Why software aren't free!

If you are using a FREE software and you don’t like it
You have 3 options:
- Stop using it,
- create your own,
- or simply, SHUT THE FUCK UP

You get the right to complain about what I build IF AND ONLY IF you paid for it.

Hope this is clear!!!

Boss: "I looked at a testing suite. It is $2,500 a license and I'm buying 60 licenses. You should probably get familiar with it."
LeadDev: "Um, we already use NUnit, and it's free."
Boss: "Hmm...I'd better add Pluralsight training in the budget so you can learn about the new program."
LeadDev: "Oh, no...we need new laptops more than we need software."
Boss:"New laptops? Not my budget. When we buy this new software, everyone is going to use it"
LeadDev: "Everyone? How will you monitor it's usage?"
Boss: "I'll have networking send me captures of all the running tasks on the dev machines. The test suite better be running. Writing good tests will be our #1 priority."
LeadDev: "Um, we already write tests using NUnit."
Boss: "I don't understand what you are saying. I need something I can visualize. This UI testing suite is exactly what I need."
LeadDev: "Maybe the testing suite would be better suited for you and QA?"
<click..click>
Boss: "Submitted the budget. There will be a test server available for you to configure. This whole project costs over $100,000, so don't screw it up. Any questions?"
LeadDev: "Oh...well...what server ..."
Boss: "Dang...sorry, I'm taking off the rest of the afternoon. We'll talk about this more on Monday. Get started on those Pluralsight videos. I'll expect a full training and deployments by next week. Have a great weekend!"

This is me when some software have one month free subscription for new accounts

"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free"-Linus Torvalds

"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free." - Linus Torvalds
"If free software is like Libre Office, I would rather pay for Microsoft Office. "

Non-dev coworker (ndc) sees me using google chrome: I don't understand why chrome is so popular. I hate it and don't know why anyone would use it.
Me: what browser do you use?
NDC: internet explorer.
Me: why do you like ie better than chrome?
NDC: it does everything chrome can do and it's free.
Me: ie can NOT do everything chrome can do and chrome is free. You just have to download it from google.
NDC: no I read that chrome is proprietary software and why would I pay to use it when ie is free.
Me: ie is also proprietary software. Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean it costs money it's just not open source. Plus ie is not free. You paid for it when you bought the windows license that came with your computer.
NDC: no ie was already on the computer when I bought it so I didn't have to pay for it.
Me: it was included in the price of the computer but you still paid for it.
NDC: whatever I'm going to keep using ie because it's free for me.

ARE YOU RETARDED???

You know what? I'm fucking done with people telling me that open source alternatives to popular/proprietary suck by default.

Something does NOT suck by default just because it's FUCKING open source.

Have you got any fucking clue where we'd be right now if open source software didn't exist?!

Let me just remind you that about 80 percent of the worlds' servers run Linux. Open-FUCKING-source.

How the fuck are we supposed to innovate without open sourceness? Yes indeed, that would be about fucking impossible.

Although I've got to admit that some open source software programs don't work 100 well (in comparison to alternatives), what are you expecting? People put their free time into that shit and they've got to make money as well.

"well how are programmers supposed to feed their families if they only write open source software?"

Fuck right off. Of course we all need an income to survive. Hell, I need that as fucking well. But there's more to it than just work. Some people consider open source/working on open source software a hobby/passion. That doesn't even remotely mean thaty they don't work/don't need some kind of income.

If it wasn't for open source, we'd be nowhere (technologially seeing) right now.

I don't discriminate fellow devs. i don't care if you write Java or PhP, I don't care what OS you use to code, I don't care if all your software are free or not, I don't care what framework you use, I don't care about all this. The important part is being a dev. But, those bastards using light theme can go fuck themselves. 🤣

So this fucking neighbour of mine just asked me how can I be an engineer if I don't have a printer :/ and then he asked me to create a ticketing system (he is a travel agent) for free because it's just a software.

Coworker: "Hey I have the final logo for your software"

Me: "Awesome, only a few bugfixes after my holiday and we are good to go on production. 2 more hours to go until I am free for a week."

Coworker: "After your holiday? Boss said it goes on production tomorrow!"

Me: "You are kidding me, aren't you? There is no way I can do all the work today and push to production!"

Coworker: "Boss promised the client..."

How about boss can go an f himself? He knows I have some other project to finish today and that I am leaving. This is in our team cal for over a month now! Ahhh. My coworker now has to deal with it-.-

So i was working with a small company which were developing software for insurance sector. It was decided then that there should be an app for windows phone community and i was hired to that job.

It took me almost a month to finish the job. Please keep in mind that project was huge and already developed for android counterpart and was a hit in market. This was a chance given to me to prove myself and i proved it.

First month was fantastic for the company as software the company made was not available for windows phone. Price has been set for the software was higher in those time. Almost $15.

Excited by the success i added some more features which were not available on android counter part.

But price was very high. Even i asked management to drop the price because there were less windows phone user but no body listened.

Result : in a year app has made roughly 5000 download in which only 200 paid the actual price. Company asked me to take down the app from store. I was blamed for my over confidence in adding features that this made app less usable. They did not say a word to business managment team. I was fired.

Rough, cruel world.

6 month ago i published my app for same purpose with same feature set and different UI. And made it free. Completely free. Added a link to pay developer $0.5 or Rs 30.

Result: i have now 10 thousands plus download in last 4 month in which almost 3000 users have donated already.

Now i have my resource and my confidence and making an android app for same purpose.

This is my story and is not fake, i am 28 years old. If you think you can, you can.

Amen.

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

One of my potential clients insisted we guarantee that the software we build will be bug free for a year. Was almost tempted to ask if they'll be OK if it crashes and burns after that.

Vsauce has made all of its Mindfield content free on youtube...

Watched the episode about moral licensing

TL;DR; If you do something very good you tend to compensate and give yourself a free pass to do not so good

It happens to me in software when I accomplish something really fast, like a bumpy process that is undefined and in most cases should take X amount of time, but due to luck + experience + right mindset I get it done like 5 times faster...

I end up wasting the other parts of the time feeling good about myself and exploring google maps and writing rants here...

Companies can't use free software?

Well, I just forced everyone to use Nextcloud instead of Dropbox and Google Drive. People did not like it as first but the quickly realized how good it was.

We also moved from skype, teams and slack to matrix.
I am glad that matrix-synapse is so easy to install nowadays!

Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

Definately Linus Torvalds

"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free"

"Computer is like an air conditioner, it becomes useless when you open windows"

I’m a graphs designer, hardware expert, free software generator, marketing evangelist, networking wizard, and troubleshooter bot

the free antivirus software that comes with your computer

Stallman is ranting about proprietary software. Yes, sir!

