance problems in a foreign, proprietary application that is ancient.

To be crystal clear: Only reason that thing exists is because some old geezers fear change.

Asked me for help cause it's an _ancient_ MS SQL server that is luckily running on hardware owned by us.

Finding the credentials was already a funny task.

We had to access the vault (not joking here, we have a physical vault for storing sensitive data and critical backups), grab a folder and find the necessary data cause no one ever dares to touch that thing.

The application is btw for a sort of ERP / inventory system that is used in some ancient shops not yet migrated...

Yeah. Story speaks for itself.

Anyway, after dusting off ourselves, we were able to connect.

Was a bit ... Interesting. Everything's in german. The worst kind of german.

After looking at the first tables, I started giggling.

My colleague knew immediately that this was a sign of danger (insert Simpson meme here), raised his eyebrows and asked "How bad is it....".

Me, still giggling, "lemme take a further look, this is gold".

*long sigh from the colleague*

Well... It ended with me putting my hands in front of my eyes, turning around and saying: "I cannot look at it anymore, it hurts too much...."

To summarize:
- German table names
- When a table exceeded 300 plus columns, they added another table with the same plus suffix "_ddd"… where ddd is an zero filled integer sequence like 001
- To join this mess, they created views... Named "generator" - Sequence Number ... Some had the beginning of table names appended, which doesn't make it less confusing.
- the process list was listing queries running longer than 5 mins.

Which isn't at all surprising when generating carrtesian products of N tables with left join.

I've seen shit.... I've seen a lot of shit.

But that shit scared me.

Is there for the programming language "Crystal" a library called "Meth" ?
I'm affraid to google this. 😳

how often does it happen that you have to prevent terrible architectural decisions from being made, because people who are in charge but obviously have no clue, make really weird suggestions and are really confident that this is a good idea?

PM: so please analyze functionalities X with dev Y, since module Y that dev Y develops shall provide these functionalities.
me: as i said yesterday, module Y will use my module X and shouldn't care about how this is going to be implemented.
PM: yeah, but module Y shall be able to... (lists some functionalities)
me: yes, that's what i'm currently working on in module X. my current state of the API can be used in a way that... (lists different low level functions and how a combination of them can be used to provide these functionalities)
PM: okay, hmm... i just realize that module Y will actually be a user of module X...

well.... yeah?!!
i always thought that was crystal clear?? 🤦‍♀️

Day 5, saga of fighting crystal reports and Oracle drivers: I have finally lost the rest of the hair on the top of my head, and fear my beard may be thinning. My rubber duck seems to be suffering from a personality disorder... things aren't looking good.

Today I fall in love with Crystal Lang. Seriously, this language is perfect!

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

devRant; More addictive than speed, crack and crystal combined!

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

I use a library and it gives me some strange error message. No problemo, just file an issue on GitHub asking the maintainer if I'm plain stupid or the lib actually has a flaw. As it was a question, I have not posted a dump and all the shit.
Maintainer responds with a snarky comment about his crystal ball being broken and I have to submit a log, a dump, debug information and a bunch of other stuff.
Well, what choice do I have, I collect all the requested information, create a wall of text comment, all nicely formatted.
And the issue ends here. Myths say, the maintainer got asked to join Elvis on Mars.

I mean, why do you ask all the shit from me in a unprofessional manner just to stop answering? Just say "I have no clue why it behaves like this" and I know whats playin. But that's just ... sad.

That moment when you make a typo that you didn't see for a long time and than the compiler breaks

I often wonder if our clients seriously think we have an all-knowing crystal ball of wisdom when they send tickets like "Cannot send emails - please check" while they have like 10 servers and email delivery is a complex matter on its own already.

If I didn't care what our clients think, I'd reply with equally informative email of "Maybe, who knows"...

Firebase... the kind of hosting you seem to be friends with, but if you're honest, you would really like to kill it by sticking a flamethrower in its ass, happily pulling the trigger, while singing "Oh happy day" in full vocals.
The people who wrote the whole thing must have smoked crystal meth through a hobo's raped intestine to come up with such a turd fest. WTF.
If it wasn't for my boss, I'd have ran far away to nerver hear of this tripper infested crap again!

