Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

PEOPLE. DO NOT LIE ON YOUR RESUME. IT. IS. NOT. WORTH. IT. Ok, backstory.

We had a guy apply for this position at work. It really needed to be filled but also required someone with just the right certifications, so hiring the first schmuck to come along Was not an option.

We search high and low and as time passes without an acceptable applicant we become more desperate and open to negotiation. Basically, you name your price, we’ll agree to it at this point.

So finally a guy comes in, got everything we need but one minor certification. No problem. He can get that on the job, he doesn’t need it to start. He’s hired.

So he quotes us a salary 10% above our top range of what we’d usually pay a guy for this position, we don’t care. He gets it. Plus a housing allowance.

So we’re getting him registered with a place to handle his certification process and they call his four year institution to verify his transcript. We work with hazardous materials and a four year degree in a relevant field is required. It’s standard for the certification training institution to check. Especially when it’s a prestigious big name place like this guy had. And here I used to think that was paranoid of them.

They call and tell us the school says they have no record of him. We do some digging. He was never registered there. I’m like “that’s not possible, his professor is a listed reference. We call that reference.

He worked on a project with this man, he never taught him. Is very fascinated to learn this man has been presenting himself as though he attended the university. Asks to be delisted as a reference.

So long story short it comes out this guy did have a degree in this field, just from a less prestigious university.

The insane thing is, he would’ve still gotten the same job and salary package if he’d been honest about his university!

It is a loss for all involved. He doesn’t have a job. We don’t have anyone working in this position. It’s really unfortunate. Don’t lie on your resume people. Your employer will find out and the risks are not worth the benefits.

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

Disclaimer: just fascinated by this one in 9gag

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

I got fucking scammed.
Too bad that I just realized it.
As most of you know, I am in Cappadocia atm. We had a balloon flight. Yada yada yada.
Then I took a green tour that was provided from an travel agency that was a Partner of the hotel I am in.
[Skip]
The guide brought us to a stone seller. At the jewellry store, we were told that they have a special kind of gem. It gets mined in Mugla(Turkey).
Thus we thought that the stones they sell are mined natural gems called Zultanit.
Oh boy were we fucking wrong.
The zultanit gems are able to change their color depending on the light it receives. We were all fascinated at the demonstration. They told us that it is the second Turkish gem. First comes Turquoise.
I bough a zultanit bracelet for myself. And a zultanit ring for my mum.
It took me about 635 Lira which is about 95 Euro.

I was like damn. They are so damn valuable. It maked sense to me, because it was changing its colors at differentt areas.

Now guess what...
I went onto the internet and checked reviews about that shop. They were mostly saying that these are not real, but lab created gems. I was deeply shocked.
I checked the "certificate" that I got from them. It matched. My gems are lab created and not mined as they told to us tourists ffs.

I am crying internally.
How could I be that dumb to believe that?

Guys, never buy anything they tell you. Check everything to its detail.

The "zultanite" is a real gem. They even have their own trademark, but we were sold a "zultanit (lbrt)".
They did not show the certificate before buying it.

My biggest insecurity?

That I'm fascinated by a lot of domains and rather than mastering one I'm just intermediate in all of them, making me a jack of all trades but a master of none.

The time I learned loops and I was fascinated by the fact that I could do 100 operations in a few lines. I was hooked.

We're currently designing the ALU of a CPU at the university. After that we will design the registers and combine them all together.

It is like the awakening of a child inside of me. I have tried to understand how computers work in its very details.

That was too complex to me, but I believed that I can and will understand it when I start from somewhere in that field. That lead me to learn HTML and CSS when I was 6 to 8 (idk it has been too many years).

I'm really indescribably fascinated, motivated and happy.

I'm fascinated by the programs in use by stores. I was buying a piece of furniture yesterday and noticed that the employee typed my order using the console. Literally everything - the model, the color, the shipping address...