It's funny. Although I try to only use open source software which is free (at least as in freedom but also as in beer mostly), I'd gladly pay for using it!
But no way on fucking earth I'd pay for proprietary software.

Why?

Because I'd love to support the people behind the free software! They made something awesome and the most awesome thing is, they made it in a way that ensures that the end users can modify it to suit their needs! That's so fucking awesome!

That's why I'd never pay for proprietary software. Can it have awesome features? Yes, of course! But can anyone except for the devs easily modify it to suit their needs? No. And that's why I'd never pay for it.

The Indian state of Kerala uses Linux(Edubuntu) in all the schools. This incident happened back in 2010. I was not that proficient in Linux but I liked it for some reasons.

So one day, one of my IT teachers was handed the responsibility to edit a video. Being the School Student IT Convenor, he asked for my help. I'm no Video Editor but this thing was so easy that Openshot was enough.

While I was at it, he said: "Why does the govt. want us to use such unprofessional stuff? If it was Windows we could do everything very easily. Who is ever gonna use Linux in a professional environment? The govt. is spoiling the children by urging them to use Linux, Free Software and Open Source."

I couldn't argue that day. But today I so wish I could go back and roast him!

The reason why hiring a Recruiter in Software/Web Development industry is a waste of time and money.
- A real story from 2 years ago.

**few minutes of recruiter reading my resume, skills and whatnot**

Recruiter: Okay sir, we are looking for people skilled in C# for our app development and Java for our business software envirnoment. Which one are you interested in.

Me: C#.

Recruiter: I see, well.. I'm afraid we already have someone for the seat.. *checks resume again*.. maybe you would be interested in Java?

Me: Not really, why is that if I may ask?

Recruiter: Well, says here you have experience in Javascript

Me: *trying not to cringe* Yes, but I didn't see any Javascript related job available.

Recruiter: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "Java" just short for Javascript?

Me: No, just like C# isn't short for C and C++

Recruiter: *oops* then I think we do have a free spot for you.

TL;DR - the guy had guidelines but no field-specific knowledge.. I only feel sorry for the other guy who thought he got the job lol.

First day at new job yesterday, and it was really enjoyable, it's nice to be at a place that is actually competent at software development. I actually have people I can turn to who are tons more experienced than me.

Aside from the usual orienteering, I spent my time examining their existing systems and wrapping my head around the project I'll be working on for my trial period.

People seem friendly, coffee is good, they know what they're doing, willing to experiment and try new things, and I will get a free mac book pro as an employee.

Hope I get this.

Free (crowd funded?) Hosting for NGOs, individuals and projects that is promoting, building or distributing free software (FOSS/FLOSS)

!rant
In our advanced software engineering lecture everyone has to hold a free presentation about about an own topic.
One of my fellow students picked “failed IT large-scale projects” and - of course - had some german examples with him. You know, we germans are good in failing large projects🤣
He has chosen “FISCUS”, a project that wanted to unify the german tax system. It was a FIaSCUS. 13 years without any progess. 13 ... years ...

ok, but this is, where the story begins. The student then began to enumerate the reasons, why it has failed.

He told about bad architectures and stuff like that until the teacher interrupted him.

“No, that’s false. We had the problem, that some states, blablabla”

The important word was the “we” and we realized, that this student has by chance picked exactly that big project in which our teacher was the PM.
What the Heck.

He than had to think triple, about everything he had planed to say😂

I don’t know who recommended this... but I GOT FREE STICKERS 😜

Second day on the job, only one with no real degree in software development (did much stuff in free time, just finished school, got the job mainly because i knew people there)
So you can imagine that they were sceptic about me.

Chief executive whatever told me there is a problem with some JavaScript they can't fix cus there is no time and shit for that.
I was like ALL IN and said i could do this in a few mins.

Fixed it in 20 mins. Everyone was cheering. I was like "Well it was the right decision to not do my homework back in the days.." 😁

Free Software Foundation Europe trolling...

I have in my head parts of a game, I'd love to build. A top-down space colonization game. You control various spacecrafts and build spacestations etc. to expand your control.
The catch is that you have limited direct controls in-game. Most of the "gameplay" consists of having your own piece of software running somewhere, communicating with the API and controlling your colony.
Similar to Screeps, but I don't like the limitations of writing JavaScript and uploading it to the service. I'd love for the user to have free control of what language to use. They just need to be able to create a TCP socket and communicate with the API

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

I think Gihub/intellij has spoiled me. Whenever I get discounts or free stuff as a student/employee and it's not either completely free or 99.99% off I feel cheated.

Product - Oh you are a student? Here's $990 of this $1000 software, enjoy.

Me - Not completely free!? I'll take my cheap ass elsewhere thank you.

*Disclaimer - work percs are awesome plz no fire Mr. Bossman if you see this*

Windows removed from my life - check

Spotify removed from my life - check

Facebook removed from my life - check

Non-free software completely removed from my life - check

Now I just have to solve the rest

Me: Wish I got one guilty free murder pass..

God: GRANTED! Which software tester would you like to kill?

Today I uninstalled WhatsApp, I mean I haven't had a look at it in over a month and nobody texts me anways.

Writing this makes me realize how sad this is

I don't want to support Facebook or any data mining company, instead I want to support (free) / open source software like Signal

"I decided to write the core software for my Time Machine in Java. It's Date API is so error free and easy to use."

As the legend goes, the scientist is trapped in another dimension between Timezones.

#thanksjava

Why THE FUCK would anyone make a totally free (in the sense of price; gratuit) software project, and then not make it open-source?

What is the benefit of stifling the development of your own project when you have no monetary gain from doing so?

Programmer Influencers piss me off to Jupiter and back.

The ones who talk about just being a programmer, and don't do normal tutorials and solve a real-world problem and demonstrate it.

"i iNcREaSeD mY pRoDuCTiViTy bY 90%. hErE's HoW"

"tOp 10 lAnGuAGeS yOu sHoUlD lEaRn iN 2023"

"dAy iN thE LiFe oF a SoFtWaRe EnGiNeEr"

"HeRE's hOw yOu cAn wRiTe bUg fReE cOdE"

This was a fun thing that just happened:

I was sent a timed questionnaire by a potential employer for a software engineer job. I'm like okay, I will do it on Monday (today) because that is when I will have a free minute.

Well I sit down to do the thing and I had had a few beers, because the Ballmer Peak is real to me when I have to answer bullshit programming quizzes.

