I want Gordon Ramsey to start a IT program in the same fashion as Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares

He'll sit at a desk with a laptop, examining code as if he's eating food, venting frustrations and screaming insults out loud

Then he'll have a talk with the team and see how they work on a day

After that he'll go into the freezer (server room) and scream at mold and cockroaches

Then comes the intervention where we discover that the PM is still grieving about the death of his original programming language and the team loves him but thinks he should move on

The next day the development studio is modernised and has a candy bar, tennis table and everyone is forced to use linux on their new macbooks

Then we experience a good day where everything is great and velocity is through the roof

Then Gordon leaves and everything is shit again

It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

I've always hated Omegle, but my online friend forced me to do it, since she thinks it will help my social anxiety.

I had to send her screenshots as proof.

As much as I didn't want to, I had no choice. I was too scared to do the video chatting so I did the text chat instead. This is how the conversation went:

Stranger: Hey

Me: Hello.

Stranger: Wyd?

Me: Just programming, you?

Stranger: ur a programmer?

Me: Yes :)

*Stranger has disconnected.*

I once had a manager who would, at every stand up, ask everyone if there was a better way to solve their problem. She did this even if the team had already decided on a solution or even if there was no problem at all. She wouldn't let us continue the stand up until we had proposed a new 'solution' that was close to her 'suggestions'.

Some of my favorite suggestions were: "Are you doing everything you can to not make it too 'spiffy' ?". If you said yes the follow up was always: "can you tell me how?"

Then when you said you hit a bit of a bump yesterday due to something unexpected she always demanded that you pair programmed today. Now I don't have anything against pair programming, I even think it's useful from time to time, but being forced to sit next to someone or have someone sit next to me every time someone encountered something unexpected annoyed the shit out of me. Needless to say no one had any problems to speak of during stand ups after a while.

Whenever I was sparring with one of my colleagues she would always join in and start proposing 'solutions' about technical problems she didn't even understand. Again, she wouldn't back down until we had accepted her 'solution'. We would then go to a different room and hope she wouldn't find us there.

This went on for months, until several people had disagreed with her so much that it ended in shouting matches.

It still makes me angry when I think of one person crippling a team that much. I took my issues to her, to HR and finally to the CEO directly, but no one did anything about it.

Finally one of my colleagues decided to quit. After he handed in his two weeks notice our manager came to me and asked if she could talk to me in private.

She told me that she didn't understand why our colleague quit and she thought everything was going great. This was after just about everyone had told her that they hated how she acted and that if she wouldn't stop they'd quit. I had told her that myself twice.

She then proceeded to tell me that I was the most valuable employee and that the company couldn't go on without me. As a gesture of their appreciation for my invaluable effort, she was so generous to offer a salary increase of 50 euro, before taxes.

I laughed, said no and handed in my two week notice the next morning.

I vowed never to work with fucktards again, and I haven't since.

In an alternate universe, Soviet Russia won the Race to the moon, the Cold War wasn't actually "Cold". And Russia took all of America's technology. Changed the programming languages to Russian. You're now forced to code in Russian.

Write about what you'd do, Comrade.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

The amount of much political correctness in the dev community just pisses me off sometimes.

I've watched "Use the right tool / language for the job" has become *THE* excuse for shitty tools and languages. 

Case in point -- JavaScript. If you want to make a website that interacts with the end user, the right tool is JavaScript. But that's because IT'S THE ONLY TOOL. Does that make it a *good* tool?

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

Brendan Eich, I forgive you. You had 10 days and a corporation on your case.

That's not saying JavaScript doesn't have some good things in it. It does. But "Javascript the good parts" is a fucking thin book.

Sure, some amazing things have been written in JavaScript. Great communities have coalesced around this cancer.

BUT THATS IN SPITE OF JAVASCRIPT, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. AS A LANGAUGE IT'S STILL A STEAMING PILE OF DOGSHIT.

A master can draw great art with a shitty piece of charcoal. That doesn't make charcoal THE BEST DRAWING TOOL EVARRR. It's just a testament to the master's craft.

If you started your programming journey with JavaScript, do expand your horizons.

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

See JavaScript for what it is -- a shitty language everyone was forced to use. 

PS: Don't even get me started on Java ...

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

Was anyone forced to learn an obscure programming language during college? If so what was it and have you used it since?

Mine was ADA95 and nope lol

!rant
print("Hello World!")

