Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

I'm 40 years old today. Feels strange.. and getting older as a developer is not an advantage at all. But I got a wonderful little baby, a wife and a job I (almost always) like! So happy birthday to me 😊

Be more passive

I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.

I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.

Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.

Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.

But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.

If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.

If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.

*Pours another chocolate milk*

Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.

So I'm working on a computer vision project that grabs video from my webcam and detects faces in each frame. Earlier yesterday morning I was capping out at 30 frames per second, which is what I believe to be the max for my webcam. As the day became night and I was wrapping up my work on a portion of the project, I noticed that my newly compiled version was only getting around 8 frames per second. Confused, I looked into my frame grabbing + face detection code.

"Maybe I can only detect faces in a certain region of the image, based on where the face was in the previous image?" No, still 8fps. Hmm.

"How about I lower the resolution of the image, that would definitely help!" I tried that, but no speed boost came either. What??

I start to dig deeper. Maybe I'm not linking my libraries correctly, and it's using an older library I compiled. So I recompile that. Nothing.

"Am I low on resources?" I close out of all my other apps. Nothing.
Okay, wtf. Now I just comment out the face detection code entirely, and only grab webcam frames.

8fps. ?????

Suddenly, I get an idea. I get out of my desk, walk over to the doorway of my room, and flip the light on. I sit back down, and run my code.

30fps.

The stupid webcam switches to "night mode" when it detects low light, which restricts its ability to output frames at high speed and caps at 8fps. Damn, I felt like a fool 😂

!rant

My personal wisdom of the day: You know you are getting older if you are too lazy to crack you program licenses and instead buy them legally.

Getting older. I've been needlessly worried about my age as a developer since I was 23, which is hilarious.

People always need good devs. You don't have to become a manager or commit suicide at 30. Just be awesome and someone will pay you.

Just the other day I got back from getting an extra monitor.. and just when I came back home, some older lady that also lives in this residence came to me, all panicked because her left car lights wouldn't turn off. So she asked me whether I could fix it, because I'm a man and therefore technical... Yeah.

Told her I don't know anything about cars (I don't even have a driver's license), and she should ask someone else.. but she kept clinging on to me and eventually I figured.. screw it, how hard can it be?

Got to her car, yada yada yada.. lady opens the door, and it's full of fucking buttons everywhere! No fucking way that I'm gonna dabble with those. So, do the easiest thing first.

"Ma'm, could you please turn on the car?"
*Turns car on, all lights light up*
🤔 Fair enough...
"Hmm.. and what happens if you turn it off now?"
*Turns car off, all lights go off*

Lady: "I've got no idea how you've done it but thank you so much, you're an angel!! 😊"
Me: "Well.. 😅 let's just say that turning it on, off and back on again works at least 90% of the time..."

HOW IS IT AUGUST 1 RIGHT NOW

2019 ENDS SOON BUT IT STARTED LIKE YESTERDAY

WHAT IS HAPPENI

WHY IS TIME GETTING FASTER THE OLDER YOU GET?

JUST FCK OFF THIS IS NOT NORMAL

I GOTTA HURRY TF UP AND DO SOME SHIT WITH MY LIFE BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT☠️☠️☠️💨💨🌬

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Proprietary video format. Native iOS app. Ok.

Using swift to decode and render. Ok.
Kills battery and is actually too slow on older devices. Ok..

Diving into armv7 neon assembly, it puts the "ok" in "pleasure".. Ok.....

Getting it to work. Fast frames. Yes. Ok!
Battery still stressed..ok.
Just need to get rid of the brown tint.. ok.

The tint became a brand mark. iPhone gone. Ok! Hours later, received email.

Vendor upgraded to serve h264 over http.
"Kill yourself with fire, ok?"

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

Getting older means attending more meetings.

!rant I'm beginning my nerd project of getting my IBM 5150 to the internet via my raspberry pi and a terminal emulator. Oh and the IBM has a 4gb (yes gigabytes) HDD in the form of a compact flash.

The pi is a model B. Even as an older pi, look at the difference in size versus performance!

The 5150 is 4.77 mhz

The Pi is 900mhz

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

It's my 19th birthday today! I've had a good year as a programmer, my best yet actually. A year ago I never would have thought about coding a browser but now I'm building up to it with smaller projects like programs that communicate to each other from other computers, more advance gui, c language and wrapping c with python. I never thought I'd get to this but I'm only getting better and I thank this community for being here supporting me. Honestly I cant wait for this year and I cant wait to post more :)

Had a miserable evening yesterday. Me and my gf planned going out around 9pm to this movie with 2 other couples. Movie was kinda okay and we finished around midnight and went over to our apartment for drinks. We had lots of snacks and drinks ready, other couples brought some drinks.

Evening was kinda weird, guests were mainly just ranting about their work and household life and 2 hours in they started asking each other wether they should go home. In the end they left around 3am. I felt kinda defeated: some effort went into planning everything, and in the end I didnt feel much of a connection to them.

Maybe everyone was tired after a workday + late movie + drinks after the movie. But idk I expected more from people in late 20s. When planning we had two options: meeting on saturday or friday and they chose friday.

Anyways I guess either we are getting older or we just need to meet less often and more early in order not to run out of energy and stuff to talk about.