Im now working as a fulltime dev for 3 years. I do programming since im 9 and now that I collected some experience, I have to to say, its horrible. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with german internship companys? Letting me do 3 years of FUCKING CRYSTAL REPORTS. IN A DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT CONSISTS OF A TEAM LEAD THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO LEARN SHIT LIKE PROPER OOP AND ASYNC/AWAIT FROM ME. THEY EVEN ASKED ME IF I CAN DROP OF MY HOBBY PROJECTS TO WORK ON SAMPLES THAT THEY CAN LEARN FROM! NO! FUCK! JUST BECAUSE THESE DOUCHBAGS ARE TOO LAZY TO FUCKING LEARN TECHNOLOGY THEY SHOULD BE PASSIONATE ABOUT IN THEIR FREE TIME, IM NOT MAKING IT MY JOB TO FREAKING SHOW THEM THAT HAVING A STATIC CLASS CONTAINING ALL MODELS EVER EXISTED IN THE APP IS A BAD THING! SERIOUSLY, THERES ONLY ONE INSTANCE OF EVERY MODEL WE HAVE! AND THEN THEY BLAME SQL SERVER FOR RACE CONDITIONS WHEN TRYING ASYNC!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!! AND STILL, IF I TELL THEM WHATS WRONG, IM AN IDIOT BECAUSE IM A JUNIOR! Please tell me that i didnt waste 10 years of my life dedicating to such bullshit. Will that change? Is it company specific?

"Did you manage to reproduce this issue in-house?"

Yes, off course we managed to reproduce your fucking random reboot issue that happen to two in thousand customers and might happend just after boot of after several hours or days or not at all when you, as you said yourself, were doing nothing. While at it we also turned lead to gold, water to wine and resurected Elvis (although he is a little bit grumpy and mumbles something about brains).

So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).

The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.

We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.

We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.

In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)

The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)

I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)

Feel free to ask about anything concerning it!

It's 2016, and I'm fighting with a version of Crystal Reports that was developed for VS2005. My employer claims we're on the cutting edge... I WANT A NEW JOB.

Lets get some shit crystal clear:

- Angular is amazing.
- If you're complaining about it, then you're not experienced enough with it and you need to learn more
- Im using Angular for years, i built personal, professional and client projects with Angular as frontend and got paid thousands of USD
- I have never had any problems with angular in terms of performance, slow load time or insufficient documentation
- Angular is perfect for large projects. The structure is extremely robust and Easily lets you scale the project no matter how complex the project is
- You can have a trillion components and still be able to easily understand what each component does and add up to it because of how all the components are modularized and decoupled

Soo there's this new language in town.
It says it looks like ruby but runs like c.

Any one tried crystal yet?
Is a compiled language but with all the funky features.

I'm a .Net developer from Morocco, i'm currently working on an accounting software for this fucking company owned by an American boss. And i'm handling every single aspect of the project including the back-end (C#), Database (Sql Server), Reports (crystal reports, ABAP, VSTO), and design (UI, logos, animation...). For a salary of 300 USD/month, with no insurance, no transportation fees, and no fuck given about my health or my coworkers'. Not mentioning the shitty working hours and condition.
This is my first (job)

The thing that I most hate is when you're approaching a new framework/tool, you follow the official documentation and the first example doesn't work.
I'm trying the official documentation of webpack, I tried the first example and guess! Error! It says that's probably a breaking change. Where the hell should I learn it? I don't have the crystal ball, should I guess how your fucking tool fucking works? Oh my god, it's ok if you introduced breaking changes, but just update all the references, is it so hard?

What I already knew: hard disks made of crystal exist which can store 360TB of data for billions of years, they're just really slow.

What I didn't know: Elon musk owns the first and second disks and one of them was launched into space alongside is Tesla roadster! (He personally has the second)

Maybe using linux in schools.
I don't know, the crystal ball's been acting up.

Company had problematic client projects that each client has a bucket load of change requests. Company doesn't know how to say "No" to them. Company can't afford to pay the subvendors for the changes and the subvendors aren't willing to do them for free.