Erm..... Here goes nothing.
Hello everyone, I'm [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] in the SEA region. I'm a highschool student, 17, with a hobby of programming in Python 3 as a self-taught trial-and-error script kiddy, mostly small scripts from random "Yea I should do that, how long will it take?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"-moments. I found DevRant while talking with people in a few programming Discord servers. Hope this is enough for a "Hello World!" post....and yea, welcome me to DevRant *pop confetti and hope not forced to clean up later*

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

"Guys, I'm going to change my studies next year, I'll be studying IT, programming, stuff about computers"
"You mean, they threw you out of mechanical engineering and you are forced to do that?"
"No, I chose it myself, I'm not interested in mechanical engineering anymore."
"But you love it, you repaired your car! (WTF???) But are you sure there are jobs for what you are studying now?"
"Well, much more than in mechanical engineering actually..."
Like, they didn't notice that I'm fond of IT stuff since I'm 13... C'mon guys...

!rant per se

It’s funny, until junior year of uni I was a strong advocate of Java and was willing to argue the case for it. One thing that I definitely was taught in uni that a language is just a tool (for the most part). It’s the theory that matters, and that can be applied pretty well to most languages. Have come to the point that I actually get frustrated when people get into arguments of language X being shit or inferior to language Y.
Like many people perceive college as a place to just learn programming and stuff like discrete structures and theory as being time wasting, but i have come to realise that it’s quite the opposite, if you know the concept of something, applying it to a language is easier than learning how to do something in a certain language and then bitch and moan that “it can’t be done” in another language you are forced to work with.

As a final year student it makes me feel proud about things I do now, back in 2014 I was newbie to programming and after the years of study ( I skip collages in order to study by my self at home since my syllabus is too old for me to keep up with new technologies. ) I still feel like shit against brilliant programmers on the internet.

My journey untill now was frustrating and side by side it was fun too, I have spent several days to figure out very minor problems in my programme which made me forced to learn even more in order to avoid silly mistakes in future.
Those four lines of output were really true worth of that forty lines of code.

Every one of us, in their entire life at least once had thought about which programming languages to learn first and yes I was one of those guy who used to search on Google, watched YouTube videos and asked seniors for the same advice but soon I realized it's never enough to completely learn even one language. Each and every programming language is based on similar logical structure. No matter how different it's syntax is it won't make much of a difference.

I am thankful to internet and all of those guys who make video tutorials, help on q&a forum (stack overflow) , publish posts on website and all of IT community guys. I made it this far it's all thanks to you and I know it's just beginning of spectacular journey ahead.

When I was around 13 I started programming html and designing websites on and off over the years. Later during my first year of college I picked up C++ and loved it. I always had this idea that web design was very elementary programming until recently.

I recently got forced into learning C# and ASP.NET Core MVC by my internship. Holy shit was I wrong. Web design is so insanely complex and interesting!

C#, ASP.NET Core MVC, HTML, CSS, JS, Entity Framework Core, and the list goes on.....all to create a single website/web application.

I apologize for my ignorance to the website development community.

I’m so excited to learn all of this! =D

Client from hell, next chapter.

As money comes in, project won't be canceled.

Only madness comes for free.

Newest insanity.... We had to explain that in a warehouse system a unique article number as an identifier is a must.... This discussion took 20 minutes.

The reason? Saving 2 secs as they don't have to enter the supplier item number....

Their plan?

Article Number can be...
Integer, automatically assigned
String, Supplier Name and Supplier Item Number seperated by a delimiter....

The argument that stopped this insanity... Costs.

We argued that if we are forced to implement something which we believe will be a high costs, no value, nonsense feature we won't do the necessary migration and programming after reversal as in 'find someone else who unbreaks this insanity'...

Did they understand that a warehouse system without article number for reference is dumb? Nope.

I long for the day I get a job with an actual developer team, where I can do things like getting my code reviewed or pair programming or being forced to write better tests.

Working as the only developer (or a team of 2) sucks :(

Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

When your company forces you to program forms on the webpage with the sole intention of capturing your data then blasting you with emails, phone calls, and texts :( sometimes I really do hate my job

Does anyone else question their career in programming from time to time?

I've been around this line of work for almost 7 years now and I still get these doubts once or twice a year.
Be it unreasonable deadlines, horrible people that I'm forced to work with or just outright incompetence.

My latest occurence of doubt was when getting assigned a task that initially didn't seem like a big deal, but it turned out to be months and months of custom work instead of going along with the standard components and design guidelines.

This was somehow missed in the estimate phase and once I got assigned to it a hard deadline was already set, to top it off the features was non-negotiable.