Ever since i was a little boy, i was fascinated by the stars in the sky and what made them shine. I used to wonder how our universe came in to being. What made it what it is today. What will happen to it long after we re gone. Will it die? Will it live forever? How big is it? Why is it big if it s big and why is it small if it s small. "God did it" was never a satisfying answer for me. God does not play dice as Albert Einstein said. So many questions went through my 10 12 year old mind. Until someone recommended to me the book, "A brief history of time". The book answered a lot of my questions and gave birth to more. Computer science is like my crush. I love it as a friend. But Astrophysics, its the true love of my life. It not only quenches my thirst, but it satisfies my curiosity, while making me more curious. Its an endless cycle. It teaches us that we came from the stars, we go back in the dirt, and only to be returned to the stars again.
Stephen Hawking, his work, his books, taught me so much. Inspired me. Made me more curious. And today the world has truly lost, one of its greatest people.
You will be missed Sir Hawking. RIP.

Swear to god, I'm worse than a cat.. my fascination & curiosity will get me killed someday.. o.O

12:19 - Magnitude 6,4 earthquake 3 km from Petrinja, Croatia..

Felt it in Ljubljana..and my stupid ass was fascinated.. :/

Yup, you read it right, not scared or whatever the hell should people feel when earthquake happens..just fascinated..and curios...and in full analysis mode..

Oh tremors?! Yup, something's definitely shaking.. Eartquake? Yup, earthquake! Woow, huge earthquake.. Where is epicenter?! Also long one.. nice, never felt it like this before.. hm.. x, should we go out? How?! I know an elevator is a no go, stairs also do not look promising..better stay in I guess.. hm..still going...feels weird.. Ok, look for shelter I guess.. wow..that's a long one.. ok, doorways should be safe-ish?! Where's x? He went silent..go check up on x.. x is fine, he's not stupid like me, and unlike me also has preservation instinct to not stand under the doorway that has glass components in it.. DumbAss.. Shaking stops... Well that was weird..also I didn't have time to analyze everything..or record it! Stoopid! How did I not think of this before?! Recording would be awesome!! shame..

I know panic doesn't help anyone, but FFS, sometimes I do wish my head would panic at least for a second instead of trying to analyze everything..

I mean, WTF is wrong with me?! Most people would be scared, I just estimated that it's not that dangerous for us and no use/not smart to try to go out of the building so I just took shelter (not a good one, I know now for next time?! o.O what next time?!idiot!!) and started observing.. DumbAss.. :/

When I was 11 or 12 and I found a magazine for kids that for some reason had an HTML tutorial to build a personal site with Microsoft Frontpage. I think it was 2006 back then and for a few weeks I learnt a lot about HTML, managed to create my site and upload it to a free host. I was fascinated. That was my first close up, at least, to something related to programming. From that day, I knew I was going to work with computers. Now I'm a Java dev but I'm still seeking the language for me. Maybe Javascript.

Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.

We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.

First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.

First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?

Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)

The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..

Most of us can and have gotten freelance work before, but I've only met a couple of alleged full time freelancers, and the idea has always fascinated me. For those of you who actually are able to pull it off, what's a typical day like, and how do you maintain a steady stream of clients?

Joining devRant.
Learning Kotlin.
Learning to dev, actually.
Being fascinated by software development.

------------Weeklyrant-------------------------------------
So I bought a smart watch to go with my Samsung Galaxy back when I was 12, and upon inspecting the watchface maker app I came across lua scripting files. This amazed me. Animations, complex math, hexadecimal color system, variables, sensors...
I spent about four months
learning/experimenting with lua until I discovered arduino and C++.

I am now 14 and have been fascinated with robotics and learned java and dos since.

As a freshman at a college, I am fascinated by the sheer lack of knowledge of Engineering Students in their fourth year. I had always thought I'd find more interesting people here. I'm disappointed.

Not programming, but when I started to make my first website in pure HTML by the age of 8. I was so fascinated that I can't tell :D

Hey guys it's not a rant, but i feel this place might help...
I am a 20 yr old, second year guy ...have got some experience in core Java and after that, i have been doing android for 8months... Yeah , i coded some basic apps got my hands dirty on firebase, sql libraries and some connectivity...
Even got landed in an internship.

Today i feel myself to be an intermediate android dev , nd i know their are many things that can be learnt in android that i don't know..
But what after that?development as a carrier interests me, but i fear for a job security ... I could learn more of Android,maybe learn ios after that but their are always articles coming out that react is future, webapps will replace android and stuff like that...
I Have also heard stuff like companies today want to squeeze more out of their techs, so they want less and complete developers having experience in both web and mobile app designing and other stuff like that
Are you freakin kidding me? Android and ios alone are like drinking Pacific and indian ocean and to add web developing, its like drinking out every drop of ocean in the world.
I guess their are guys which exist with knowledge of all three, maybe I can cover them all too(someday) but that would take my whole clg life of 4 years..(I guess)
And no ,I don't have problems with that too.. I actually like developing but again i hear big words like cloud computing, AR,VR AI, data sciences, automation, graphics designing, game dev, and many more...