Well F me right in the A, it is a 38 question true or false logic quiz. And I am no longer a college kid trying to get into grad school so I have no patience for that crap, and apparently less with a little beer in me. Long story short, there was no comment section for me to rant in so I decided to go on YouTube and watch cat videos instead.

Bug free software is a myth

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

Hello everyone 👋

I see people blaming the developers when you see a crappy software product , saying that they have done a bad job.

But even it could be true also it could be the product managers who didn’t give enough time todo what needs to be done or project scope is too big for the persons knowledge.

I’ve worked in a company where deadlines were so tight I didn’t have enough time to proper UI and Testing. I used to be only developer who has someone experience and I had to train the interns as well. I am also to blame to joining such company but in desperate times takes desperate measures.

And now when i’m leaving the company and I have spend 2 years of my life for apps that I’m not proud of.

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

It happened me a few years ago. I live in the Netherlands, but I am Hungarian. My new "friends" asked me to fix their laptop. I did it for free. It turns out, it was a huge mistake. In the next half a year I've solved several issues to them and to their family members (I don't get it, how they can ruin a well working hardware and software that fast, but it is another story). It takes a lot from my free time at the end. Then I had enough and ask some money to fix the next laptop. The price wasn't high, a bit more than a half of the repair shop's price. They tried to press me to do it for free, cos "you are our friend and you are hungarian too, we have to help each other out". I said no. It is too much. I've never seen them again...

The stickers I ordered from FSFE came yesterday!

I am from Nepal, developing country, most of the people here have no idea about linux and free software, finding ubuntu on bus media server was a total surprise for me.

Hello * ! I'm browsing devrant since few months and finally subscribe.
As a GNU/Linux user and Free software supporter I really appreciate to not be forced to be logged to use this app. And the community is great ! Thanks to the developers and the community for this awesome app !

Our company today disallowed the use of GitKraken to all developers. Reason? They wanted to save money. When I told them that software is free, they responded with , “No, not in any way! All developers can use GitHub Actions instead”.

I don’t think they know what GitKraken nor GitHub Actions is, nor that GitKraken is free.

Not that I like GitKraken, but I don’t want to limit other developers use of it if they like it.

Meanwhile, we have been running no less than four kubernetes clusters, of which only one is in use…

Our team makes a software in Java and because of technical reasons we require 1GB of memory for the JVM (with the Xmx switch).
If you don't have enough free memory the app without any sign just exits because the JVM just couldn't bite big enough from the memory.
Many days later and you just stand there without a clue as to why the launcher does nothing.
Then you remember this constraint and start to close every memory heavy app you can think of. (I'm looking at you Chrome) No matter how important those spreadsheets or illustrator files. Congratulation you just freed up 4GB of memory, things should work now! WRONG!
But why you might ask. You see we are using 32-bit version of java because someone in upper management decided that it should run on any machine (even if we only test it on win 7 and high sierra) and 32 is smaller than 64 so it must be downwards compatible! we should use it! Yes, in 2019 we use 32-bit java because some lunatic might want to run our software on a Windows XP 32-bit OS. But why is this so much of a problem?
Well.. the 32-bit version of Java requires CONTIGUOUS FREE SPACE IN MEMORY TO EVEN START... AND WE ARE REQUESTING ONE GIGABYTE!!
So you can shove your swap and closed applications up your ass but I bet you that you won't get 1GB contiguous memory that way!
Now there will be a meeting about this issue and another related to the issues with 32-bit JVM tomorrow. The only problem is that this issue only occures if you used up most of your memory and then try to open our software. So upper management will probably deem this issue minor and won't allow us to upgrade to 64-bit... in 20fucking19

Richard Stallman.

Software must be free in order to empower it's users. GNU/Linux wouldn't exist without this person, and open-source would be a tired and sad joke if it wasn't for free software.

Where the fuck my privacy go?

I'm paying you to listen to music or watch films, I don't want you to create a damm profile my taste or "learn" what might like.

If it was a free service, fine, I'd understand, but I am fucking pying you. I should have the option to completely disable your arse sniffing software.

I know some of them provide a "private mode", but I want that to be the default, I am paying for the god damn service :/

So, I'm a CS student in a third world country. I love coding and I think i'm pretty good at it.

As I'm kind of poor, I'm pretty much constantly looking for any job I can take, and I've already done a dev gig at a software sweatshop here doing mostly PHP, JS and Android/Java... the dev experience was cool, but money was absolute crap ($1.5USD/hour at the current rate, working 9h/day Mon-Sat, did it while in vacation). Better than min wage in my country but still, looking at the numbers I see from programmers all over the world... it was practically working for free. The real problem is almost every dev job here is similar, so I was looking into going remote but every opportunity I see is for seniors/people with 2-3 years experience or more.

Can you give me some tips on getting a remote job as a student/recent grad with little experience? What would you do in my position? Any input is greatly appreciated!

Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,

And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?

What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.

And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.

Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.

Cool cs programmer are born today😖

People still need to understand that open source! = free software. It means source code is free but it does not guarantee that Software is also free. #opensource #softwaredevelopment

I study software engineering, so that obviously means I'm also free family tech support right?

Apparently some lady that lives nearby believes this, but she replaced family with vague acquaintance.

This lady is very computer illiterate, so much that I have to describe the wifi icon as a dot with two waves above it.

So one day, she calls me because her Outlook isn't receiving mail. I ask her if she has any internet and she confirms she does because she can visit Google. After trying a bunch of possible solutions in Outlook, I ask her to download a remote access program so I can look at what's wrong.

She didn't have internet. Visiting Google means seeing the Chrome logo apparently.

Hello devs, me and a friend want to do a little experiment. We want to install some kinda tracking software on his android phone to monitor everything he does for a few weeks to see what data/metadata his phone sends to what servers etc. Problem, we can't seem to find an app (free) which does this... Any recommendations?

I love it when my clients give me free reign to choose the software.

I'm gonna set up nginx with flask on Ubuntu 16.04 on DigitalOcean.

It's gonna be great :D.

I really don't understand how some it recruiters ever got their job... Brainless fucking scaredycat fuckwats!!!

Just finished a mission and i put myself back on the market, been flooded by calls and emails since monday, so far so good.

But all of them wanting you to 'come over the office for a chat', fuck no. 'I will come once a real opportunity gets presented, i propose to do video conference call as to not waste time and transportation'. But noooo... It's like they never heard of that thing being possible before. I propose them to use meet.jit.si (really cool and free to use videoconference software, no software needs to be installed)... 'Yeah sorry but your link doesnt work', 'how come? You just need to go to the url and grant cam and mic permissions for the session'... 'No it asks me to install software (not true) and i simply cant now ... Can you tell me who you are and what you do and what your field of expertise is?'