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

Top gripes about getting older as I'm about to turn 40:

5. Actually starting to have moments at home after work where I'm contemplating saying 'Hey babe, wanna bang?' but before I can get the words out my body pipes in with 'Dude, cool your jets, we're wiped out today; check back tomorrow.' Women say they like older guys because <insert character trait here> but I'm now convinced it's just because they know there's less work involved. =/

4. Friends with young children. I hardly ever see them anymore, and when I do, all they talk about are their kids and their shitty relationship with their co-parent. The circle continues to get smaller...

3. Having to go get glasses in order to renew my driver's license. How do we not have a heads-up display in every vehicle by now that shows the street numbers of buildings as I'm perpendicular to them as well as the names of upcoming cross streets? That way I'd fix the problem the way I do for everything else: notch up the font scaling on my display a point or two. Elon, you're slipping...

2. Realizing that the "American Dream" isn't worth the paper it was printed on. (Anyone else remember paying 97¢ for a gallon of gas or $2 for a pack of Marlboros?) Concurrent realization: It's not easy to find work in another country without moving there first, even if you speak the language. Any devs in Portugal that read this, ligue-me.

1. Being too busy to just chat with new people I meet except on rare occasion. Mostly referring to work time here, when it seems I'm always needing to find the shortest route to the objectif du jour. If I could tell my teenage self just one piece of advice, it'd probably be "start your career in Europe, not the USA" but I really want it to be "treasure the time you spend on IRC talking about anything and everything with people that always have time for you and vice versa, because it's going to be over before you know it."

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

Tried getting enough sleep for the Monday and failed miserably.
First, I made my kids washed, like usual, around 6pm. Then tried to put them to sleep. The younger one went to sleep, the older refused. Wanted to play, run, jump, sing and scream. After an half an hour his screaming woke up younger. Now I had two kids to put to sleep back again.
The younger is one year old and requires more attention, otherwise cries.
After serious fight the older was forced to sleep. He tried to jump over me, bite me, kick, hit, eat chocolate, wanted to pee, then jump, run and fight again. I ended up lying him forcibly in the bed, holding his hand by kind of a block, so that he couldn't move to much. Took 15 minutes, but he felt asleep. It was 22. Joys of having 3yo kid.
After more 30 minutes and a bottle of milk the 1yo was sleeping.
At 2am the older woke and cried. I woke, tried to make him calm, he pushed me away and went back to sleep. Now it's 3:40, my sleeping pill wore off, and I won't take another one, because I need to get up at six.

This is how you get a good night's sleep before having a busy week.

So one of my clients had a different company do a penetrationtest on one of my older projects.

So before hand I checked the old project and upgraded a few things on the server. And I thought to myself lets leave something open and see if they will find it.

So I left jquery 1.11.3 in it with a known xss vulnerability in it. Even chrome gives a warning about this issue if you open the audit tab.

Well first round they found that the site was not using a csrf token. And yeah when I build it 8 years ago to my knowledge that was not really a thing yet.

And who is going to make a fake version of this questionair with 200 questions about their farm and then send it to our server again. That's not going to help any hacker because everything that is entered gets checked on the farm again by an inspector. But well csrf is indeed considered the norm so I took an hour out of my day to build one. Because all the ones I found where to complicated for my taste. And added a little extra love by banning any ip that fails the csrf check.

Submitted the new version and asked if I could get a report on what they checked on. Now today few weeks later after hearing nothing yet. I send my client an email asking for the status.

I get a reaction. Everything is perfect now, good job!

In Dutch they said "goed gedaan" but that's like what I say to my puppy when he pisses outside and not in the house. But that might just be me. Not knowing what to do with remarks like that. I'm doing what I'm getting paid for. Saying, good job, your so great, keep up the good work. Are not things I need to hear. It's my job to do it right. I think it feels a bit like somebody clapping for you because you can walk. I'm getting off topic xD

But the xss vulnerability is still there unnoticed, and I still have no report on what they checked. So I have like zero trust in this penetration test.

And after the first round I already mentioned to the security guy in my clients company and my daily contact that they missed things. But they do not seem to care.

Another thing to check of their to do list and reducing their workload. Who cares if it's done well it's no longer their responsibility.

2018 disclaimer: if you can't walk not trying to offend you and I would applaud for you if you could suddenly walk again.

RANT:
Google is just a steaming pile of shit!!

I've recently installed LineageOS onto my phone and wanted to degooglify my life.

So my current Smartphone doesn't have any GApps installed and I get along fairly well.

Should I need anything, I should just be able to use it in my browser right?
RIGHT?

Nono!! As soon as I want to log into a third party Service using Google (older acccounts with the other choice only being Facebook) I need to "verify my identity". And the only option are my old smartphone who still have Gapps on it but are slow and don't accessible when I'm away!

For those who say: "Google is just beeing secure. They don't want anyone to steal your account.". I USE 2FA AND HAVE BACKUP CODES.
BEFORE DEGOOGLING MY DEVICE IT NEVER ASKED SUCH A THING!!! WHAT A PILE OF SPYING SHIT!!!

And the best part, after I remotely started my PC at home and just want to take a screenshot of the message for this post before just using a working session, the message didn't appear.
Somehow google decided that me logging in 15 mins later (same ip) proves my identity?!?!?!

IF THIS CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO AI. FUCK THIS SHIT. GOOGLED SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE AN ONLINE CASINO BECAUSE THE CHANCE OF JUST GETTING LOGGED SEEMS COMPLETELY RANDOM!!!