Basically i hear too much and i fear too much 😅 and i don't think closing my ears would be a good choice...
So, which ocean of carrier should i aim to go for?nd are my fears real? Do companies really prefer some web guy designing Amazon like apps over android-only guys like me?is automation nd templates really gonna take all we, developers jobs?should i look into ai/data sciences?

Well , i am a simple guy, who got his first pc at 17 so naturally, i am fascinated even by the working of a calculator app and anything relates to tech so am open to pursue my interests in any fields

Half Life, Portal and Halo as well as a hate over windows vista.

I don't shit on things I can't comprehend. So when I bought my laptop with vista and hated how shitty it was I decided to find out the culprits. Turned out they were software engineers, but I was not about to shit on engineers without knowing what they go through. Down the rabbit hole.

Portal and Half life are what inspired to focus on Comp Sci afterwards and Glados and Cortana fascinated me. The fact that good money follows in the field played a big part as well.

Also, and more importantly, mom wanted me to be a programmer since she wanted to be one, she always thought this was the future. She won't read this, but I always thank her for pointing me on this path, she is my biggest fan.

Finally getting off my proverbial ass and doing something about the lack of games I like. Going to focus on making an engine for the kind of games I want to play.

No, I am not starting from scratch. Going to base my engine on Godot and use it for my own titles. I am not insane. Making it from scratch is too much work these days. But the indies are shifting from Unity to other engines right now. So a lot of wanted attention will be placed on better alternatives. This means more content and plugin choices will be available to Godot devs.

I kept making excuses as to how hard it will be or it will take forever. It only ended up taking me further away from what I wanted. I have my wishlist of features and I will focus on modularizing them so they can be used as needed. If it makes sense I will make these modules available to the community at Godot. This will help get feedback on what can be improved and generalized further. It will also reduce development costs in the long run. I want to take the approach that No Man's Sky has taken for content and generate as much as I can. I am fascinated by generating objects using algorithms. This seems to be a trend in games.

The struggle I have with games: I want to build things like structures in game (aka Minecraft), I want to build characters in game (aka RPGs), I also want to deform terrain (aka organic voxels), and I want a mixed genre (guns and dragons). Nothing like this exists in a form I want to pay for. I also want to be able to mod the game and for other people to be able to mod the game. That really narrows the list of games down to nothing. Sure there are few games that hit these bullet points, but not all in the same game.

I am finding I struggle to be engaged intellectually at work. I do what I have to for a paycheck. I think having a side project will help with this. One that is radically different than what I do at work is going to be helpful. I need to be realistic about expectations. I probably shouldn't expect any real progress for at least 2 to 3 years and probably more likely 5 years. I have some experience with the tool chains from other engines I have worked with. I also want something that I own and is mine. Even if it sucks.

(in 2008)
my boss in my first job. in general every time when he randomly burst into office. one specific time when he burst i to office and INSISTED that we've got to go to a parking lot to see something.

that something was a remote-controlled helicopter he just bought. (this was before the age of drones).

oh, and he was a chain smoker, always had a cigarette behind his ear (wat), and was dragging me out to have a smoke (i was the only other programmer smoker, but not as heavy as him) every 10-15 minutes under the implied pretense of needing to discuss something about the code, and frowned heavily when i refused (because i was actually in the middle of actual work), because he took it as me refusing to have a work meeting with him.

no, we almost never talked about anything work-related, while on that smoke "work meeting".

also, my boss' boss in my first job, when she entered the office asking "we need a clickable map of our country where clicking each region brings you to a search page with filter set to results from that region. how would we do that?"

i answered "html imagemap linking to the right search url for each region, or embedded flash doing the same, if you want the region buttons to be animated", and turned back to my work.

upon which she proceeded to talk about it with the second programmer, both pretending they're solving some aspects that my answer didn't already solve, INSISTING that i stop doing "whatever nonsense you're doing" and pretend that i'm paying attention as if anything they said was in any way relevant or important. i kept returning to my work because i was solving an annoying bug and their talk was empty and useless.

this second incident was then cited as one of the reasons i was let go, because "he ignores important conversations with his superiors about upcoming tasks"

in general, my first job was a shitshow where nobody had any time or energy to do actual work because they all expended all of it to PRETEND for their superiors that they're working, since the superiors had no clue how it looks when we actually do our actual jobs.