For fucks sake you got my cv right in front of you you fucking blind maggotpuss! Learn to fucking read!

Tomorrow is another, hopefully better day...

Glad to take that of the chest.

Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.

The best software license ever seen :

my patches and additions on top of Ian's code are licensed under the ABSE ("Anyone But Stefan Esser") license.
note that an additional exception to the license is added, forbidding use/redistribution of said content to his
trainees as well, but only when in a 5 mile radius from "Stefan Esser" or while holding any sort of (video)conference/chat with him.

note that this license will only be used as long as what would capstone decode / that one other arm64 ida
plugin thing by i0n1c ("Stefan Esser") are not under the MIT license.
afterwards, all exceptions are cleared and basically WTFPL applies

if you need a copy of the rest of the license feel free to google it or something.

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

Stop asking which Linux distro is best. Seriously there is no "best" one. Arch is best FOR ME. Debian or Fedora might be your cup of tea. But I have great news for you, they are all FREE and there is free virtualization software you can try them on. Stop asking a stupid question that only gets opinionated answers and flame wars and go try them for yourself.

Also, while I'm on the topic. Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu XFCE etc. are all the same distro, they just have a different DE (desktop environment for you noobs). It's like on Monday I wear a suit but Tuesday I wear shorts and a tee shirt, it's still me, I'm just dressed differently.

The three open source apps I prefer over "closed" ones. And that not because they're Open Source but because they are free and awesome.

GIMP2 & Blender & Audacity.

Fuck all the alternatives.
Photoshop & C4D (CC ~800€/y),
Maya & 3dsMax (each ~2000€/y),
Magix with their 100 different shitass software,
and so on..

What if...

Windows is FOSS?

※ FOSS : Free and Open Source Software

So, I have this free 90 day trial code for intelliJ IDEA Ultimate I got for enrolling in this udemy course. And, I don't need it anymore because I can use my student email to get access to jetbrains software, ie intelliJ ultimate. So, if you want to try out inteliJ ultimate for 3 months, let me know and I can give you the code... somehow. I'm not sure yet. Maybe Google Hangouts?

I have a really huge admiration for people who works for the free software, those who made very good tools for almost everything. The Debian community, the FSF.

I'm also admirative in front of those who used computering as a science and made big discoveries in AI, compressing methods, pentesting...

I'm wondering how it is to work in these two worlds?

If you are working on multiple projects a great tool to make you very productive and keep organized is a simple checklist.

For many years I have jotted one down each and every morning listing what I want to accomplish that day. I even include simple items. Crossing each task out as I complete it gives me a sense of accomplishment.

Checklists have enabled me to complete projects at work and many free and commercial side projects including software and technical books.

Do you use checklists? If there is a particular type you like?

Sad story of how software die 👻!
When do you call a technology obsolete 👴?
Mac user: when you have something new and costly 💰!
Linux user: when it is old and free 🆓 open source alternative are released!
Windows user: when antivirus 🕵 can no longer protect you!

Gosh, where went my social life? XD
That's already more than a month that I moved to Nice. I'm working a bit too much I guess. You know, I'm the kind of guy who is gonna rebuild the entire software architecture on his free time because it's crap x)
Anyway Nice is quite relaxing I like this place. And if someone is around and see my face, come and say hi :P

I'm an advocate of free software, debian specifically, hell my business runs on it!
But sometimes you just can't get around to use proprietry software. One of those is nvidia....

WHAT THE FUCKING MESSED UP NAGGING NARK SHIT NVIDIA!!! YOU FUCKING BREAK MY SYSTEM! YOU WONT PROPERLY COMPILE YOUR KERNEL MODULE, YOU BREAK MY X, AND ONCE I FIXED ALL THOSE THINGS MANUALLY(!) YOU HAVE THE FUCKING GUTS TO NOT EVEN DETECT MY SCREENS PROPERLY

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT!!! NVIDIA YOU SUCK!!! MOTHERFUCKER DO I REALLY HAVE TO FALL BACK TO INTEL GRAPHICS??? FUCK YOUR FUCKING COMPANY AND ESPECIALLY YOUR LINUX SUPPORT

And no i am not planning to use ATI since they dont support EGL, what is a dependency for the gnome desktop...

I'd love to just work on GPL software all day, filling gaps in the free software world.

My uncle who thought me Computers and Networking ( I once worked with him on a project ) came by to my house today. He said that he created a software that automates his work on the boring stuff so when he has free time he works on his own company. My man!

Bored waiting for a long running test cycle to complete, so...

Monopoly: Software Dev edition.

All properties are companies with apple and alphabet being the most expensive ones, course the online version plugs into stock tickers to accurately reflect the current share price.

All railroads are broadband providers.

You don't build houses or hotels, but patent portfolios and 'landing on another property' becomes 'infringing on a patent'.

Cards:
- Kickstarter refund, collect £200
- Hit by ransomware, pay 1bitcoin.
- You are sued in East Texas, go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect dividends.
- Get out of court free card.

Yeah, I'm that bored that I'm rewriting bloody monopoly...

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

I am currently doing my first ever internship. It is a medium-ish sized IT company and I basically do stuff in networking and software development. I sit on my chair, wheel it back and forth the small space behind my desk for like and hour. Then I go to the cafeteria, eat whatever is there (it’s absolutely free? Hopefully). There is a pool table which is always occupied. Then I sit in the lab and configure routers till 8 in the night. Boring.
I am developing a management system side by side so I break my head over server side routes (seriously, they are confusing) over the night.
So coffee is my mantra and boring is my life.

I fucking hate the Internet

day before Yesterday, I was searching for a software on internet(which is not free) I found a site (unofficial) giving me both free full & trial version. so I thought, why not get the full version. I downloaded it, installed it. awesome.

everything was going great until I found out that all of my files in a folder were encrypted by some WankDecrypt. I was lucky the files in that folder were useless. but next day some mysterious links started to pop up into my browser. and today some fucking wank decentralized shit started eating up my ram. FML

Somebody fucking stuck his shit with cracked version of software. so beware devs.

I just saw an ad by a viral marketing agency thisventviral.net that sell a 16GB USB stick with an os image they call Xtra-PC for 29,60.
I immediately noticed that it seemes to be a simple USB boot stick with a Linux distro with a Windows like ui and OpenOffice and other software pre installed.
They guy took out his CD drive bay an claimed that he removed the hard disk. While odd his clames about faster speeds are obviously true because microshaft windows and office are bloated pieces of shit.