(I also had this prior when using my smartphone browser. There I couldn't "circumvent" this and I was at home. But having this shit on my browser which should've a session is unacceptable.)

I have finally decided to stop helping people setup a proper machine learning environment inside of their machines with Proper GPU support.

I-fucking-give-up.

Goggle Colab, EVERYONE is getting dey ass sent to Colab. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK about privacy and shit like that at this fucking moment, getting TIRED af of getting messages about someone somehow fucking up their CUDA installation, and/or their entire machine (had one dude trying to run native GPU support through WSL 2, their machine did not have the windows update version 2004 and he has on an older build, upon update he fucked everything up EVEN THOUGH I TOLD HIM NOT TO DO IT YET)

.......fuck it, I am sending everyone to Colab. YES I UNDERSTAND THAT PRIVACY IS A THING and Goggle bad and all that jazz......but if you believe in Roko's Basilisk then I AM DOING THEM A FAVOR

I work hard to get our robot overlords into function, let it be known here, I support our robot overlords and will do as much as possible to bring them to life and have me own 2b big tiddy with a nice ass android.

I should also mention that I've had a few drinks on me already and keep getting these messages.

I like model railways. I also like embedded electronics.

I therefore enjoy combining the two in my free time quite a bit - putting arm processors on trains and getting them to do cool stuff. I'm also happy to dish out electronics advice to other model railway guys, a lot of whom are older and have literally no clue (but will create stunningly realistic scenes that are a million miles away from my lowly efforts.)

But bloody hell - is it hard to do so without being drowned out by incompetent sods who think they know it all because... reasons. I think I may just stop attempting to help beyond this point. This is the latest nugget I've had to contend against - I guess he's heard about skin effect, but since DCC works at around 8Khz and using anything more than 1.5mm core cable is ridiculous for a model railway, even that is complete baloney.

Other electrical nuggets I've heard from this group include "only washing machines run on AC, everything else is DC", "the colour of the wire matters otherwise it could short circuit", and "driving your old trains with a DCC signal will make them run better, because it's more modern". 😬

First time back to work today after a month long break. It was soul crushing. I don’t know if I’m permanently burnt out or just seriously disenfranchised with the corporate world but I would have thought after a holiday I would be energised and ready to go. It turns out after coming back to work I feel exactly the fucking same! Tired, exhausted, discontent, irritable and most importantly BORED. I am bored spending 8+ hours a day at a computer chair responding to emails and teams messages! Has anyone felt like this before? Did you ever overcome it? I’m worried as I’m getting older I’m losing my love more and more for programming whilst simultaneously hating the concept of work more and more.

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

I feel like I am getting years older every day in this job..

Could someone help me find a mobile developer position (Android I prefer)..

Okay, so yesterday was crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm not even typing this on my phone. I'm typing it on an LG G4.

So, I took an Uber out to a Sprint store I'd been told did repairs. My phone's vibrator was broken. So, basically I thought just like that R&M episode "20 minutes adventure in and out" - only to find out they'd need to wipe my goddamn phone, and then send it to Texas. I now have to wait 6 days for my phone lmfao.

So, in the meantime, they took an hour to get me this G4 which makes me miss all the finer things in life - I miss my USB-C and not having to give a damn about how I plug it in and I miss my fingerprint reader (I know, I'm a lazy fuck with first-world problems. I don't care to hear about how fucking stupid I am for either of those thoughts, STFU). Also the G4 is prone to hardware failures, so they said they weren't too happy about giving me this, but it's the only one with NFC.

So in the middle of setup, the Sprint store's power went out. FUUUUUUCK. The phone was pretty much at 5% battery and was being slow as hell, so you can just about imagine the irritation me and this guy had when the phone died in the middle of setup.

The next thing is an unrelated story, but I'm sure some of you older guys here will love this. I was at a place called Triangle Park last night. I go there for burgers, but they also have a bar. Sometimes I get sent to the bar and the bartender gets me my food. So last night I went to pick the food up from the bar for takeout.

The bartender must've had an accident and messed something up, so she told me to sit at the bar. I thought it was obvious I was only 19, so I barely sat. I'm literally not old enough to sit at the bar, even though when I was younger my dad and his friends used to let me sit with them because I had a history of saying stupid shit that made his friends laugh. Nonetheless, I sat with my ass hanging off the edge because I knew it was wrong :/

She comes back and asks what type of drink I want. I had to tell her that I was 19. I wasn't gonna sit here and lie because I'm pretty sure she could've lost her job for serving a minor. I exited and waited in the lobby.

But are we at the point where 19-year-olds look like 25-year-olds? I don't want to think about this because it means I'm getting older. That's a lot to take in. Later in the night it was still gnawing at my gut.

Yesterday was one hella day man.

Imagine life as a Game,
Levels are Ages, if you have gotten older your level increases, and lifes getting easier and harder, easier with Knowledge and harder because of Diseases, challenges, kids etc...
Quests are life goals, such as having kids,
having a job, a family etc...
Side-Quests are jobs your getting from your boss, Jobs from Clients, Helping the Family, Cleaning your Room, etc..
Fast-Travel is Cars, Busses, Trains, Trams, etc... (Except in Germany)
and Last but not least,
Procastination, The End Boss of life, if you defeat Procastination you have beaten life... (But also died because the game is Over...)