I went in, reverse engineer the shit out of each application, database, system, documented my own findings, changed according to each client request. This involves editing tables in MSSQL, rerouting PHP files, adding field and validations in C#, passing parameters in VB to Crystal Report, and managed every change request into my own personalize ticket system (that the company does not have).

Saved the company, everyone was grateful. A couple of months later, the company hasn't paid my salary on time, I left like a boss.

They're in shit again and need my help. Haha!

I picture a large, ice cold, crystal pint filled with bubbling ruby red ale straight from the draft... Its majesty overflows as I stare some human shape walk that marvel at my table...
I take a sip. Fuck it, it's not enough and I'm not feeling like manners... I straight up bottom down that bitter odd amount of beer while my hand feels the cold liquid handshake of this heavenly brewed product... It was a shit day at the office, but right now I'm at the top...

Have you ever felt that you are just existing mechanically like a robot?

I went through a dark phase and came out on the other side stronger. Though people helped me but technically I was all alone.

I have had countless people tell me that I inspire them.

I used to get approached by so many every week for mentorship and career advice.

One of my closest college friend said he survived extreme Schizophrenia and depression because of my support.

Hell, I have had people tell me that they are alive today because of me.

I never bragged about my achievements unless asked. People said they feel light and positive after talking to me. They felt I gave them a sense of purpose.

I used to have immense clarity in my life. My life path used to be crystal clear.

Many even said I am the happiest they met.

But with recent narcissist abuse, all my life, emotions, and positive energy drained out of me. Literally squeezed. My biggest regret.

I can no longer feel a soul within me. I cannot feel happiness. I am fucking lost.

I am just existing like a mechanical machine and I hate it. This is taking me longer to heal than the time frame I anticipated.

I feel this will take some more time for me to heal but I am 100% sure I'll fucking bounce back and bounce harder.

I'll dream again...

I'll smile again...

I'll make new friends again...

I'll love again... I'll live again...

Bloody fucking Crystal. Lame fucking excuse for a reporting engine product.
Can’t change data source from API for a report containing List of Values at runtime.
What the actual fuck! A reporting system where I can’t change the data source.
Die in hell you Fucking blood sucking leeches. Die of malaria!

You know how shitty Crystal is when you need this setup to try and get it to work across environments. (ಥ﹏ಥ)

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

Hey everyone!

This is really two things in one:
1). Asking about a good gaming laptop.
2). Follow up on a post I made a while back asking for suggestions for new programming languages to learn

So right now I have a surface pro 3 i7 256gb, it's great for development, but not so great for gaming (Overwatch).
Saw the Razer Blade Stealth and thought it looked pretty nifty. Suggestions?

Also I would like to say a big thank you to all the people who told me about some really cool new languages, like Crystal, Elixir..etc.
Thanks everyone!

Just found a crystal subreport with 33 shared variables. For those who don't know what that is (lucky), they're super global variables that exist everywhere.

Please send help. I'm supposed to refactor this...

Whoever made the Crystal Reports language, screw you and your silent syntax errors. Sincerely, guy stuck maintaining reports.

I finally broke.

I modified a Crystal Reports file to adjust some margins and now the project is crashing when executing some DTS and is my fault...

Hello everybody,

I am 17 years old, I love to code and I cannot decide which new language I should learn.

What do you think of Rust and Crystal? What would you prefer? What is better?

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

Task: blinking light.

Boomers: One lightbulb, one bimetallic strip.