So this leaves me in the odd position that a viral marketing scam selling you over priced USB sticks and an image you probably could find for free, also makes people adopt Linux instead of the bloated shit. And that with people that won't notice any of the downsides of using Linux.

Wired position, should I hate them or should I commend them for theire unintended efforts spreading Linux desktops?

Employer uses IBM Software, which forces me to use Eclipse. I hate eclipse. Hate is a hard word. I'd never say, I really 'hate' a person. But eclipse, eclipse is what I hate. I can look at my smartwatch and see my heartrate rising, just thinking of how the fuck any developer on this crappy planet would ship that bullshit IDE. That saying, I'm totally fine with some bugs, using windows and so on, but eclipse... Is this a get-more-contributors strategy? Holy moly it really kills me. Hey, let's just open that maven Proj.. Oh, crash. Hey, let's install that "bug-free" version of the maven-integratio... Oh, crash. Let's do a global search over my worksp.. Oh, freezed. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, seriously, most junoir devs I know, just use Eclipse, because they don't know of any other "better" IDE (VIM would be better, even notepad). Is there anyone sucking professors cocks / vaginas to get them introduce that crap IDE to students?

More often than not, I hear that the mission-critical stuff in Linux is done by paid people, the folks that work from 9 to 5 with a fixed time/resource schedule. Is software in Linux all like that? Say for example, Linux (kernel), systemd, Xorg, all the desktop environments, LibreOffice, Mozilla, Chromium and such.

The reason why I'm asking is because I kind of feel like the premise behind Linux "free, libre, *philanthropic*" and such is kinda wrong. Especially the latter. Do the people in the mission-critical stuff really care about its stability any more than commercial software devs do? Sure the projects driven by personal needs that are published are philanthropic in their nature, I'm having some of those too. But those are all non-critical and maintained as such. The stuff that's behind the steering wheel however? I'm not sure...

In essence, is the mission-critical part of the Linux ecosystem - however open-source it is - any different from other commercial software products QA-wise?

Software engineering is slowly being lowered to a basic skill to please corporations that literally want you to automate your job away. The only fruitful areas of software engineering that I can see being relevant in the next 10 years are those mixed with other hard sciences such as bioinformatics, robotics, bleeding edge statistics and mathematics (AI research), physics, etc. The trend I see right now is that software engineering is being integrated with business-oriented degrees or arts degrees, targeted programs towards beginners offered for free or low prices. There's going to be a higher barrier of entry for the jobs that are actually worth the stress and I'm praying I'll be able to catch the train before it leaves the station.

We've been using a recruiter who works out of the same business park as us. They purport to be "specialists in technology".

Somehow a conversation got started and I ended up explaining how we make use of open source software, where possible.

Their response: "That's the free one, right?".

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

Have a thinkpad with libre-boot and a librem 5 phone with ONLY free software on it.

And maybe get into politics a bit.

I have multiple (in no particular order) :

Nextcloud : It was an idea that I had in my head as well - to take on corporations like Google in the space of personal cloud. Be free, open-source and put the users in charge.

Gitlab : The most open and transparent company that I've ever come across. And they work 99% remote. They've got features that no other players in the space have. All while putting users in control.

Fediverse social media - Mastodon, GNU Social, Diaspora (soon) : For taking a major step in the direction of putting the users in control of their data; all while enabling a decentralized social network.

Ruby : An open community and building a programming language that runs a lot of software of the world.

Python : The oldest thriving community that has a special place in the development community (and my heart)

Javascript / ECMAScript : The scripting language that grew to be a beast of it's own.

MAKE ALL THE SOFTWARE
"FREE & OPEN SOURCE"
😎😎

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

The best way to write bug-free software is deleting all of it.

got them ! merci @dfox !

Destroyallsoftware is free until April 10! Hurry up!

NODE 18 MOVES INTO MAINTENENCE TOMORROW

...do you know where your legacy software is?

This was a free public service announcement brought to you by your favorite 🎪🤡🤹‍♂️

Our Code everlasting
The all creating One
Coders Almighty

Through Our Holy Lines
Conceiving Algorithms
Konrad Zuse our Savior

I believe in Clean Code
I believe in Free Software
I believe in Open Source
Our Code is three in one
I believe in the bug-free project
That'll be compiled again
For I believe in the name of Alan Turing

Even free has a price. You get to use a shitty software with a support community of douchebags.

When the client asks "is your software bug-free?"

Ah, another day, another regression found in a major library

guess i work for all these companies as a volunteer

🤦‍♂️

good thing i'm no where near their 6 figure salaries either.

maybe i should get that 6 figure salary and then eat more salads and steaks at the free food court, type more shitty code on couches, and play more foosball during my approximate 4 hour work day to acheive their software levels

if only i was so good

One of the most rude things you can do to an open source project is immediately question why they use a specific (language, toolkit, gui, build system, etc) and suggest they use something entirely different simply because it is "better".

Like I can't even compare it to something a normal non-technical person would understand.

It's not even a preference thing like what car you drive or iPhone vs Android.

I've literally donated hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time and you get the benefit of using the software free of charge and then you have the balls to question what I've given you.

University decided we have to use Wolfram Mathematica with instructions how to *cough* find it *cough* for free. I was really annoyed with this, because I didn't want to "find it" so I stumbled upon SageMath and it's working good enough. I get pissed when somebody tells me I have to pirate software (I'm no saint, I've done it before), it's not fair to students who don't have 100$ to throw at a software they'll use for 3 months and never again probably...

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

Why the hell does enterprise software get away with not having basic, logical, functionality?!

A hierarchical page structure should allow you to name multiple pages the same as long as they're under different parents.

Every FREE documentation platform understands this, yet atlassian fucking confluence can't figure it out.

I really don't get why creators of already-suspicious looking software (and the related suspicious looking website) put terms like "NO VIRUS" or "100% free of malware" next to the download area.

I mean, why would that help anything?

(I understand those typical virustotal scan widgets though, those are fine)

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.

Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.

Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

Do you think it's wrong when I use a cracked version of a not free software because I genuinely cannot afford to pay, I am not using it to make money either

just a note to everyone selling web based software, like plugins or themes: check github. someone who bought your stuff might have put it in a public repository, enabling everyone to get your product for free.

Devs with young kids: how the hell do you do it?

I am a foster parent for my cousin who is 4 months old and I don’t know how in the fuck to make this work. How do you do it? How do you balance code and kid?

For reference I work full time at a tech support place, I go to school full time, and I’m trying to pivot into software development, which means any free time is spent coding/studying code/building a portfolio. Problem is I don’t have free time because of the baby. How in the hell do people do this.

monday.com: our manager has been pushing for it for weeks. We barely got any time with the demo before it expired and the company took forever to get licenses.