These kind of things really makes me feel helpless and really depressed. My work is all I have, and I don't really know what I would do if I'd change career path today.

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

Obligatory subjective view from inexperienced eyes of a highschooler

I think it's evolving to be more beginner-friendly and more easily accessible. I'm seeing ppl roughly my age can program pretty well (ignoring the mandatory programming classes in highschool that stuff is just no (I know, we had this convo before but do hear me out, although it teaches fundamental programming in Pascal, the execution sucks ball because "mandatory")). I'm not saying we are on par with the in-industry devs, it's just we can code well enough to at least make decent small program/script.

With newer scripting languages that are easy to pick up and syntactically similar to English which is obviously Python, both objectively and subjectively, and its ability to be OOP without scaring first-timers of the what-the-blyn-is-this blank program (looking at you C#) people can be introduced to programming and programming concepts fairly easily and they can switch from Py to other languages with little to some hiccups, from my personal exp at least.

But then there's the "too much kiddies in the field" arguments I saw on dR (I think) a while back then when SO decided to better support newbies. To that, I can only say "Please give us a chance". We're completely oblivious to how the dev world work nor how you guys do your work so before you scold us on this, at least tell us how to work like you before you go on a 2-A4-page rant on how the industry is not as good as before and how it has degraded.

That leads to the problems of politics invading programming. We have it, I hate it, goddammit I wanna murder them. Linux CoC controversy is just...no. And then there's forced diversity in hiring (also ranted on dR a while back) and corporations pissing devs off to satisfy a minor group. I'll just shut up on this. No no no no no no no NO I'm not gonna. Not gonna.

Do correct me if I'm wrong though. I'm a less than a junior dev.

The past two years since I've started working, I've never taken a holiday. Today, I was forced to go on paid leave for 3 weeks. Feels weird but kinda exciting at the same time :D

In the end I'll probably be programming half the time anyway...

If you were forced to not use an electronic device for programming purposes ever again, what would your job be?

For example, I'd study medicine and try to become a surgeon.

The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)

*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.

* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.

* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.

* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.

* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.

* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells

* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.

* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.

* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.

* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.

* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.

* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.

* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.

* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.

* The header of a column is itself a datacell.

* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.

* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.

*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.

* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.

* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.

* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.

* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.

* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

So I joined a company as an Angular dev and the code they gave me was stupid AngularJS ported to Angular 7 mixed with thousands of lines of jQuery inside index.html,

also all the css was scattered into a few files with 8000+ lines of code and no idea about which file does what, we decided to rebuild the project in Angular,

I built a huge portion of it with PrimeNg (a UI library like Angular Material) but after building all of that they tell me to remove PrimeNg and also asked me to import all SCSS modules in angular.json like wtf,

they forced me to use bootstrap with jQuery IN AN ANGULAR PROJECT this was my first job and I think I have a pretty good understand of Pakistani IT industry after this.

I learned programming from online paid courses and tons of practice so I expected others to be on the same level but that's not the case.

I kind of don’t like OOP. There I said it.
Don’t get me wrong there are times I like using it. I don’t mind some of the features but I can rarely find times I want to use them.

It can be useful depending on the project but I mostly don’t use it and when I’m using Python I always feel like I have to? I know Python offers multiple types paradigms of programming to use but everyone’s making a big deal about OOP and I can rarely ever find uses for it. What I said for Python also goes for C++ I feel like I’m forced to do it. And I especially hate it in C++ fuck that.

I’d just like to use Python, and C++ without using it or if I do not have to use all the fancy features. And kinda wish Java and C# didn’t force OOP on you but I just don’t use all the fancy features in those languages (I don’t even use java but I’m mostly talking about C# for that one).

It’s not that I don’t know how to use it it’s that I can never find a use for any of the features or just don’t want to actually do it. Personally I only really see it shining in Game development, GUI development, and MAYBE network programming??

By all means I’m not trying to flame on OOP, I just wanted to throw my OOPinion (HA) on the matter. in fact you can tell me why you like it or dislike it. I’d like to discuss the topic with anyone.

React, it's declarative way of doing things, and the functional programming methodology it prefers.

Realized how much I've moved on from for-loops and class/object instance to maps, filters and immutability/observers when I worked on a Laravel project after so long and found myself forced to do things in the, erm, "PHP" way, despite spending my initial year and a half of programming working exclusively in PHP.