(one month after i was let go (because, in my boss' words, yes, the one with the helicopter, "the IT productivity is very low and I have to hold someone responsible") , the second programmer was let go as well, and one month after that, our boss (head of IT) was let go too. to this day I keep being fascinated how did the company manage to survive long enough for me to even be there, let alone how it STILL manages to survive. i guess being part of a nation-wide conglomerate is very effective in covering your company's losses and uselessness)

>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.

Automation always fascinated me. Not only it looks and behaves like a life form, it also can perform billions of calculations without making a single mistake while I can’t even multiply double-digit numbers with my double-digit IQ.

If you pick the right components, you can make an immortal, perfect machine that can do its job for centuries, even millennia without a single mistake. There is nothing else on earth that can do this.

There is a robot surgeon and its hands never shake. It’s just flawless. If it fucks up, there is only you to blame, the flawed, pathetic operator.

And now it’s time to remember that it was just a 40s technology all along. And now it’s time to remember that now there is machine learning. A whole new perspective isn’t it. All the mistakes that machines make are sitting in front of the monitors.

No wonder I decided to be an engineer.

I work as an intern in a big company. There is a person who joined the company recently with about 6 years of experience in other big companies. He can't do simple things like adjusting his computers resolution and raised a request for a new monitor. He used to wonder why his request was denied 😐 later when I got to know this had happened, I went and fixed the resolution, he was so fascinated.. Hmm...

I always wanted to be an airforce pilot since I was a kid. Then snes came, spent a great deal of hours playing so many games. I got curious on how they were created and although I did it, I always wondered why people blow on cartridges if the game won't start. Fast forward to CS, Diablo 3, Red alert. I was fascinated whenever I type something on the console and something happened, that got me excited. Add that I was using wordstar and programming HTML/CSS in school when I was just 10-11. When I turned 12, I was programming using Borland C++. It just snowballed from there, curiosity and a series of my programs working made me focus a lot of my time talking to computers (especially when I built robots using lego mindstorms). While my classmates were having a hard tim deciding what course to take in college, I was already certain since I was just a sophomore in high school. I will write and talk to computers until I wear thick glasses.

So there it is, my dev story. Apologies for a lengthy post. 😀

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

Well it was that moment when I realized how all that shit fits together. So it was that sunny day during summer holiday. Me and I was learning some c++ and I'm like "why the fuck am I doing this. I should be playing with friends". But I was too lazy for shit and you know :)

So it was the second empty can of coffee that day and I was making me a new one while there appeared this little spark in my brain. And I'm like "wait.... I think I just understood how the world is working".

I was so fascinated btw that I spent the whole holidays doing c/++

I propose a new word — “walm”. If you’re fascinated with liminality, and you feel calm in a huge liminal space like Walmart, you feel walm.

!dev && random == true

Venus (top), Jupiter (bottom). There's a star (Antares) there to make it triangle but the star is dim to get caught by my crappy phone camera.

I've always fascinated by the night sky. Nevermind the mission to travel to Mars, the only matters now is how beautiful the night sky is but a lot of us don't get access to it because of light pollution. It's kinda sad that I need to go outside of the cities to see more of what the sky has to offer. I really wish everyone can see and appreciate it once in a while.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Some people have interesting, cool or exciting lives and I know u are fascinated by them... U may even fall in love . but do remember that u r an insignificant troll who is good at doing one complicated job and whose significance cannot be comprehended, appreciated or understood by the said fascinating people. So go back to your cave do the shit u usually do coz u have a deadline to meet.
-the voice inside my head

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

I was 11, I picked up a Java book out of interest. I was fascinated from minute one. I got interned at a tech company 3 years later.

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

I actually only started programming a little less than two years ago. I entered my freshman year of college as a mathematics major, but as time went on I ended up enjoying coding in C++ much more than trying to work out partial equations.

