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Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
Worst experience with higher ups:
The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.
That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.
I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.
Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.
So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.3 -
Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.
After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.
Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).
Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.
I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.
The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.
I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.
I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.
The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).
Hey all! I’m new on devRant!12 -
a friend just asked for good games that are ftp
i said why does the way you download a game matter. 🤦♂️7 -
Dear ESLint,
- you convinced me to put a space between function() and {
- you convinced me to use single quotes for strings in place of double quotes
- you convinced me to put a space between inline operators
- you had me when you said that trailing spaces shouldn't compare in my code
- you said to put semicolons at the end of each instruction, and I thought it wasn't a so bad idea
BUT NO FUCK OFF NO NEVER I WON'T NEVER PUT A FUCKING TRAILING COMMA IN THE END OF JAVASCRIPT OBJECT IT'S MEANINGLESS UGLY A WASTE OF A FUCKING BYTE.
WHY THE FUCK I SHOULD TYPE var obj = {a: 'some text',} INSTEAD OF var obj = {a: 'some text'} WHY WHAT'S THE MEANING OF THAT FUCKING COMMA9 -
Pull-to-refresh is useless.
If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.
I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.
Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.
It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.
Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.
To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.
Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.
To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.
A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.
Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.
If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.
An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.
If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:
html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }
Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.
Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.
12 -
So I thought I knew source tree, apparently I do not... Lost a week's worth of work, went to history, saw someone removed it with a commit, and now I'm getting blamed for my own work 'disappearing'. The reason I am being told I am to blame is how I control my branches... So how I do it is that I keep a local copy of the master branch, I keep it updated and monitor it for changes regularly (meaning fetch and pull cause double tap..) before I do a merge, I check for any new code on master again, then using the local copy of master, which I just updated, I pull the master changes into my branch, deal with any conflicts, build and done. Then I request my changes into master once I am happy everything is good.
My question is, clearly there is something wrong with the way I do things, so please source tree users, what is the most fool proof way to pull latest from master so that I don't loose code? 😔11 -
Hi guys what is the meaning of double back slash in my Git folder? It is not removed when I do a "git clean -fd". This is the first time I encountered something like this.
$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified: some/folder/hello.php
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
"\\"
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")8
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