Seriously wtf? I wanted to play a new game. So I found Elden Ring on sale. But the first 30 minutes in the game is video/cutscenes so far. How can that reasonably be considered game play if it counts against the 2 hours of trial period? I don't play Skyrim in 3rd person, but I like that I can switch in and out to look at things.

I didn't like the feel of the combat system and I didn't like that it locked the 3rd person view. I hate playing in 3rd person as it is nearly always janky. How can that game be that popular with no option for 1st person?

I must be getting old. If a game doesn't feel the way I like, I bail on it. It has been this way with the last 3 or 4 Steam games I tried. Is it me, or has gaming in general gone to shit? I want an RPG with simple open world aspects, a non locked storyline that you can do if you want, maybe a vast generated world, and the ability to build things. I like FFX, but it takes a while to unlock "do what you want mode". It has party/character development, but no building.

I feel like the 2 hour trial period is too short. Not enough time to give the game a chance. I would have stuck it out if it gave me more time. I bailed because of janky 3rd person. Not enough time to get used to it imo.

I would rather play older titles I can trust to be fixable than new games. I am seeing people who play Skyrim come back to playing Skyrim after trying Starfield for a month. That is not a good sing for Starfield.

Maybe I just know what I want and have no time to be fucking around with new takes on game play. It is funny. I have 3 or 4 games I bought on sale from Steam that I have never played. Or played very little. I played Wild Hunt for like an hour and never played again. I didn't refund that one because I will get around to it, but I don't know when.

they say everything "old" is better, but in programming, dependencies in C was a mess. Shut up. Sometimes C is a cult enforced by those who don't even write in C. Now I build my projects with Parcel in less than a second with no configuration. It uses a full-blown AST for everything. If I want more performance with similar DX, I use fastpack, bringing build time down to tens of milliseconds.

art? charli xcx, sophie xeon, death grips, just to name a few. they made things that weren't imaginable before, ultimately pushing music forward. Hendrix is good but they're just incomparable in terms of beauty, complexity and sophistication.

literature? every old book I read feature same conflicts. they are so similar it's almost boring to read them. meanwhile, Erlend Loe delivers a complex idea without using a conflict (!) and without any character changes. that's insane.

"older is better" is getting old. it's time for you to seek for some other reusable gibberish to insult what other people create.

finally, let me remind you that you, my friend, create nothing.

IPMI...

2010....

Java Web...

Oracle JDK needed....

Oracle JDK Download requires Oracle Account..... To circumvent as I don't want a motherfugging shitty oracle account tons of googling and loading shit from not so trustful pages.

TLS 1.0 and WebJDK require Internet Explorer.....

And an even older version of Oracle JDK 8....

Broken keyboard input....

As on Laptop for Windows / Internet Explorer additionally struggling with keyboard...

Mounting SMB Share requires password change, as my password contains invalid characters....

Finally getting shit to load GParted...

Taking fucking ages to load.

Broken keyboard input, no pasting.....

Chrooting / input becomes a 15 min exercise.

Actual input necessary on chroot: 1 command.

Actual time needed to get there : 2 1/2 h.

*sigh*

When that one old machine dies noone was aware of. And this one old machine is only accessible via an IPMI... As noone even knows where that machine is.

Weekend dead. Weekend is so fucking dead and overrated.

I got a new job recently(that's an older rant's story) and I find amusing that I'm still getting reject notices from job offers which I applied to... 2 months ago 😂

That one from 2 months ago is quite funny cuz I didn't have any other interview with the company, just like the first interview with a HR lady, so after one week I gave up with that company and moved on. So I received the rejection notice today and my first thought was "how considerate!"

Rock, meet hard place. I’m losing my employment again. I’m tired of web development, which I’ve never been super great at, and want to switch to something else. But how do I do that and what do I switch to if this is what I’ve been doing for over 20 years and I have to get a new job soon without time or money to get a whole new education and career path? Getting older also means this old dog is having a harder time learning new tricks. Wish I could just retire early.

God I can't wait to get a new phone.

Going from a shit phone to a mediocre phone to an older flagship and back to mediocre really shows how bad the mediocre one was.

Since my first one was shit, the mediocre was like "wow this is nice!"

Mediocre to (an older) flag ship was amazing, because it kinda felt like I was still using a relevant device and getting a nice experience.

Now I'm back to a mediocre phone and I must say, all the faults I didn't notice before the flagship are basically screaming at me now and every day I'm forced to use this phone makes me hate it even more.

This is PART 2/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering course years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 6: After the previous drama MT built the groundwork for the project without allowing us to intervene for a week. When he finally disclosed his code he gave us tasks and I was stuck unable to run the new project, due to the friction with MT I asked SR for help which took a couple of days. MT accused us of not wanting to work and claimed he’d just do everything himself. I continued working on the task improving MT’s code and committed the work, which surprised MT and told me I didn’t have to do it. He ended up complimenting my code and complained less about me as a result.

Rant 7: MT kept giving SR flak for not working and took him out of the repo, which I promptly forked just in case he tried anything scummy. SR was indeed working on certain things, but he wasn’t listening to MT’s demands, there was no team coordination. I had to act as a proxy and push some of SR’s changes myself while informing him of the state of things.

Rant 8: When MT finally added SR back and some of the tasks were cleared up, FT didn’t cooperate. She seemed to have zero initiative and always relied on MT to tell her what to do, which didn’t include coordinating with SR to get the front-end templates running. I tried getting them in a group chat but it didn’t work, she just ignored him.