Now that we're on it ... this thing sucks ass. It hijacks all the browser keyboard shortcuts. You can't use Ctrl+F or Ctrl+L .. you can't even right click.

This is the worst project management software I've ever seen. It's amazingly even worse that Jira. I wish we had just gone with Redmine. It's free and not garbage

YES!

Finished a complete version upgrade with vastly improved scalability and maintenance in just 3 weeks!

NO!

I forgot to do the database migrations as I went along. Ok... no problem.. I'll just use some kind of database comparing software, I'm sure they exist...

<googles...>

...fuck... is there not any for free?

Ok fine whatever i'll manually compare the tables and columns, fuck it. Sure there's like 50 tables and like 20 columns per... whatever...
should take like a day or so, with testing...

YES!

Finished my new version upgrade after just 6 weeks of coding!

....fuck sakes...

*everyone bitching about a piece of software that everyone hates because it's awful, doesn't work, AND costs millions of dollars*
Me: Hey here's a solution that's basically free and gives us everything we need, and all of the enhancement requests
"Cool! We'll look into it for 2020. Keep working on it for a third of what you should be making though"
.. but we need it now??

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.

Woah! Collabs! Nice.

I'm actually glad it's a paid feature. The sheer entitlement of people using free software asking for development help for free has always bothered me.

Cool idea, I hope it works out!

I set up an issue tracker for a software I'm developing for a company. Sent them an invitation to that tracker, stating that I hope to keep discussions more concise and clear that way (they're all HW/Embedded Devs)

The good news is: they've taken to the tracker quite well and are happily reporting issues and discussing them.

The bad news is: they're all sharing a single account.

It's been up for a day now and already no one knows anymore who reported/commented what.

WHY, JUST WHY would you think it's a good idea to share an account between 5 people, maybe more, who knows? Creating one takes less than a minute and it's free ffs.

When I talk about release a personal project to GNU/GPL license (when it's finished, some day) people looks at me like "wow, be careful". It makes me think about the mythology around silicon valley and how the idea of writing a killer app or a nice machine and instantly grow rich became a standard, even when it's terribly wrong and false...

a friend of mine has applied at a company who have sent them this task* to complete before the job interview.
They gave about 10 days to complete this.
*I rewrote it

Personally I think this is super overblown and way too much to complete as a test before the first interview.
They expect the applicant to configure an SQL database, a backend with a custom API and a UI.
It's like a fullstack prototype software, not a task.
Im not in web development and I wouldn't feel confident learning these technologies in my free time in just a few days.

I said that this felt like some HR manager writing up the test or that they want the applicant to create a prototype for free.
Am I being too extreme here? To me it feels overkill, what do you all think? Is this common?

Oh and I should mention, this is for an internship position for a bachelors student.

What's worse than WordPress? WordPress + WooCommerce! What's worse than WordPress + WooCommerce? WordPress + WooCommerce + PayPal! What other more shitty software could we possibly add? Some malicious virus hidden somewhere in the millions of free WordPress plugins most of which are not even full open-source? Who can possibly review and maintain that rummage table of outdated crap code?

If software developers / engineers and various other technical people stop serving banks and governments and become free minded we’re be having our own clothes and food served to us whenever we want and where we want by now.

Fucking capitalism and stupid dickheads.

I think being able to be served by robots in your own house to provide you everything you need is first step for long spaceship trips that can take over galaxies.

Living on this planet is boring as fuck.

I see many people are FOSS enthusiasts here. Some only use free software on principle. I like open source alternatives too, but not every time.

As devs, our job is to make software. How can one justify preferring free software for all our needs, yet working on proprietary software?

Does advocating free software devalue your professional skills, while you're working on paid software?

If you do good work and sell your software, then someone releases a free thing solving the same problems, that's obviously bad for you.

Why should software be treated differently than other things? Have you seen a construction company building stuff for free? If you don't want to pay for your house to be built, can you find someone who builds it for you for free? I doubt that.

Yes, you can make your software free and accept donations. But you can't plan with that financially, you still need to be treated and payed as someone who creates value.

I have no problem with free software, I love the fact that many people can find the time and are willing to contribute to the public without compensation. What I'm saying is, software is a product of hard engineering work and builds upon knowledge and experience of individuals, and should be compensated like any other work.

What do you think?

i found this beauty on diaspora (in tribute to the comic artist frank franzetta)

p.s.: i asked the artist if i can use it here, but got no replies. i hope it won't be a problem for him/her.

Build my own business entirely with free/libre software. Generate at least a decent supplementary income from services while still providing source code free of charge.

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

Want to know more about Free and open-source software (FOSS)

I'm gonna spin this as ridiculously awesome meeting. My company is currently expanding the local satellite office in to a full site. Part of that includes building a local presence for recruiting efforts.

I was part of a meeting I organized at my alma mater between my executive partner and two deans of the college. I am leading the effort to help them align their curriculum with modern practices, training them on free software licences with my company, and more. As well, there's an opportunity to train students on an untouched area of big data in the medical industry.

Less than 2 years with the company and partners (local, national, and international) in the company within my work area are sending me kudos.

A few months back I was talking with our web team and we determined a ticketing software would be useful for clients to submit website updates. Rather than request we buy one, because we constantly get told to stop spending, I spent my free time building it out. We tested it and decided it was ready to present to management.

Management tells us that clients aren't going to use something like this (4 fields and optional file upload). The project sits in a repo untouched for some months.

<Time passes>

Company-wide email come in announcing our brand new ticket system for clients to submit issues about our software. Then a second email comes in to me asking why the web team never thought to do something like that and went on about how useful it would be if we had something similar. I link them to the one I built and my notes from our previous meeting.

Manager who told me clients would never use this: Let's talk about this next week and see if we can get people to use it.

It's been 3 weeks and the meeting has been rescheduled 5 times.

The problem when you spend basically all if your technical life working by yourself, is that you are not used to understand programs you didn't create. Specially when there are no documentation or a single line of useful comment.

I've tried to help in an open source software just to get frustrated and fall short because I couldn't understand where things were getting initiated/called and I don't have too much free time to keep trying/searching.

Any tip here? I don't really need to learn that, but I think it is important. We never know about the future and I don't want to get stuck/uninployed in the future if I loose my ~15 years job someday.

Biggest dev ambition? I've got a couple.
For my career, becoming the "go-to-guy" or even lead architect at an ambitious and professional software company. For my free time, releasing one or more apps that people find useful. Also releasing and maintaining a piece of open source software that devs find useful and see potential in. Inspiring others in general.
Those are some goals I've had from the very beginning.