Zoomers: LED (D13), Atmega328P, Atmega328, 5V, 16MHz, 2KB SRAM, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, FT232RL, 19.0mm x 43.18mm, 16 analog pins, 14 digital I/O pins, 6 PWM pins, 2 resettable fuses, 8MHz external crystal, 16MHz external crystal, 12MHz crystal, 0.5mm pitch, 0.1 inch headers, 1.27mm pitch headers, mini-USB, 3.3V regulator, 5V regulator, 16MHz ceramic resonator, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 47uF capacitor, 100uF capacitor, 10uF capacitor, 100nF capacitor, 0.1uF capacitor, 22pF capacitor, 1N4007 diode, 10K resistor, 4.7K resistor, 330 ohm resistor, 10uH inductor, 27 ohm resistor, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, LED (D13), green LED, red LED, yellow LED, 6-pin header, 8-pin header, 28-pin DIP socket, 6-pin FTDI header, ceramic resonator, USB mini-B socket, 16MHz oscillator, M7 diode, LDO voltage regulator, 3.3V regulator, 5V voltage regulator, polyfuse, 22pF capacitors, 100nF capacitors, 10uF capacitors, 47uF capacitors, 100uF capacitors, 1N4007 diode, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 16MHz resonator, 0.1uF capacitor, 330 ohm resistors, 27 ohm resistors, 4.7K resistor, 10K resistor, 10uH inductor, 22pF capacitor, mini-USB connector, 8-pin header, 6-pin header, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, ceramic resonator.

On the one hand, as an avid programmer having a non-programmer partner, we (I) once wanted to mod some Gameboy Pokémon games (Crystal), but the games were written in Assembly and I was definitely not getting myself into that. My partner was rather sad, as this was quite a big project for the both of us, but it was never finished, and it was still complicated to explain to him why Assembly is such a bitch. Nevertheless, we found other projects to have fun with (simplest of them: random movie picker that chooses a movie based on title/genre/etc. from our own movie list file).

On the other hand, explaining and making programming exciting for people who are not into it, so you still seem like an interesting person for new dates (poly relationship), is really hard. But I would also blame my introverted self and not only programming for unsuccessful dating :D

Setting an element in an exact position in Crystal Reports is like coding on a smartphone. It just won't do what I want.

Don't you just love that moment when you see shit,

Flying.
In a bow.
Through the air.

And actually just starting, just starting, to hit the fan.

Three days before your deadline.

And it is crystal clear the project is gonna end up as a mess.
Total disaster.
But the best thing of all: it's not your fault.
So, you are actually celebrating the mess to come a little, and know that you can blame the guy who isn't trusting you as a new guy, and show him, with all his more years experience, he is the one who can't be trusted.

Get told a colleague finished work on a new web service thing on Friday.

So I fire up SOAP UI. Get an error due to problems with a sql statement. Look through code, issues already fixed so I build the project ct add the new dll to the app, another error, this time a column included in a select statement that doesn’t exist in the table being queried.

Colleague is on holiday, there are no comments in the code and there’s no source control.

Boss wants to know if the column needs to be added, or whether colleague added it and then decided not to use it.

I think I have an idea what it is meant to happen, but my only exposure to this project is as a 30 minute intro, and we didn’t look at any of these parts.

And sadly I left my crystal ball at home today fml

PIC C programming on Linux with MPLAB, the editor from the manufacturer
I particularly hated the debugger
I don know of it was just me because I didn't understand it but *screams* SHIT FUCK WHY DON'T YOU READ THE DATA YOU FUCKING CRYSTAL TRICKED INTO THINKING!?

Working on a new project for Crystal

Got a few
Crystal reports - words cannot describe how much I loathe this

Sybase ASE or IQ - both are just a hot mess to setup properly

Not a service now fan either

Esri map processing - basically entirely undocumented, slow, old fucking hate it

Arc GIS online - ridiculous licensing issues, undocumented APIs are given as official answers from the dev team, massive pain in the arse

I need a fucking crystal ball to know whether something is a reference or an object fuck angularjs

2 functions 100% same logic 1 returns a new object 1 returns a reference to the old one

Anyone knows where i can order one my expectations are that it lights up if the function will return a reference and stays daark if it returns a copy

Has anyone heard of the crystal programming language?I just found out about it today and I think I'm in love 😍

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

Whoever wrote this line of code... please take on a different profession.

`else if len(LEFT({ODWR_CLAIMSNAPSHOT.POLICY_TYPE}, 3)) > 0 then`

What's SAP?
Piece of shit if you ask me.
Their Crystal Reports is so user-hostile it makes me want to throw up all over the keyboard.

Nothing better than finally stepping in and turning your life around just to have this one dream that kicks you right where it hurts

Not a sad dream where when you wake up you can be sure that it was indeed just a dream. I mean one of those crystal clear dreams where you behave just like you would in real life, being in exactly that situation that you worry about and then having to watch yourself failing at being a normal human being

Thanks brain. I didn't want to get over it anyways

Make the analog clocks at work run faster. Might be able to do this with changing the timing crystal. Depends upon the clock I guess.