I learned a few things from that.
1. No matter how smart or experienced someone may seem, sometimes people are just petty or take things too personally.
2. Top students are sometimes too focused on their grades and disregard depth of knowledge and work quality.
3. A bad team at college can somehow make something acceptable if everyone works on things that add some kind of value.

A bit late for wk61 but here goes:

Does anyone have any advice for an older dev (just turned 50) during job hunting?

One of the devs on my current project was let go some years a go, and hasn't found a new job yet.

He keeps applying to positions, but keeps getting rejected and being told "we went with another candidate".

Choosing the young buck who will leave in a year over a older dev who still can contribute for ten years seems like the most common descicion.

I hired him on the current project I'm doing for a client, which is on iOS, and I've thought him swift and the general process of development on ios. And he's taking to it really well :)

I hope this will better his chances, but the current client won't have the resources to hire someone full time now.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

Monday marks the beginning of a new month. In the new month, I turn a year older. As I steer further and further away from "youthfulness", I intend on starting a new chapter in my life.

Sunday 28th Feb is the last day I put any investment towards my "white-collar" professional career. Beginning March 1st, all my energy is going towards my entrepreneurial career instead.

This means that instead of learning that Huawei HCIA networking certification that I hate, I'm going to continue learning Docker (then Kubernetes) which I intend to use on my first product & the many more to come. Instead of studying the horrifyingly boring Data Science course, I'm instead going to put my energy behind understanding GCP & AWS, with the hopes of eventually getting certified.

Basically, I'm going to put all my energy into learning technologies that interest me AND have the potential to help me deliver on my entrepreneurial journey faster & better, rather than studying certifications which everyone believe will make me more employable.

Unfortunately, there aren't that many jobs going around & I'm currently under a year long internship with extremely smart graduates (a valedictorian included). The joke is we're earning $250 a month and have zero hope of getting employed anytime soon. I'm tired of going down this path.

I'm glad I got my degree in CS, now onto creating job opportunities for my fellow peers!

PS: Expect rants about my entrepreneurship challenges, and celebrations about my entrepreneurship wins!

So I just did my morning shopping and only one register was open. There was an older gentleman in the front, who took some more time getting cigarettes and paying his total. Well Mr. Important in his nice suit decided that took too long: "Lady! Please open another register! People don't have time, I have to go to work!"
The cashier called in for another register to be opened and once that guy made his way to the other line, she said "My mother always told me, if you don't have time for shopping, don't." 😂
ALSO GUESS WTF THAT GUY WAS BUYING, JUST A SOME CHEAP FUCKING CIGARILLOS HE COULD'VE GOTTEN EVERYWHERE ELSE THAT'S NOT A SUPERMARKET

NO FUCKING WONDER I SUCKED-ASS IN HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA!!!!!

Arghgghhghgh ughhh....

I want to beef up the hell out of my Maths Chops so I can maybe try going back to school for a A.S. in EE or hell even an B.S.

I'm using my company's Safari Learning account for getting free-ish access to college algebra books and I'm self studying.

I'm still in Chapter 0 where the book covers shit you're supposed to know from previous years of education. I'm just learning about some of this shit now!!!

While it's possible that I didn't pay attention in high school lectures, I took geometry in 9th grade and was an A/B+ student and felt confident in maths. I got to Algebra II in High School and suddenly nothing made sense anymore, reality fucking-fell-apart!

Suddenly, I'm failing tests left and right and struggling with the lecture concepts and I could never seem to grasp materials covered in class anymore to even be able to finish the homework assignments.

Fast forward to me being 15 years older and wanting to take a stab at this shit again, but with new found determination to get into EE so I can fuck around with small electronics for pet projects I want to do. I'm starting with College Algebra to try and learn when suddenly, low and behold I have a HUGE FUCK-MOTHERING GAP in my core understanding of the language/syntax/grammar of mathematics.

Been fucking knee-capped for the last decade+ because I either slacked off during those fundamental lectures (which again; is totally plausible) or I had a complete fucking imbecile for a math teacher that glossed over the topics and fucked not only me but the 40+ other kids in that class.

I'm not going to blame the teacher, although I really fucking want to, but I can't remember how the class scored on tests or homework to be able to fairly and objectively make that judgement against the educator.

FUCK!!! I hate my 15 y.o. self right now

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Okay, so, my company does some stuff around blockchain. I had source for smart contract prepared before and it was on 'todo' queue. So, time for it, time to deploy on Kovan, time to test it on actual chain. Riiiight? Okay compiled no problem, deployed, no problem, i plug into several gui's ABI provided by compiler, and... Well..

I still do not understand why each and every gui prompted me to send view transactions (external view), instead of, well, eval them locally, i checked the ABI manually, it is correct, i stripped it down, it is correct, all up to spec.

I try older version of offline MEW, to have older web3.js with no success that thing works properly.

Every
Single
Web3.js based client
Behaved
Differently

And none behaved correctly.

I would, like, understand, if I didnt use official compiler, but official compiler should for F sakes be compatible with official client.

Today this stole 6 hours of my life, I didnt manage to solve it, and I am legitmitely pissed.

Im getting close to re-implement segment of web3JS to be able to do the tests I need to do.

Its not like I havent done it before....