I'd like to locally encrypt files before syncing it with the cloud; what's the "best" software available for this?

I'm currently switching to STACK as my cloud service (it's a file hosting service for Dutch people that offers 1TB of free storage).
But I don't feel fully comfortable with them having access to all my personal data.

So I came to the conclusion that it would be best to locally encrypt files before syncing it with STACK. I DuckDuckGo'd but there seems to be a lot of software available for this so I'm not sure which one to use.

Which one could you recommend me? I'd prefer a free software but I'm okay with paying as long as it isn't too expensive.

Software can be "bug free" only under a very narrow definition of the term, and very specific circumstances that has little to do with the capabilities of the developers.

After all, the outside world is horribly messed up.

If you ever decide to make a software, contact the DBeaver developer team and ask them what they did, then do everything exactly the opposite and I'm sure your software will be the most complete, beautiful, bug-free software in the world. Because I am convinced DBeaver is the most incomplete, ugliest
software full of bugs. And also, did these people ever actually use a database administration tool before they decided to make one? It seems like they haven't to me, otherwise it wouldn't be so user-unfriendly.

Note: I am writing this in my calmest, had I written it 30 minutes ago, you would have seen some ugly words.

Might be good news, maybe not.

And.co was bought by Fiverr and the platform's software was made completely free.

I'm suspicious of Fiverr and every other freelancing platform out there, and am wondering what's the whole point of buying a SaaS and letting people get its services for 'nothing' in return.

Fucking Windows.

Everytime I update the system it acts like it got infected by yet another virus.

Everyone uses this shitty insult of an OS because one day Gates said "hurr durr look how fucking generous I am, y'all get my OS for free". And we got fooled big time.

Any E-mail I try to look up in Outlook that's older than a month doesn't exist, Excel converts anything I type into ISO-timestamps, and the most infuriating thing of all is that whenever something runs in an error, it just gives me a big

FUCK Something went wrong YOU
FUCK Ask your administrator if you have any questions YOU
FUCK Who do you think is sitting infront of the screen you big pile piece of shit software YOU

AFAIK Gates founded Microsoft as the hero mounting against the giants of its time, IBM to be concise. Looks like Microsoft lived long enough to become the villain themselves.

I always see people who say that open source != monetarily free. While I agree that may be technically true, I think practically speaking it is not.

Why do I say this?
Well to my knowledge there isn't any successful company that makes money by actually selling open source software. There are a few companies that have become successful by selling complimentary services like Redhat with Enterprise support or Mozilla with selling ad space in their browser, but none that actually sell the software directly.

!rant

I always hear stories about someone hearing one of our developer friends is a developer and assumes that means they know everything about computers. Hell, I've had it happen to me before (usually the common "oh I have an app idea that's better than facebook! you just have to build it")

A big one I hear if someone asking a developer that has only worked with software to help fix a hardware issue or build a computer. Personally, I'd prefer if someone asked me about a hardware issue (except printers, fuck printers) or to build a computer for them. I've been called a rare breed for knowing about an equal amount about computer hardware and software.

I'd much rather do some physical work building a computer (as simple as a hello world program, a lot of it is putting shit where it fits) than build an entire website or program for someone. But I mean, I might actually know hardware a bit better than I know software, and that's just me. (Obviously never do anything for free when you could be paid for it)

All software tests are "rust free guarantees".

That it is to say, if your car manufacturer issues rust free guarantees, their cars are prone to rust, which means they are shyte.

Stock Android rant

Friend: your phone looks different
Me: yah running stock android
Friend:where is the file manager and it looks weird
Me:that's the price of using stock android
Friend:what's stock android btw
Me:it's clutter free software from Google
Friend:what is clutter free and I don't like it though

Me:I finally give up on him and have my phone back

Ideal job

I do creative projects whatever I want with no deadlines or pressure, everyone loves whatever I make except me because I know I can do better than that last crap I made, getting paid plenty of money to pay off all my family and friends debt and have plenty left over. Specifically making fun programs useful software or web apps and have plenty of free time for taking retreats and going out into nature away from computers and technology.

Some user profiles I thought were worth stealing for a post:

PonySlaystation
"Full Stack Software Engineer, Electrical Engineering Student driven by OCD & Club Mate."

'club mate' read: probably white powder and ritalin. I heard he once dismembered a horse and put the bloody head in a rivals bed.

uyouthe
"Russian assassin leader, Apple fanboy. Tabs ftw"

Comrade, apple is bushwazee capitalist filth. Onlytrue comrades use windows, because the upgrade is free.

Root
"Magical processor fairy; part-time misanthropic bane of idiots. 🧚‍♀️🏹 Ergo sum miseriae"

Do you sprinkle magical processor fairy dust in each new generation of chips to increase their
clock rate?

Unstableness of core technology stack. The more developers are there, the more complicated architecture they create that often doesn’t give any significant value besides what if something goes wrong ?

What if you make mistake ?
What if power goes down ?

I feel I am last optimistic thinking software developer on this planet.

I feel that those tools just try to give some sort of power to the management over developer free mind.

Creatures like multicloud, cloud, k8s I feel that it’s just beginning not the end of road. And this beginning is a wrong turn.

It’s just another vendor lock in.

But I might be wrong.

Is there any free software or website one can use where it takes a screenshot or page and you can mark areas on it, then add comments to those areas? (kind of like powerpoint comments, but without the awkward canvas limitation)

Then later the viewer sees instead of huge message bubbles, only those marked areas on top of the screenshot and when he hovers them - sees the comment pop up somewhere.

I remember QA having something like that, but don't remember anything about it. (I think it had a palmtree logo?..)

It would be amazingly useful for clients to just go through screenshots and marking on it "that looks nasty, put ajit pai on it".

I wonder if software companies leaks their cracked product to internet with viruses to remove users' desire for using their products for free 🤔

Just caught my free antivirus software doing advertisement for another antivirus. I mean like making myself obsolete just because I'm getting the money for it? xD

Zoom free tier calls end after 40 minutes.

Idea: pwyw conference software where the call ends after 40 minutes if the host isn't paying €5 more monthly than everyone else in the call. There is no way to discover whether this is a limited call until the 40 minute mark, and there's no way to discover who outbid the host at all except by getting everyone to show their bank statement.

so my friend and I are canvassing NLEs for our guys at the Post Production squad in our project (we were in charge in infrastructure). We looked at Premiere since it's kinda ok until we found Black Magic Design's Da Vinci Resolve.