I have since become fascinated with many aspects of computer science, mainly web development and systems programming (I discovered Linux and the command line only a year ago and I'm practically in love). I've since been working for a couple fairly new startups with duties from developing a mobile native app in AngularJS/Ionic to migrating content to new servers and developing custom themes on WordPress. I have deep, deep aspirations of eventually being employed by Google as a Senior Software Dev (although I'd definitely prefer working for a company that would allow 100% remote work 😁). I've even finally began developing my own projects, ranging from a URL shortening service to a basic online encyclopedia.

I wanna spend the rest of my life doing this shit. Hell, I hope I die at my computer.

My father had a PC with Win3.11 where young me was allowed to play solitaire and an educational programs for kids, later on, followed Win98. I was fascinated with this big grey boxes which could do so many things, especially connect you to the Internet where you could find knowledge about EVERYTHING. (Someone remember the "Blinde Kuh" search engine?)

I remember my father connecting the modem with a long cable all the way through several rooms to the TAE-outlet and the weird sounds the device made.

I often heard "Get away from the PC or your eyes will become rectangular!" when I was sitting there for hours over hours reading and playing.

When I was ten, I got my first own computer, a trusty 486er (386 with logical coprocessor! 8MB RAM if I remember correctly. Weeee! :D) which was my uncle's old PC with Win95.
I started writing on the PC and got into several online communities ... it went downhill from there. :D

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

We're rebuilding out company's platform from the bottom up, and throughout this process I've learned a lot. However, the stuff I've done lately has fascinated me the most. We're implementing OpenOffice for converting files to PDF. Since I started with this task I've had to implement secure running of OpenOffice by sandboxing and queues, but by far the coolest thing was what I did today. I was trying to implement IPC, and damn was it fun. I actually ended up writing a full parser for raw byte streams, since we had to include some special information. It was fun 😁

My most humbling experience was finding the source code online to the original Pokemon games. It was right after I had finished my first text based Linux console game and I was looking up other programs source codes just for shits and giggles. Most of them were simple and I learned a few simple tricks but the red and blue Pokemon were the first codes I saw that fascinated me. The addressing, the memory allocation, even the simple audio processing was simply genius. So many unique innovations and techniques. If I achieve 1/5th of the skill I found in those files, I can die a happy programmer!

I still remember the moment when I found out that there's something other than Internet Explorer ("The Internet program" back then for me), named Firefox (v2.7).

It was simple stuff like tabs that fascinated me, it's an experience similar to learning a second language and opening up your mind and understand the abstract idea of everything.

Just set up my own IoT device for free thanks to the guys at Losant.

I met them at codestock a couple years ago. They were running a workshop with some Adafruit boards and at the time I had never seen anything like Arduinos before. I was fascinated. So I walked up and asked about it. They said they sold the chips just to demo their IoT stuff. I said I'd buy one. I then waited like 40 minutes for them to get their card reader working. They gave up and handed it to me, gratis. That started my dive into electronics from programming.

Few years later, I needed a remote temperature sensor to make sure a certain unattended appliance never got below freezing. I suddenly remembered that kit (now buried under my heaping stash of electronics), followed the tutorials, and had the exact thing I needed up and running in like a few hours, with all the bells and whistles I could want. And for free.

The icing on the cake here? I went on their website to look at a kit to replace it. I found one with even more goodies in it, and the entire kit cost less than the cost to go to adafruit and buy just the board alone.

Thanks Losant for being awesome. If you wanna do IoT anything, look em up.

fascinated by docker and virtualisation.
anything fun to try out? :)

Curious what you guys think about the creator of Node.js saying that he does not think Node is the best tool for servers and that Go is a much better option.

For me at least, I think it is great that people like him become aware of the shortcommings of the technology they devised, but wonder if it is such a good move to say such things (even tho apparently he is not the head of the Node.js project anymore)

I have always been fascinated by Node and the whole JS ecosystem. I think it did wonders for JS developers and it pushed the whole JS experience to a whole new level, but I am also aware of the shortcommings of it just as I am of the other environments that I use.

So, what do you guys think about his statements? Would you consider investing time in Go as a Node developer? Do you think that it will be possible to do a switch or would you rather stay in and advance the state ot Node development?