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Not university. I hate the whole stigma behind university and that the only way to have a successful career is by getting a degree. I started learning myself by just googling stuff when i was 11 and was more interested in it when i grew older and was about 15 when i started watching a lot of YouTube tutorials, reading online articles and made a GitHub account. The best way to learn is by having passion for it, knowledge will come itself as long as you're determined to achieve.

I feel so lost all the time Everytime I think about the future. How are you all going forward?

- What should i be doing ? I used to like computer science when it was taught with lots of simplification and abstraction (in the school level). Now i know there are a 100+ research areas/work areas/branches in it, and i am an average in all of them.

I like most of them more or less, and won't mind giving away my years of life working/learning them. But for what and why?

-- Money? Every profile turns into a decent salary after a certain time. This means i can ride any boat i want.

-- Passion/interest? Now what exactly is this?as i said everything feels doable, given enough time to get a hang of it.

-- Fame? Its rare the developes, testers or other individuals in computer science ever gets a solo credit. Most of the time its either the ceos, the researchers or the company itself. So i guess getting a fame is equal to burning your neighbors by flaunting your cash for most ppl

-- Happy life? Meh, this point is affected by a lot of other factors. Would come back to this point later

- everyday in my feed, there are people showing 6, 7 sometimes even 8 figure salaries. Other people would get inspired with those, but i feel very weird about these.

I never see myself earning those, idk why. Why would someone give me those huge amounts?

How do you find yourself deserving for ythat big ass money? At what point you hit that realisation? Here is a small story :

I did an Android dev course around 2.5 years ago. There was a guy there an year older than me. He was very bad in this, i tell you. Most of the time, i was explaining the concepts to him after class.so last year he graduated, and took a job, We both used to expect a decent salary amount, say x (with me having a little ego that i expect certainly more than him, say x+20% ), but he took a job for half that number , say x/2.

After 1 increment and 1 job shift in 1.5 years, he has now successfully achieved package greater than x. I on the other hand, being still at college and with a lot of bad internship experiences now feel that i won't be getting even x/3 at my start no matter what.

- There is also this thing about people going into more of a management and other non tech roles once they start growing in this field. Why? What did they realized? I am sure not everyone of them would have hit this realization that tech is not what they want to do (which i can't understand why). Maybe its the money and/or happy life expectations?

i have started to feel dumb for not being able to think innovative new ideas and being an average mind :/

And about the happy life, so far its not much happiness for me, and am confused.

I am grateful about the usual things i have (healthy middle class parents, working body, roof , food,etc) , unhappy about the things i don't and see with others (more money, materialistic assets, confidence, siblings, social life, love life, etc) and that's it.

From what i understood of 21 years on this earth is that everyone is running to achieve that list of their desires and wants to move them from todo to done, like trello task. If you can't then keep fighting to achieve or grudgingly accept the fact that you couldn't and be happy about it.

So is that it? That's your happy life goals?

In the early 2010s, at select locations, Nokia Oro phone was offered bundled with a portable IPL hair removal device. Its enclosure was made entirely of leather, layers upon layers of compacted leather of different kinds. It gave you access to Queer Mode™ — engage it and have sex with any of your thoughts. Your mind was your oyster, but it was in fact being turned into a two-bedroom all-white apartment designed by Karim Rashid.

As the tech was getting older, the only way to source capacitors was syncing your Alienware table clock with the root node using a non-laptop that had shapeshifting black goo for keyboard.

Small puppy that ran Windows 8 was always smothered in shit. The white non-kitten ran Nokia’s version of QNX.

Reading through a tutorial / blog post, getting all excited, then realizing it was dated 5 year ago, and with a completely obsolete version of the library you're working with.

Bloggers, tech doc people, and companies (I'm looking at YOU IBM) really need to at least date and version their articles! Please!

Mind you, search engines will happily serve up older code even when you're being specific (and no, I didn't mean "dance studio").

Is it any wonder developers bristle when high level management admonishes them for not "looking for help earlier"?

Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.

I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.

I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.

It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.

Back to my iPhone for now...

🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵

With ~15 experience in the industry, I'm finding that my resume is getting increasingly unruly in terms of length.

I try to keep each role description to 4 or 5 targeted and concise bullet points focusing on achievements and responsibilities, with the older roles having as few as 2 or 3 bullet points. But after multiple roles at various companies over the years, my resume has hit the 5-page mark when including the summary, applicable tools/programs, certifications, and education.

I'm curious how others here deal with lengthy resumes. The overall length can definitely be reduced by switching to a different template, but even then I feel as though I'll run into the same problem with more length-conscious templates after a couple more roles in the future.

!rant but a question...

I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?

I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.

I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.

Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!

Dependencies suck.

I wanted a ruby gem and needed an older version of ruby to run it. Fine, what's the best way to get multiple ruby versions on one system, apparently rvm.

Now I want rvm.

I can't have rvm without getting gnupg first though.

Before I can get gnupg I need brew.

Now I have brew setting my computer on fire compiling god knows what so it can get gnupg so I can get rvm so I can get the ruby version I want to get the gem I want!

It's been running for quite a while...

This isn't the first or last time that the convenience of packages and versions leads to a maze like trail of prerequisites you need to follow.

I'm sure there's some tool that would've helped with my problem, but the problem shouldn't be this bad to begin with!

I understand why it happens but it still sucks and it's a lot of wasted time.