First of all, I was suprised with the price. 299 for the Studio Version? Holy fuck, that's cheap as hell! Then there's a free as in free software version which has the core editing features with 1080p rendering. So we grabbed that and kinda suprised it requires postgres but as seeing Resolve having collab and render queues, it makes sense.

Installed them on the PCs the postprods gonna use, they were amazed. We literally saved 500 bucks for an NLE. When they asked how much is it. Our reply was:

"That's free".

and there was silence...

"And it's also 299 bucks for the cooler version".

And silence still ensued.

Guess our guys wasted alot of money on a pipeline that is cheap as hell but more jam-packed than any other NLE found in the market.

Props to you BlackMagic Design.

I'm founding a company on machine learning with two others where one of them is an economics guy who decided his work was boring so he did his PhD in Engineering.

He started about three months ago to also invest some time in computer and dev stuff.

As a free software and Linux guy I wanted to get clear about stuff like open sour...

Economics guy: "We should definitely make all of that stuff open source to give back to the community."

Me: I love you. I truely do.

The same thing happened with security, svn etc.

I mean... Well... So unexpected! o.O

The Odyssey of the Tenacious Tester:

Once upon a time in the digital kingdom of Binaryburg, there lived a diligent software tester named Alice. Alice was on a mission to ensure the flawless functionality of the kingdom's latest creation – the Grand Software Citadel.

The Grand Software Citadel was a marvel, built by the brilliant developers of Binaryburg to serve as the backbone of all digital endeavors. However, with great complexity came an even greater need for meticulous testing.

Alice, armed with her trusty testing toolkit, embarked on a journey through the intricate corridors of the Citadel. Her first challenge was the Maze of Edge Cases, where unexpected scenarios lurked at every turn. With a keen eye and a knack for uncovering hidden bugs, Alice navigated the maze, leaving no corner untested.

As she progressed, Alice encountered the Chamber of Compatibility, a place where the Citadel's code had to dance harmoniously with various browsers and devices. With each compatibility test, she waltzed through the intricacies of cross-browser compatibility, ensuring that the Citadel would shine on every screen.

But the true test awaited Alice in the Abyss of Load and Performance. Here, the Citadel's resilience was put to the test under the weight of simulated user hordes. Alice, undeterred by the mounting pressure, unleashed her army of virtual users upon the software, monitoring performance metrics like a hawk.

In the end, after days and nights of relentless testing, Alice emerged victorious. The Grand Software Citadel stood strong, its code fortified against the perils of bugs and glitches.

To honor her dedication, the software gods bestowed upon Alice the coveted title of Bug Slayer and a badge of distinction for her testing prowess. The testing community of Binaryburg celebrated her success, and her story became a legend shared around digital campfires.

And so, dear software testers, let the tale of Alice inspire you in your testing quests. May your test cases be thorough, your bug reports clear, and your software resilient against the challenges of the digital realm.

In the world of software testing, every diligent tester is a hero in their own right, ensuring that the digital kingdoms stand tall and bug-free.

There are no meetings at the company I work for. GASP!!!
Well...we have one, now and again, but it is just an opportunity for the boss to update the support team with changes to the product and we (i.e. the software engineers) come for the free pizza. GASP!!! I would prefer that we have technical meetings, but it falls on deaf ears.

Is there a good, free software only, security and privacy focused Linux distro out there? I am basically searching for an OpenBSD but as GNU/Linux.

Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.

Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.

Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.

Ok I take back what I said about having luck with hardware and software sometimes, why is it so fucking difficult to setup a linux distribution with your home directory on a seperate drive... Just why...

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Tux be with me

(Please feel free to enlighten me if you are aware of a way I can do this)

The code is under "GNU General public license as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 or any later version" and I used it as a reference.
Should I redistribute the my new code under the same licence and make the source open? Should I make just the component open source or the entire app?

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

Spends 9 months on the side developing a library for analysis of a specific programming language. No help, entirely my own work. There's various tools built upon this library. Incorporates project management, an effective build system capable of parallel and distributed builds, a packaging system...

Beta release the library. Wait four months. Ask the community for who's been using it so I can get feedback and other comments. Majority of the comments follow a specific pattern.

"You don't support X, how dare you!?"

One, this is free software, pay me if you want specific things.
Two, I'm the only developer of a project usually undertaken by a small team.
Three, yes it does you fucking invalid... Every fucking time someone claims it doesn't support some feature, it's something I've already written and validated. I swear to fucking God users can't find something themselves and instead of checking the Wiki or asking for help, they blindly assume they can't make mistakes and it must be my defect.

short: free/cheap music making software?

Can someone recommend me some neat, free (or affordable one-time payment) music composing software / Digital Audio Workstation? I don't have a MIDI keyboard, I'd do everything per mouse/computer keyboard input. Windows btw

Going to be taking my first certification test soon! It's the HTML5 Web Application development fundamentals MTA if you were wondering and im getting it for free so I've started refreshing and studying! Next I'm going for the Software development fundamentals C# and VB!

Guys I need html and CSS programming software any recommendations that are free?

Hi guys,

Been lurking for a while and has been refreshing to see I'm not alone in some of 'interesting' issues I face day-to-day!

I am in a situation where I am a technical lead, but any architecture changes need approval by the MD, any software (free, obviously paid for is understandable!) needs signoff before installing, even if it's to see what it's all about! Essentially anything I should be responsible (no matter how minute) needs signoff before I can even attempt anything.

This is my first time that I am in a role of this level, but it seems like I am responsible for a lot but don't have much control over what I can do about it, is this normal? To me it just seems there is no trust in my judgement, which is not justified considering I'm only just being put into the role!

Spend last two hours trying to get a language pack for Microsoft Office. Two fuckin' hours with just an error saying "Please check your internet connection and see if you have space on disk"

Yes motherfucker, I fuckin have internet connection and I have 1 fuckin terabyte free on my fucking disk.

The only fuckin solution on Office's forum is to uninstall and reinstall the whole office software. Just to add one fuckin language pack.

I'm going crazy... Everyday I hate Microsoft products more and more and fuckin more.

Today is the "I love free software" day :) gonna do a little stream on Youtube for that xD

What you guys think, if there is new software to be made what it should be or what field it should address?

Feel free to add rough ideas also.

TL;DR: Free/cheap software for photo editing?

My sis edits her photos with PicsArt and she sometimes takes mini-jobs for a wedding or something. Yet she seeks some "more professional" editing software (for desktop).

Ofc since it is a hobby she doesn't want to buy adobes kit for photoshop yet on the other hand, pirating it is bullshit when earning money with it.

What are your free/cheap one-time-pay photo editing software recommendations? (I already recommended her affinity and gimp but she doesn't really wanna learn gimp)