The moment I knew that I was meant to be a dev was when I was 14 years old and it was computer class during high school. Basic HTML was the lesson and I was hooked by it. My favorite tags were the blink and marquee tags. I was fascinated by it! But learn to love web development when I knew what backend developing was about ;)

I hate my AWS professor, he just sucks at explaining the practical part of AWS. How one can make it completely dull, I just don't get - explain almost anything the right way and I am fascinated. I will also say the subject is taught online and I really do not jive well with online teaching outside of self-paced things. He has on one particular occasion given us a homework that he took from an Indian guy online that was impossible to do in our scenario, with AWS Academy student accounts, and we protested by not doing it and calling the professor to the attention of the administration. We'll see how it turns out by the Friday...

i was around 8, i saw my dad coding with VB3, I was fascinated. He taught a bit and showed me his project : A complete and very feature-heavy radar simulator, with lots of graphical elements and planez flying by. I was dumb struck. he even gave me a little project to do : A calculator. Thank you dad

Today I found out that my favorite indie game, CrossCode was built using ImpactJS, a javascript/html5 canvas based game engine/library/framework/tumamaencuerada and I was fascinated by it.

The game is absolutely beautiful, plays and works great, badass story mode and combat design. all powered by web tech. I am honestly amazed, I was always under the impression that something like Unity was used to build it.

Gives a bit of hope

wasn't a fight, really, just me having gotten frustrated after half an hour of trying to explain to a 2D animator what smear frames are, since we were making a flying hummingbird, found out that multiframe animations for the wingflaps looked like crap for its flapping speed, so i was like "oh, i know, let's just make the whole wing flap a 3frame anim, one frame wings down, one smear frame, one frame wings up, done"

cue the UNIVERSITY EDUCATED ANIMATOR looking at me with confusion, asking what are smear frames.

cue half an hour of repeated attempts at explanation, each attempt imagining him to be a younger and younger child, last 3 attempts i was actually sketching it out for him in photoshop and playing it to him (via photoshop's timeline for making animated gifs) so that he could see how it looks, which still didn't help him get it.

it turned very unpleasant towards the end, due to me getting very dumbfounded and irritated and interlacing the last couple of explanation attempts with remarks on my fascinated disbelief that a university educated and graduated animator not only had no idea what smear frames are, but isn't even getting it after having it explained multiple times as if he was an elementary school child.

at that point my boss stepped in, told me to go have a smoke, and when i came back, he managed to explain it to the animator by some of the interpersonal magic he (the boss) had.

that dude (the boss) was amazing.

p. s. the hummingbird turned out looking amazing, thanks to the smear frames.

I was once a guy fascinated by the world of computers , games and tech stuff. And today in my 21 and almost 6 months before my graduation ( as a fucking "CS" engineer) , i feel almost everything in CS as difficult or boring , even the things i am usually good at , and by looking at the competition, i am scared if this career is ever going to be fruitful for me :(

I was always fascinated by Silicon Valley(the real place), it seemed like a dream workplace. But ever since I've watched Silicon Valley(the show), I have lost my faith in the place. I used to be amazed by the big people in tech, but now all that's left is skepticism.

Is it really like that in real?

Hello devs!
Please help a fellow dev make a big career decision.
I am a person who is fascinated about AI.
So after working as a gameplay programmer, I have decided to switch my role as a R&D engineer in the same company. I will get to work on cool stuff in the ML and AI domain. But I have got this another job offer for a full stack developer role and the salary is supposed to be three times of my current package. It's great company but the only thing is that they do not have ML and AI in their tech stack. It has been only a year since I graduated, So I wanted to know what would be a good path. To follow what you like or to follow general software development with a great salary hike (which I am sure it would take many years to reach that amount in my current company). Also there are very few companies that offer such a good pay. I want to know that if I go with the salary option, Would it be possible for me to get into the AI domain at a later stage? I would appreciate if you share your experience as well.

As a child I was fascinated with computers. I don't know what about them fascinated me but I knew they were powerful tools. For the longest I had the mentality that those with natural talent are meant to be programmers but recently I heard a quote that changed my perspective completely it says, "What I lack in natural talent I make up for in discipline." I'm learning my first language now and I'm obsessed with it and I'm learning new things everyday. I don't ever see myself stopping.

When I was about 11 years old (now 22) on Piczo messing around with little JavaScript hacks. I was fascinated with the idea that I could write code and have the computer/website do what I want. From then I went on to learn more and more, and the rest is history.

I just discovered the code golf stack exchange. I had no clue this even existed.