Frankly I'm expecting some people will have gotten so used to this kind of insanity that they won't get why I'm renting about it, oh well, it made me feel better and gave me something to do while brew is melting my machine.

So a bit ago I posted a rant saying that I would be getting ElementaryOS onto my computer and trying it out, buckle up kiddos because this goes to shit in just a moment.

I did everything right, used Rufus correctly and didn't destroy my computer nor my installer, good! I set it up, get everything going and everything is running smoothly. One problem... I couldn't download **any** programs that weren't from the Ubuntu Store, which really annoyed me because I like to use Brackets, and I couldn't find it in the UStore...

So I messed up **really** bad here... I didn't *format* my Elementary Installer, but tried to delete the files like a pleb and stick an Ubuntu ISO in it's place, I didn't even think on going through Rufus again, I just slapped that shit in there without a thought.

I restart my computer, I read a forum stating that I would get an option that allows Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) to take over the partition of a previous distro. Neat! Another bloody problem is that I decided to use "Win + R" and manually delete the Elementary partition **myself**... What is even wrong with me...

So I restarted it, and before my father left to go shopping, he said I should go into the BIOS to change the boot order (Now this is where I **really fucked up**. Thought what I said before was bad?).
Cool, so I boot my PC and go into the BIOS, now I couldn't figure out on my computer where the boot order was, when it was right in my face the whole damn time... I managed to almost destroy my entire BIOS with the fucking file in my USB stick, because I was being an idiot...

I restart, GRUB opens up with a black screen and white text in the top left corner, know what the most important line is in that small block of words? "unknown filesystem"... Of fucking course I fucked it that bad, GRUB didn't even give me the option of just using Windows 10 instead, just quietly gave me the middle finger since I basically nearly fucked everything.

What's funny is that I had someone (who lives with us, let's call him Jeff) look at my computer because I was done being a dumbass.
He told me that I still had my BIOS (which was a bloody relief, because I thought I basically destroyed my computer doing what I did) and that all I need to do is fix the installer I tried to use.

I gave him the USB and just started to play on my phone.
Then I remembered something maybe an hour or so ago... I had an older installer that I used on my shitty laptop awhile back, if I can find it again I could just use that instead of waiting on Jeff. I dug around my room and found the USB that had a working Ubuntu ISO on, correctly placed inside this time.

I basically walked up to my computer, plugged it in and started it up, and it worked. I got Ubuntu and Windows 10 back, and I was basically laughing like I just saved a man's life.

Moral of this story: Don't be like me and do something stupid, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're attempting at...

My main project in work is making program in C# (right now .NET Standard) that can read scans of invoices that are sent from contractors. I'm working on it for almost two years now (with breaks and only halftime because university). Alone. And for last two months I've been redesigning, refactoring and making whole app "better", using experience and knowledge gained in the last two years.

Obviously my boss wasn't happy with that but I got him to accept it, promising that it'll make it work faster, expansion will be simpler and I'll make core as a separate library that can be used anywhere, not only in the JobRouter ecosystem.

And so I reworked most of the code, made it cleaner, I hope, and a tad quicker. And I was happy with it while testing on a package of invoices. Today I made first integration with customer's JobRouter.

The results aren't any better - in some cases they are much worse. Especially while searching for invoice entries, which can be in any shape or form and on any of document's pages.

I guess, being a Junior, I wasn't really up to the task. I'm sick of working on a "guessing" program that has to work with every invoice template users can imagine. I'm sick of not getting any recognition for what I did good. And I'm sick of constantly being pushed to make it work better when I just don't have any more ideas or my skills are just lacking.

To be honest, I don't know what to do. I'll probably have to work on making it search the data better. But it's not trivial to just look at the code and see errors. Iterating on the code while working with different invoices worked for a bit in older versions, but I reached the point where changes made to make one invoice be read better, made another one worse.

Its like on those GIFs where you squish one bug to make another two appear.

So yeah, I'm currently really doubting my career, skills and intelligence.

Finite State Machines are awesome! Resume from reboots and automation is possible even on older Powershell versions without Workflow support. Setting state and transitions resuming where it left off is huge for getting PC's set up. Unfortunately can reimage due to no vl reimaging rights but scripting is totally possible...and with it creating it's own scheduled task to run on startup it does what it needs, then reboots resumes and deletes the task when done.

(!rant)

I need an advise...
I am quite used to work in PHP. But I feel like it's getting older and older. Is there another comparable language? I'm thinking about Ruby or something...

What do you think? Do you have a more modern language in mind? Is it easy to use?

Thread topic: religion, philosophy, matrix

Summary: skip if you don't like these topics, stay if you want to find out why the conclusion has relevance to programming

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Ok.

Let me get this straight:

There are 4 founders of the BAYC NFTs.

1 has a fasist/nazi pseudo name
1 has a racist pseudo name
1 has a satanic pseudo name
1 has a pedophile pseudo name

Their logo is a copy of Nazi Waffen Totenkopf emblem, which was the German division force of the Nazi concentration camps

And they became billionaires.

Ok

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Sam bankman the founder of FTX crypto shit robbed people for 32 BILLION dollars. And hes not in jail because he donated most of that money to democratic political party, leaving himself 1 billion dollars as allowance. Now that he bought political power, politicians protect him. So he's having fun in the bahamas and penthauses, having generational wealth and enriching his fraud parents.