Working with Crystal reports, getting ready to deploy my changes. Guess what? My tiny changes to output has successfully broken 12 other fields, and 1 that is in absolutely no way related! Comes right from the database!

And it's crystal, so there's no debugger or logging. Plus, the report takes an hour to run! Today's gonna be a fun one!

8 hours trying to get the fuking print orientation to work with crystal reports. Had to shift to esc/pos and I dont know how to tell it the size of the page. Someone can help?

I don't think that it is a trend, but I'm pretty excited with the Crystal programming language. Ruby's cool syntax and a compiled language performance, sounds pretty good to me!

So this week should be interesting. I am working on a (potentially) very large project for my current client and need to build a service that somewhat replicates the functionality of heroku (in that it needs to be able to load an app built in one of several languages, and spin it up in a docker container).

Unlike Heroku, however, each application also needs to be able to have a list of public and private (internal only) API routes listed and be able to dynamically route requests to the correct routes on in those containers. (Sorry if this is confusing)

Does this sound challenging and amazing? Absolutely! Do I think I may be in over my head? Yes, yes I do.

Has anyone ever built or worked with something similar?

Trying to find affordable new laptop with student's budget is like searching for a diamond crystal in dog's shit. It stinks awful lot.

What do you think about the Crystal language?
It looks kinda cool, but I'm somewhat worried about the lack of Multithreading and the beta status so far.

i'm the only one thinking naming variable can and could be something a little bit subjective? or are everybody else can find the perfect name that make it crystal clear for any person reading it?

Holy shit my dream last night was the best I had in years. I was basically in this open world (just real life) kinda thing that felt a lot like DayZ with the atmosphere (just no zombies). We we're a lot of friends just running about. But it was also kinda an exploration dream where I went into this bunker on the airfield (I guess) and then it was more like an action horror game where I had to shoot the most disgusting creatures. Except one monster was a cute girl (yeah I don't know). The dream then shifted to cuddling and making out with this super cute girl in bed

Oh man. This dream had it all and it was crystal clear the whole time, it was just amazing

Sorry, not sorry for reading this lol

That moment you remember that yesterday you said "that's a tomorrow me problem" and you're that tomorrow you.

Rubber ducking your ass in a way, I figure things out as I rant and have to explain my reasoning or lack thereof every other sentence.

So lettuce harvest some more: I did not finish the linker as I initially planned, because I found a dumber way to solve the problem. I'm storing programs as bytecode chunks broken up into segment trees, and this is how we get namespaces, as each segment and value is labeled -- you can very well think of it as a file structure.

Each file proper, that is, every path you pass to the compiler, has it's own segment tree that results from breaking down the code within. We call this a clan, because it's a family of data, structures and procedures. It's a bit stupid not to call it "class", but that would imply each file can have only one class, which is generally good style but still technically not the case, hence the deliberate use of another word.

Anyway, because every clan is already represented as a tree, we can easily have two or more coexist by just parenting them as-is to a common root, enabling the fetching of symbols from one clan to another. We then perform a cannonical walk of the unified tree, push instructions to an assembly queue, and flatten the segmented memory into a single pool onto which we write the assembler's output.

I didn't think this would work, but it does. So how?

The assembly queue uses a highly sophisticated crackhead abstraction of the CVYC clan, or said plainly, clairvoyant code of the "fucked if I thought this would be simple" family. Fundamentally, every element in the queue is -- recursively -- either a fixed value or a function pointer plus arguments. So every instruction takes the form (ins (arg[0],arg[N])) where the instruction and the arguments may themselves be either fixed or indirect fetches that must be solved but in the ~ F U T U R E ~

Thusly, the assembler must be made aware of the fact that it's wearing sunglasses indoors and high on cocaine, so that these pointers -- and the accompanying arguments -- can be solved. However, your hemorroids are great, and sitting may be painful for long, hard times to come, because to even try and do this kind of John Connor solving pinky promises that loop on themselves is slowly reducing my sanity.