Sure, there's Class Components and imperative techniques in React but I had blissfully settled into using the flexible nature of doing things enabled by both native JS and React, with hooks, Lodash/Ramda and (almost fanatically) pure functions

So this is the story of myself getting from hating vim to find it pretty good.

When i started fiddling around with linux i was literally overrun by vim. I mean how the fuck should i remember all these stupid commands.
So there we go ... nano was my favourite (and only) editor i used.

Everything was fine in my little nano world. I saw some colleague editing every damn thing in vim. I asked him "man what the fuck are you damn crazy"? And thats where till that moment the deepest conversation about an editor in my life began. He told me he could do that much with vim, its almost everywhere nowadays and a must for any admin.

So after letting him tell me about every thing you can do he promised me he is going to help me getting started quicker. And i must say boi vim is really awesome. But for "real" development i still use a ide. Although i find myself programming go, python or bash scripts entirely in vim and its not that bad.

So if you find your way through the deep shit of that single damn command input down there you can get a pretty decent editor.

Dont get me wrong i am forced to use nano sometimes, when i help some of friends with their servers or so and they litterally uninstalled vim because they were to frustrated.

So as i am started to go into the devops area you get more and more towards you have to edit a file on a server, or just tweak around before automating the shit out of it.

And i must say vim has become a solid alternative for me to a full blown ide, or any other text editor.

So yeah i am gone from freaking hating vim to using it almost everyday. But why some people out their treat vim like a religion is not understandable to me in any way.

So whats your story why do you hate/love vim? Or are you just like me a "happy user" that would switch to another editor anytime it would be a better fit?

It started when i was about 10 old.
My uncle showed me how to display something in dos-prompt using the echo command in a custom batch-file.
A few commands later, i was able to "program" a flip-book of an ascii ski-driver. Each ascii picture was separated by pressing any key and cls ^^
Aaaaah. Sweet childhood memories!

Later on i used a programming-language for beginners in windows.
This language gave you control of a triangle called "turtle".

My first high-level programming language was Delphi.
Since i had no idea of databases, i created a pseudo database of magic the gathering play-cards. Each card had it's very own windows formular filled up completely with an uncompressed image object displaying the chosen card modally. *sigh*
I scanned each card by using a feed scanner.
Finally, my application consisted of 200 cardimages and forced my PC to swap the required memory from my harddisk.
Boy o boy. I was such a noob! ^^

Over the years i discovered and felt in love with a lot of languages (jsp, java (script), c#, php, ...) and concepts (mvvm, mvc, clean-architecture, tdd, ...)! ;)

Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.

So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.

I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.

In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).

I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.

But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.

I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.

Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.

It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.

About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)

I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)

Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.

TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.

!rant

Currently I am studying "applied computer science" in Berlin and most of my modules are easy as fuck for me. Most of the time I don't even have to study for the exams. My programming professor even told me that I am the best student in terms of clean/readable code and he was amazed when I handed in on of my homeworks where I used MVC. Today I failed my math exam for the second time. It's the only module that I suck at, mainly because I don't give a fuck about it. I can easily grasp the concept of anything that I am interested in, but if I am forced to learn something my brain just shuts down. I truly fear that I will drop out of university because of math. I am still at my first of three math modules and I don't know how to handle this problem properly, having in mind that I still need to participate in two more modules. The saddest part is that I am not the only one with those problems and fears. I will link a news article of the German newspaper "Tagesspiegel" in the comments.

I know this is neither a rant or a question, but I just wanted to tell you guys about my problems and maybe start a conversation about the importance of math in our modern times and why school's aren't able to teach basic math in a way that young people are excited for it or at least are able to grasp the basic concepts.

What do you guys think of forced linters (checkStyle) on java assignments?

At this University we have a submission system that checks for your code where if a line didn't match the coding specification then it's an instant zero.

Being experienced in programming before going to a university, this somewhat surprised me, it also has unit tests implemented in it where it checks against input and output.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is it too much for people who unlike me never seen code before? Or let them have hell and understand how to deal with it? I personally think it's too much for beginners.

So I have to endure Java Programming lab once a week.
The computers in the lab have Windows XP.
You're not allowed to install additional software.
There's eclipse installed.
But no. You cannot use eclipse. You are FORCED to use J FUCKING GRASP.

WHAT SORT OF DERANGED TEACHER WOULD USE SUCH A DISGRACE OF AN IDE?????

Taking a leave for 14 days from work, just to use my vacation days, really messes with my biorhythm :D My day/night cycle shifted about 12 hours.. Programming during the night for a freelance project, sleeping 1-2 hours during the day just to rest my eyes a bit..