I am fascinated, scared, but fascinated.

!rant, but let me tell you this

I wanted to automate some tasks in work, because it started to be a pain in the ass, manually copying those assets took me between 30 - 50 min

let me see, I always wanted to check out python so I started to copy paste some code together, editing it and after a few hours all I know I have a tool which logs in to our work CMS download and unpacks a zip archive, creates a backup from the old files in the repository and moves the files I just downloaded in the repo, I put this in a loop for our twenty languages (websites) and its done

Im amazed, I never picked up a language this easy to use

Who else was fascinated by the DOM when first encountered? When I first began my journey as a programmer I found that the term Technology was always set in strictly a physical sense in my mind; that is until I started to realize that every language is in fact a piece of technology, which is supported by massive libraries. Then I realize that the DOM is another standardized technology that structures the web. And of course as I gained more insight and got introduced to more "technology" the clearer it became. I'm just glad we have so much selection in terms of this technology. Whether it's a language you want to use, a particular OS, Vm, framework or the plethora of others begging to aid and assist.

What's a CS piece of knowledge that has fascinated you a lot?

When I was about 10 years old, my maths teacher at school brought his Sinclair ZX80 into the classroom at the end of the Summer term to show his pupils. He'd written a couple of Math quiz programs that he showed us, and for 99% of the students that was enough - it was nice curiosity and diversion and the end of the school year. I however was fascinated by this little white lump of plastic.

When I came back to school after the summer holiday, everything had changed in that classroom.

Around the edge of room were about eight brand spanking new ZX81s with 16k RAM packs. They were all connected to a single tape deck in the corner of the room, into which our teacher could insert a cassette with the latest Maths program he'd written. All the pupils would be instructed to type LOAD "" and he'd press play on the tape deck - early networking!

From there I got my own first machine (a 16k ZX Spectrum) but I've never forgotten that initial contact.

In my school, We started learning computer science (Java and programming stuff, to be more specific) last year in 11th standard (I was 16 at that time), starting to learn programming and stuff like this are common in India at that age (Yes, I live in India). I m the only student in my class or in my school who knows about programming and things related to that, yes of course I know, I made my own game when I was around 12 y.o.

In school our teacher started teaching us everything from the most beginning, It was really boring and exciting at the same time for me, it was exciting because I always wanted to tell my teacher and friends about my game and other programming kinds of stuff I knew, and it was boring bcoz I had to learn those things again which I already knew.
It was obvious that I was getting good marks in the subject without even reading my book for once, and it really amazed my friends, classmates and even my teacher.

Now, since my friends have learned CS for 1 year, some of them thinks its nice and are fascinated by the world of programming and developers, and some of them think it's boring and they just need to pass the subject for good marks and nothing else.

It feels funny and bad at the same time when some of my friends come to me and ask what does a for-loop (any loop) even does... And the rest of them thinks a for-loop is just used for printing tables of numbers.

well, that's the story of my school.
The thing that will never change is that I love programming and I will never stop programming...

Thanks for stopping by Ranters,
Happy programming!

Little project for an insurance sales guy / finance coach / entrepreneur

My first thought: guy sounds extremely shady but ok let’s come up with a hefty price.

Guy accepts my offer and pays one third in advance as I asked. Of course he pays cash because he „didn’t make it to the bank“ but happened to have the big bucks in his wallet.

I give him a receipt for the cash payment.

Job is done I write an invoice for the remaining two thirds.

Guy transfers money to my account. No cash this time.
However he took the sum in the second invoice and subtracted the first one and 50 bucks extra and send the remaining entirely imaginary sum.

I text him. He does not get it and explains that he payed cash in advance.
I say yes but that is not the point. You can not make up the sums of your invoice yourself.

I send him three warnings via mail.

He sends an angry letter back sayingthst he payed one third in advance.

I tell him how nice it is that we agree in that regard but that the issue will go t court if he does not pay.

Sometimes I am fascinated how elaborately stupid people can behave. :/

Honestly, just gonna watch and see what happens. Oddly fascinated by the carnage unfolding. If the money system is fucked its fucked I guess. I am sure they will introduce some bullshit that solves everyone's problems. BitCoin of satan or something.

