a trashcan at our school

Went to hackathon @ Google HQ in NYC. Gotta say it was pretty shitty. Most people are JavaScript nerds and some code in objective-C, xcode (4-5 out of 50). The rest are chemists, scientists and general folks. Not what I anticipated when you know it's more like iOS hackathon. Anyways it was good to see the shittiest demos in my life made in less than 12 hours. We had 4.5 people working on a toilet project called "I gotta go". Public bathroom locator... One guy coded in JS, xcode and react Native. Another dude was pushing all the code to GitHub and doing backend in firebase. The third guy was making a website for no reason and then I see it's hosted weebly. He hand coded first, I looked what he is doing - just HTML tags. Thank God some organizers helped us and we had a 4 click demo with basic text and no real functionality. Plus the website who never seen. What a fucking waste of $100 and two days.

Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.

BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.

So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.

My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.

I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.

After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?

I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.

And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.

Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?

Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.

Just so done.

I hate when one of my cw starts to flood the chat, especially the #general. It goes like:

CW: hey
CW: anyone have a pendrive
CW: ?

Me: I have one (and tells him where he can find on my desk)
Another CW: I have one too

CW: thanks, I'll get the one from <Another CW>
CW: hahahahahaha

You don't need to write a whole thesis in a single message, but at least you should guarantee that each message have some meaningful information, not just "hey", "?" and "hahaha"

Slack is not MSN.

Who should and when it would be a good time to tell him this is a waste of attention?

Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?

Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)

Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit

The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.

I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)

Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!

That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!

He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!

In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!

Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!

That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.

I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.

Some days I'm really not sure if I'm a developer or everybody's general problem solver because I'm an engineer and can think critically about your site configuration THAT YOU SHOULD BE ADMINISTERING YOURSELF!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

"Doesn't work, must be the dev."

Wrong. You misconfigured something and fucked it up. Figure it out yourself - actually read the error message right in front of your face - and don't waste my time.

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

As a junior dev, should I waste my times on Working on real world project or should I just solve leetcode questions all days long (interview questions in general)?

Which one is better for me as a learner?

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

I'm so confused by our architecture and development process in general

We planned what features are to be implemented (e.g. what endpoints should do what), but there are parts of tasks which depend on others, and I'm not sure what classes to build or when to start a task given that related ones are being done by other developers, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing

I could maybe do all of this alone my way if it was just me, but when I ask in planning about how we should go about implementing shit together, I just get backlash from this senior developer telling me we shouldn't waste time discussing implementation details in planning

Like, what the fuck do you want me to fucking do, just implement all the dependencies of what I'm doing from zero, without reusing any of the code other devs are doing that touches on the same parts?

Fucking hell, man, this is the third sprint where I'm confused like this

Maybe I'm just too dumb to be a developer after all lol

I hate General Ed subjects so much.
They waste my time to no end because I hate them and I procrastinate to study them. Meanwhile, I'm not coding because it makes me guilty that I'm focusing on college studies.
Gosh!
#RemoveGenEd

Its kind of funny to me that the same things that were beneficial could have been accomplished by everyone splitting duties in the less enjoyable chores around the country, fixating more on sending construction resources to maintennace, shaving away bad buildings, and waste structures, and in general just being more active and having more free time WITHOUT all the pointless hardship, and the creation of monsters.

Do they take a single thing seriously or tell the truth even once ? Or is everything about trying to get something they have no right to ?

Lately, I've seen in some article against the Electron framework and read some people thought that "the Web, in general, is a waste/curse/..."
Did I miss something somewhere about that? I know Electron has that Java syndrome where it has to pack so many things in one executable while it could be less heavy than this (here, the Chromium browser for instance), but the Web in general?

So I was reminiscing about my hs and uni yrs and thought of the teachers in my hs Sr yr and my uni freshman and semester abroad. I went to business school in uni but freshman year was all classes in the general subjects like calc n physics that everyone had to take no matter what school you were in.

So feels like all that time in bschool was a waste... No memorable moments at least.... Only take away perhaps is maybe I'm a slightly better investor but for that I probably got more from reading interesting classics than from the classes....

I am super frustrated and don't have the energy to translate into a general language so here goeas some hinglish venting:

bc bosses ne leni deni kr rkhi hai... itna badhiya relaxed hoke chutti se wapis aaya tha, 2 din me mood ka bhosada kr diya apni harkato se.
yes, bosses , saala systummm chal rha h boss pe boss pe boss ka.
sardi me saare velle huye pade hai to harr aadhe ghnte me meeting le rhe h.

almost saari team ne aukaat dikhai hui hai , koi 5 din ki chutti pe to koi 7 din ki chutti pe, to jo mil rha h bs usi ko pele jaa rhe hai ye ppt ke chode.

mereko ek feature banane ko diya hua h... saala har cheez pehle idhr udhr delegate krke 15 din ke kaam ko 45 din ka bana diya, ab release deadline pass hai to meeting pe meeting rakh rhe h . bhosadiwaalo , meeting rakhne se tumhare baap ka code tumhari maa likhegi?

upr se thand bc.... itti thand me kon tumhare tatte chaatne office jaa rha h? jo jaa rha h usi ko bulao mereko ghr pe rajai me kaam krne do. saala gaand sookh ke aadu ho gyi h thand se, nd inhe fir bhi metro se 2 ghnte lgane ke baad banda office me chahiye . team me bs 7 lund h(technically 5 lund and 2 !lund) nd unke se 5 bahane maar ke ghr pe baithe huye h... ek langoorni manager aa jati h apne boss ke boss ka hilane... nd expect krti hai mai bhi aake saathme hilau. mereko nahi hilana yaar :'(

4 gnte to travel me waste krwa do, parking space maango to bolenge ki tumhara band level kam h, office me inka wifi vpn ke saath apni maa chudata h 2kbps ki speed se . emulator gaand marvate hai, nd fir bhi inhe banda chahiye office me nd feature ready chahiye 2 din me.

agar khud gaand me ungal nahi dete , to inki policies gaand me ungli krti h... saala 9 bje app le saare dev server band... oh maiiyavo din me 5 ghnte meeting rkhne ke baad tumhe lgta h ki koi kaam hua hoga.. nd bande ko khane hugne mootne me bhi 1-2 ghnte chale jaate h ghr pe... ek to tumhara time waste ko compensate krna chah rha hu apni marzi se raat me kaam krke, but tumhari gaand me usse bhi keede hai... to rote raho bc. meri jhaat tumhe degi festure banake Christmas se pehle.. bhupp

saala kachha utaar ke khol ke baith jaata hu, aake saare bosses ekek krke meri maar lo