I'm from Belgium, but the second developer, on the project, is from San Francisco.. It's quiet nice to have someone to talk to about the development process when every one else I know is asleep.

I'm not made for a dayjob at a desk, I need to be at home, in my bed or at my own desk, choosing my own hours, just.. Working on projects with some music, some snacks,.. Much more productive that way than, instead, being forced to work from 9am to 6pm.. You can't force creativity or inspiration
.

I slept 9 hours this week, spread over 4 days... I'm not the most healthy person, I know :D

Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.

So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.

The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.

As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.

Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.

So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"

but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"

After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.

Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.

After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.

At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)

Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.

This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :)

Best thing: Getting into some pure functional programming

Worst thing: Being forced to work with VS2013

Programming, Motherfucker
Do you speak it?

We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.

We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

We are tired of being told we're socialy awkward idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

!rant

First, a little bit of background info: I'm currently studying a programming course (Where I was *supposed* to get to choose language myself, but was forced to do it all in C++ which I had no prior knowledge of, but that's a rant post of its own.) and the final exam is coming up. I'm allowed to bring with me a book on C++ for this, so my question was if there are any good recommendations?

Primarily I'd prefer something that is as close to a physical copy of documentation stuff as possible, since that's what I'm going to need the most.

The books I've been looking at so far (and that look the most promising) are "The C++ Standard Library" by Nicolai M. Josuttis (ISBN: 978-0321623218) and "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup (ISBN: 978-0321958327). Thoughts and/or opinions? :/

Since my internship, I've been working for a startup, but my contract's job description is so ambiguous that it doesn't mention what programming language I'll be responsible for (I'm not sure whether other normal large company do), so there's nothing wrong with assuming the company wants me to wash toilets someday. Also, I don't enjoy not having seniors in my field advise me on the best/professional way to do things, so I've been self-taught online and am free to do my work my way (which is probably me coding some very bad/unreadable code that I'm not even aware of).

Until then, my primary job had been to develop Flutter app. Recently, the company has been doing some development, and I was forced to do Swift programming, which I had never done before, and I needed to migrate the coding of an iOS app that my senior had programmed into a MacOS app, but my senior's programming is extremely difficult to read, with no comments, and I was disgusted!

By the way, isn't it true that Swift programmers are usually better paid? So wouldn't I be taken advantage of by the company because I didn't even get a raise for switching to Swift programming?

First time I am posting my rant here, thanks for watching!

Trying to make a nodejs backend is pure hell. It doesn't contain much builtin functionality in the first place and so you are forced to get a sea of smaller packages to make something that should be already baked in to happen. Momentjs and dayjs has thought nodejs devs nothing about the fact node runtime must not be as restrained as a browser js runtime. Now we are getting temporal api in browser js runtime and hopefully we can finally handle timezone hell without going insane. But this highlights the issue with node. Why wait for it to be included in js standard to finally be a thing. develop it beforehand. why are you beholden to Ecma standard. They write standards for web browser not node backend for god sake.

Also, authentication shouldn't be that complicated. I shouldn't be forced to create my own auth. In laravel scaffolding is already there and is asking you to get it going. In nodejs you have to get jwt working. I understand that you can get such scaffolding online with git clone but why? why express doesn't provide buildtin functions for authentication? Why for gods sake, you "npm install bcrypt"? I have to hash my own password before hand. I mean, realistically speaking nodejs is builtin with cryptography libraries. Hashmap literally uses hashing. Why can't it be builtin. I supposed any API needed auth. Instead I have to sign and verfiy my token and create middlewares for the job of making sure routes are protected.

I like the concept of bidirectional communication of node and the ugly thing, it's not impressive. any goddamn programming language used for web dev should realistically sustain two-way communication. It just a question of scaling, but if you have a backend that leverages usockets you can never go wrong. Because it's written in c. Just keep server running and sending data packets and responding to them, and don't finalize request and clean up after you serve it just keep waiting for new event.

Anyway, I hope out of this confused mess we call nodejs backend comes clean solutions just like Laravel came to clean the mess that was PHP backend back then.

Express is overrated by the way, and mongodb feels like a really ludicrous idea. we now need graphql in goddamn backend because of mongodb and it's cousins of nosql databases.

The frustration is real when you have an assignment in a programming course that you immediately know the solution to and could bang out in less than two minutes with Python, but you're instead *forced* to use C++ which you only started learning two weeks ago... :I