Came for the lulz, stay for the community 👌

I've always wanted to build an underground bunker for storms, to hide from my unstable ex girlfriend, and lulz, so I am. The hardest part isn't the digging or the structure, it's finding a way to ensure I'll still have internet.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Date.prototype.valueOf = Math.random;

Use this as your 1st line of code in any web page or node server, for maximum lulz.

Saw a rant against "startup idea guys" and it got me thinking. A few years ago, I knew a guy. Business major, terrible at everything, but his daddy is getting him a job at a big 4 accounting firm with referrals from his frat brothers. I collect vintage watches (gotta have a hobby that isn't Netflix and anxiety,) and I figured I should make a small website, display my stuff and write a bit. He gets on board, talking about how it's gonna be the next big thing. It's not, because the market is very saturated, I mainly sell on forums and tbh just wanted to write and dick around on Wordpress. I buy our entire inventory, he blows the cash he was fronting on booze, says I "lack networking capabilities," and quits. His LinkedIn lists him as the former CEO of MY company which wasn't even incorporated enough for me to get it a business PayPal, and he is now working on a tech startup that... Wait for it... Is a social network and online marketplace for Ivy League students. I shit you not. He told me it's the "first of its kind." I signed up for lulz, and the verification email directed me to his backend directory with client logins and details in plain text 😂😂😂😂

!rant - just for the lulz

Immediate thoughts on coming around from general anaesthetic yesterday were:
Why is Ruby not working?
Did I install a new version?
Should I run rbenv rehash?

Then I realised I was in the recovery room 😂

I don't think I've ever done anything cool. I've done some shit because they're funny, I'm lazy, and to make do of the limited resources and some restrictions.

1. Webpage/Dashboard using SQL command line. I still troll some co-workers and ask them if they can make a webpage out of SQL. They laugh then I show this to them. It's a simple but comprehensive dashboard that displays transaction volumes, server status, etc. Pretty much combined all the data from different sources (database, server logs, etc.) This was to eliminate the endless excuses of my team members who use the 15 minute application restart as an excuse why they didn't get to do their jobs for the remaining 7 hours and more. What's your excuse now?

2. A bunch of shell scripts to generate a detailed analysis of transaction processing delays, relevant number of user sessions, server and JVM statuses, etc. This is to mock my lazy co-workers back then who can't analyze shit. If a script can do your job, well.. you know the rest.

3. A bluetooth master/slave shit to detect who's in which room and who's out of scope for my College thesis. I doubt its effectiveness though I don't think about it these days. Maybe I'll replace it with something better for future torture chambers and trap triggers.

4. Automated the review of the code based on the set standards. Again, because no one gave a shit about the review. They charge hours for reviweing then I had to review it again to see a lot of things that should be corrected. They are showering in defects these days.

5. And this one is definitely just for the lulz to mock my manager who is obsessed with actual hours. The tool just logs what time you logged off and logged back in. Every time you unlock the computer, it asks what the fuck did you do during the time you were away. I just put "ate", "pooped", and shit like that.

There are other stuff I probably don't remember anymore or can't put in here.

Edit: Now that I read it again, I realized that I was pretty much developing things to replace my co-workers. I wasn't very lucky with co-workers back then.

FML. I JUST realized devRant can push notifications. I don't have to open the app every ten minutes now. 🤖

Worst: Writing a quick thing in Python, debugging endlessly because some class I created wasn't being instantiated properly and then realising that I haven't added the holy "()" while creating the object and before using methods in my unit tests.

Best: Creating some pretty sweet algorithms because I was thinking more out of the box and trying things out just for the lulz.

When dogecoin went out, I was a little curious kid. I knew small to nothing about cryptocurrencies, so I started mining some for the lulz on my shitty laptop. Holy fuck no one was using and mining this shit, so I was earning 500-600 DC by night. I did it for a few weeks, let the miner running when I was at highschool.

I stopped after one month since its value was inferior to the used electricity cost.

From time to time, I remember about this story about a 70000+ dogecoins, and I instantly want to chop my balls off and put some super strength bleach on the wounds while slapping myself with spiky plants.

I lost the wallet.

In college, during Novell's heyday, I was working on my Certified Network Administrator certification (totally worthless, in retrospect). As I was becoming an expert in all things Novell, I found a security flaw. Using Visual Basic it was possible to code up an exact replica of the Novell login screen that launched at boot time from a batch file stored on a floppy. You could log peoples' usernames and passwords all day as long as they didn't realize your floppy was in the drive, which worked in certain computer lab setups on campus. I wasn't in it for stealing info or being a criminal. I just did it for the lulz. But if I had gained access to a few of the right computers in admin offices on campus, I could've gotten access to anyone's student profiles and grades.

Looks like Google totally borked Android studio in 2.2, finally had to update when my new projects wouldn't show design view anymore because of a weird rendering engine issue, now it's totally unusable on Windows.

Click into a class, 30 second wait before it responds, then I can type, until of course autocomplete pops up then it's another 30 seconds while it sorts its life out and I can type again. Given this thing 4gb of ram maximum from its default 7xx mb, even tried bumping it up to 12 for the lulz same result both times

Yes I've tried running it on Linux, works fine in Ubuntu but for some reason it won't save emulators I create and also won't launch them.

Haven't tried it under macOS, but initial research seems promising.

How do you manage to totally bork the IDE for your own platform, when the last however many releases went off without a single hitch?