📍Developers
|
|
| _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
|
📍 Getting work done |
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
|
|
|
📍Change and customise the latest Linux distro

During a health and safety course today I was asked to talk about the workspace ergonomics. Part of that course is to make sure everyone knows how to customise their seat, screen, keyboard, etc., so I told everyone to unfold those little feet on the bottom of their keyboards and everyone did... Everyone but a cheeky little customer service girl who was more interested in taking selfies of her skirt coincidentally matching the carpet. I cleared my throat and said again:

- "Please, unfold your keyboard's feet."

Nothing. Coughed. Nothing. Finally, quite annoyed, I repeated myself for the 3rd time:

- "Unfold the feet, please!"

She jumped. Eyes wide. Noticed everyone staring. And very very slowly, with a look of complete puzzlement, she spread her legs.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Some feature suggestions:
- Customise order of tabs in new UI
- Highlighting of a rant's OP when browsing comments
- Update screenshots on Google Play & App Store

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

I had to use XSS (cross site scripting) and tag injection to change one tiny CSS property on a bug tracker site where I have no actual file access and can only add custom footer text. Why not just give me file access, or at least some way to customise the CSS, you stupid thing!

Been using Linux for about a year, now starting to customise it. Since it's full of Gnome garbage, I'll test out everything and then do a fresh install. Deadline is September 3rd, if it does not work fast and reliably till then I'll have to get Gnome because I need it for school.

Let the race begin.

Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.

The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.

I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.

Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?

However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.

Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.

Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.

Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.

How do you customise your arch installation ?

Desktop environment and stuff ..
Give me the whole list

Got another one of my boring questions for us all to hopefully discuss a little.

With all the talk about the Librem 5 starting to ramp up more and with my little delve into UBports, was curious as to what other devs would be interested in/want/need from a mobile Linux operating system.

For me it's simple but mostly creature comforts.

1. Consistency and convergence, give me the ability to run a full desktop environment along side the mobile DE but make it consistent between the two (Looking at you Microsoft with your continuum)

2. Doesn't loose the customisability of Linux, let me install any Linux application I want and customise the theme and icons (Something I have a gripe with UBports)

3. Have accompanying operating system with an echo system, so have a wearable OS, a desktop OS and mobile OS, having that tie between the 3 is amazing as a heavy android and chromeOS user.

Would love to bring some of these things to reality but don't have any knowledge of how to do it, personally would love to see elementary OS have a crack at this (Wont happen but got to deam!)

Need help
I run a website which runs on PHP(so does devRant) and we want to implement web push notification, now i'm unable to understand how this will work?
1) notification is supposed to be sent from backend? how to know where to send
2) notification is supposed to be sent from javascript? how would i customise it, secondly how to send when user is not on our website
3) is there any tutorials which shows the working example rather than just showing javascript part?
thank you

Is there a Linux distribution without a lot of problems with Nvidia drivers? I'm currently using elementary os, because I like the look of it, but I'm getting a lot of graphical glitches and black screens all the time and I was wondering if changing to another distro would help. Is elementary is known for graphical glitches, or is it just the Nvidia drivers? I've also turned my display manager into a mess while trying to customise my login screen, so it might be a good time to change to another distribution. Any recommendations? And one more thing, just out of curiosity, can you install multiple distributions and use the same home directory if home is mounted on a separate partition?

git add --all && git commit -m "Alright, here's a story for you. I set out to create a navigation mechanism on here, so we could have back buttons and tabs. I also wanted the ability to customise the UI elements. In order to do that, I combined two dependencies. Each one of them provides us with some of the functionalities we need and there's quite a bit of overlap between them. Moreover, each dependency creates the UI elements differently. So customising the UI is becoming a nightmare already, since it's getting harder to tell which one of them is affecting a UI element's appearance. In spite of all that, we have an app that navigates and has tabs."

Really hate working on front end sites where the designer has no idea how to use Twitter Bootstrap.

Instead of using SASS to customise the framework they have included the entire library and their owned CSS file titled "custom.css".

"custom.css" has 768 lines on plain css (not SASS) that simply overrides Twitter Bootstrap CSS.

Seriously :(

Data Scientist: Recommendation Engine
Sr. Data Scientist: Machine Learning system to recommend personalized content to users.
Principal Research Scientist: AI to realise users' need for content and customise the user feed using content populated for maximum content usage that correlates with their likes/needs/wants.
God: ...

Why can't Eclipse save non-project-specific customisations somewhere centrally? Why do I have to customise my editor fonts, colours and hotkeys again every time I open up a new work space? Why would they think I could want different editor fonts, colours and hotkeys on every different project I work on?
I so hate Eclipse!
I so hate IDEs!

Should I install Elememtary OS (Loki) ?
Anyone that uses eOS, why do you use it? Any problems with it? Gimme advice.

I tried it on Virtualbox but apparently it doesn't like that very much. Files didn't have a search function, bit hard to customise.
I'm willing to try, everyone seems to be using it, I assume it shouldn't be that bad.

Exhausted af. Since Sunday been trying to get a decade old social grants payment delphi app that ran on win xp to work; and this is a couple of exes on different client/server machines communicating with cash dispensers, fingerprint readers, receipt printers as well as webcam. Apparently someone is searching archives for the source code which I will have to eventually customise to whatever the fuck "management" wants cause they want to "revive" the system. Ohh and by the way I'm not a delphi dev so now I'll have to learn

!rant
Finally got around to trying out zsh. Any tips and tweaks people find too useful to live without?

!rant I happen to get some notifications from devRant lately and thought that it would be quite nice to be able to customise the notification LED colour - any plans on implementing this? This would help me to easily distinguish between devRant and other notifications.

Building gunpla.

Helped me postponing my burnout by doing 1 page a day everyday at lunch break (or 2 steps, depending on the model)

Also helped a lot with realising its fine to break and customise stuff, that most hardware is just marketing & that the right tool, while being cheap, can save you a huge headache and lead to a better result.