But minor time travel paradoxes aside, this allows for all existing symbols to be fetched at the time of assembly no matter where exactly in memory they reside; even if the namespace is mutated, and so the symbol duplicated, we can still modify the original symbol at the time of duplication to re-route fetchers to it's new location. And so the madness begins.

Effectively, our code can see the future, and it is not pleased with your test results. But enough about you being a disappointment to an equally misconstructed institution -- we are vermin of science, now stand still while I smack you with this Bible.

But seriously now, what I'm trying to say is that linking is not required as a separate step as a result of all this unintelligible fuckery; all the information required to access a file is the segment tree itself, so linking is appending trees to a new root, and a tree written to disk is essentially a linkable object file.

Mission accomplished... ? Perhaps.

This very much closes the chapter on *virtual* programs, that is, anything running on the VM. We're still lacking translation to native code, and that's an entirely different topic. Luckily, the language is pretty fucking close to assembler, so the translation may actually not be all that complicated.

But that is a story for another day, kids.
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whats your code sprint soundtrack? -- for me its alot of propeller heads, Crystal METHod, & Dual Core

I can confirm that Crystal lang v1.0.0 is not stable really. I seem to have hit a block. For example, I get error messages like this frequently:

`Error: can't use Hash(K, V) as generic type argument yet, use a more specific type`.

I love the "yet" in this message; it gives you some hope!

grrgerefaeornvadfvnafvalfbv!!!!!!! *smashes keyboard*

Crystal reports, when given a null value into a display string, will just ignore everything and output a blank.

When using the new iMac 🖥, how come the images for apps are crystal clear (apart from steam apps), but as soon as it comes to playing a video the Mac just decides to lower the image quality dramatically?

I just created a new_file.rb in a crystal project and didn't notice until the compiler complained. I probably offended the compiler.

Portrait of Me, Writting Documentation -- a short french film:

The processes applied to any section of memory utilized for a given purpose should be strictly limited to those declared by the associated type that encapsulates the purpose in question until release or mutation.

That is to say, improperly encoding the intended usage of such a block by utilizing an identical type or alias thereof for a multitude of incompatible situations, giving place to guesswork to arise, constitutes the prostitution of an abstraction.

Such heinous acts of symbolical pimping have received strong condemnation from multiple digital rights organizations, as well as our own, prestigious office. Let it be made Crystal, Alizé and Hennessy clear, that we will not stand for this kind of degenerate practice, and that any heretical sects and cabals built around worship of the strange creatures that arise every eleventh night from the depths of the Black Mausoleum will be prosecuted with the full force of the law.

As a young, corageous man once said at the peak of his career: "it is only through the self-inflicted, hyperbolic discharge of smouldered, comminute perennial anadenanthera colubrina spermatic fluid that the cannonical transfiguration of our collective rectosigmoid junction can be brought to fruition". He was immediately violated with might and ire far beyond our wildest, most profligately depraved fantasies, yet his message lives on.

I leave you now to be ritually and figuratively blown by a posssessed mortician that is to become concubine to our dark master; the long journey to the old graveyard will be perilous, and my destination most assuredly fatal, as I depart to give my firstborn to our Lord Berzchjanzad -- a blood sacrifice meant to appease him from peeling off my skin and refashioning it into a bloodied scarf to be worn around his thumping, grandemonic cock.

And in this moment, as I stare blankly at this teleprompter, the president wishes to reassure you of his sacred vows of stalwart and promethean gayhood, and may __these__ nuts bounce on chins forevermore. Here's to *not* bleeding to death in retribution for this unending litany of sins...

Yet all predictions come to pass.

««««««««««« finẽ »»»»»»»»»»»

New year resolution was to be a better person (or at least nicer) but here it goes.

Monday rant: State your fucking requirements when requesting something as "This is not what I was expecting" is not acceptable.

I do code for living I don't read mind nor have a crystal ball on my desk telling me "...what you meant..."

Does anyone here prefer dynamic languages for large scale projects?
If so, have you looked into Crystal? Why would you prefer Ruby over Crystal? (Nearly or exactly identical code but one is supported by static typing)