Came across a book by Clinton L. Jeffery that details in programming language design, a topic that has always fascinated me. So I went ahead and bought the book knowing full well it uses an obscure language called Unicon (cool fucking name) devised in order to mimic the Icon programming language (obscure as well) which are languages that detail goal oriented programming. While I do not mind the language itself, seems pretty good for my taste, does not use curly braces or semicolons and a lot of other scripty things, gets compiled to bytecode and works well, but shit man, trying to find documentation for this outside of its own (I don't like it) book is a pain in the ass. To give some perspetive: you know you are dealing with some obscure shit when there ain't any youtube videos on the language. It has some interesting notions, but I just fucking hate the "documentation standard" book that it has for it, and yes, this is because the language has not taken any actual traction from the masses, there are some things that it does not have such as full utf8 support among other things, it really is a nice tech but I hate the lack of proper documentation/tutorials on it.

rant off

When starting primary school, my parents got me a low-spec Pentium 4 with Windows 98. I was fascinated and started learning many things in MS Office. This led to small adventure-like games in PowerPoint.

I quickly found the limits of PowerPoint and started to dive into C++ at around 10. I never made a game, but only because I experienced how unlimited the possibilities are you have when you know how to write software and this realisation kept me motivated to learn more and more things.

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

The History of The Scriping Lanuages (JavaScript, Python, and especially PHP):

Once upon a time someone found themselves stranded in the middle of the wilderness without nothing to eat or drink. Having watched Bear Grills as a kid, they grabbed a chunk of elephant excrement and started drinking from it, and the poop saved their life. In that moment, under those very specific and dire circumstances, in that very small scale, excrement was an appropriate solution; but that person did not ever drink from poop again.

Alas, upon hearing this tale, people from around the continent got fascinated with this new extraordinary recipe that had the capacity of saving lives! This new treat became viral. Shit juice, shit pie, and even a shitmulated Microsoft 98! Businesses built their foundations with shit, shit factories, individual shit brokers and recruiters! Everyone wanted a piece of this convenient and disruptive delicacy!

But, alas! as that first person knew, these implementations were not much more than mere shit

I probably knew I wanted to be a dev/programmer in late highschool. I was fascinated by the underlying structure to what I see on a computer screen, and idolized those who "hacked" as a form of political rebellion.

Now I'm in my senior year in college as a Computer Engineering major because CS was ridiculously competitive at this college. I'm actually quite happy about this, because I feel I know more about computers in general by taking this path rather than CS.

i always amused and fascinated by gource visualization, especially the long running project.

Are we to the point in technology that we can simulate entire: economic, governmental, social, medical, etc systems with accuracy?

I am fascinated by video games that do this. I play Avorion and it has attempted to simulate economic systems in game. So you can profit from making things that are not in high supply. I am also fascinated by the idea of world simulation to weight pros and cons of governmental structures.

Where does one start when researching models that attempt this?

I always knew somehow, without realizing it. Since I was a kid I always was fascinated by technological stuff.

My parents are into humanistic fields so they couldn't give me any good input to understand what I liked exactly.

One day I learned I cpuld tinker with stupid batch scripts until I read on some forum the word "programming".
I was like "wtf is that" and googled the word.

In that moment I realized what I was going to do in my life.

That's a little irritating and bemusing at the same time. About 24 hours ago I was involved in a discussion about DS on this very platform, and now my FB feed is full of DS ads. Not even verbally discussing the topic, just the posts here in DR. I'd be fascinated to know how they did that.

I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.

Okay, great, so what?

The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.

I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.

Alternative job(s) if I weren't a dev?

Something in the audio field, either car audio, or somewhere in the audio/visual realm. In my youth, I attended car audio shows and fascinated by the science behind what it takes to have great sound. Everything from materials used, using the various sound-measuring gadgets, to solving complex acoustical problems.

How did I start programming? Let's see ...
So, when I was a around 12, I used to be fascinated with websites. Created my first site using Microsoft Frontpage. No stopping since then. I am still learning

I'm fascinated about story games like: Sentece, Who's the killer, I'm innocent etc.
I have a question, how can I build a game like this? How is this game created?
I'm an android developer and I work in Android Studio, is there any solutions to build this kind of games in Android Studio.
If is this possible, how?
If is not what should I use, unity or?

I kinda don't understand why are people fascinated with brainfuck lang. I have done tasks during my uni time using only Touring machine. Can't get much more fucked up than that I'm telling you.