Ok

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Balenciaga. They posted photos of female children holding fluffy toys with BDSM sexual bondage. Books on the table, with excerpt of Michael Borremans, who draws "art" of naked children covered in blood and being sacrificed in rituals. Then a book of "The Cremaster Cycle", which is a demented image that symbolizes "the murder and resurrection of Abiff". Hiram Abiff was the central character during Masonic initiation rituals as the culmination of a three-part process. Etc

Balenciaga is a multi million dollar "brand".

Ok.

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What i learned through all my years of existing on this planet is, being good and doing good, does not pay off. I still live in the matrix. I am still a slave. I am still playing the game of earn to survive. Even while doing software engineering. And I don't know 1 single wealthy person who has obtained all that wealth by doing something good.

This has further lead me to realization: God doesn't help you get rich or wealthy. God doesn't give a fuck if you're rich or poor. He aint gonna help you. But do you know who will? That's right - evil forces will help you get wealthy. Funny how that works?

Because I am christian and believe in God, pray to God and did good all my life - I haven't received anything good in return, my life has not improved, in fact it has devolved and became worse.

Therefore, I came to a conclusion: I will switch teams. I'll let the evil demonic forces take over and guide me to wealth. I'm ready to scam, defraud, develop ponzis and step on corpses and people to get out of the matrix. Perhaps this is how and why good people turn into villains?

Now you understand.

I dont ask to be on the top. I just want to Not play the Matrix game. Which is the game where you have to earn to survive. I want to get into any store and buy whatever i want, without worrying how much does it cost or asking for a discount. People dumber than me do it. But i cant? That means there has to be a loophole in the matrix. An escape plan is possible. I tried escaping since 2018 and failed. For 4, almost 5 years. Because i was trying to escape through good forces. I'll now try to escape using demonic forces and perhaps I'll end up like BAYC founders, FTX founder, Balenciaga brand and many others similar to them. Ending up even half of their success or a fraction - I'll be more than happy. I am not happy living in poverty. Im getting sick of it. I'm getting sick to be underpaid $600/month for doing a job as hard as software engineering, even with a CS degree. Life is not meant to be slaved away till 65+ years old. I can't even afford to buy a car with this slave salary.

So forgive me God. Im just tired of life. Im tired of being a slave. Im tired of watching my parents become older, weaker and still working. I'll shut down all of my morals and I am ready to rob people in Web3 using all of my programming knowledge that has been undervalued.

"A little boy asked God for a new bike for his birthday, but he knows God doesn't work that way. So he stole a bike and prayed to God for forgiveness"

I am 13 y/o dev, not in college
two years of experience as an ML intern at a startup, a year of experience contracting as a SWE

I go and try to get internships at a larger company, and just get rejected
people say my resume is fake (nothing to say except IT IS NOT)
they cite labor laws (this I get)

the most frustrating thing though is that I see all these devs with much less experience than me, the only difference being that they are older and in college, getting internships at FANG COMPANIES. most of these people have never had an internship or worked as a developer in any way

one of the most frustrating cases came on a contracting project, where there was this other college dev, who was the worst I have ever worked with
he needed help with EVERYTHING
his python env,
"wHerE dO I IntEgrATE my CoDE?",
1.5 months into the project, he had not pushed a single USEFUL line of code that was actually what was needed from him

and guess where he is heading this summer?
jane street

and yet I cant even get a single interview, with internship season coming to an end?

ah yes just another day of fighting the same perceived non functioning of pytorch.. tracing through the tensors per layer to see if anything is changing at all.. listenig to the same dipshit talking about how its getting cold out there but hey it feels good.

sitting in the same place, half sleep deprived in a state of utter destitution waiting for the same dirty fucks to steal all my things because they want to keep me quiet about what they've been doing for as far back as I can now remember wondering when life will continue because lets face it, life should continue, and these people willfully fucking up my country now for nigh a century isn't my goddamn fault !

but hey, they think they got away with murder, and its more like suicide as they get used up when young and then reach older age and they're still walking the same loop and i'm being dragged along with them as they started assigning more zombies to my home area gradually who also brainlessly walk around doing the same things thinking it somehow benefits them.

Is there a way to increase the text size in the browser's web console? I'm getting older and that tiny text doesn't work for me. I primarily use Firefox.

From one pc problem to the next, today while I thought everything was fine, my pc probably overheated and now the motherboard doesn't seem to boot anymore (rgb turns on, but the lights indicating the current step of the boot don't). I panicked and thought maybe it was the CPU, because it was my first time applying thermal paste and did the thing where I ripped the cooler off the motherboard and the CPU attached to it, which I only learned in retrospect that that was a thing. I slightly bent 2 CPU pins doing that.

So far no reason to be overly pissed than panicked, but then I decided to ask on r/pcmasterrace (or masterinsolent) and boy, probable because I mentioned the game I was playing I was only getting responses like "OP dumb, game doesn't do that. I love this game so much I let the developers fuck my wife while I am playing" instead of trying to help or clear up misunderstandings.

Thankfully a system/server admin I know was able to provide me with advice to fix the bent pins, but the motherboard itself still seems pretty dead.

I'll plug the cpu into my older motherboard tomorrow and see if that might be the reason. If you have additional advice, I would appreciate it

I never finished it, but before I was working in the industry, I was coding through a book called Build Your Own AngularJS. My intent was to have piecemeal instruction/example in TDD and code way above the level of complexity I was used to. You essentially build the core of AngularJS in about 900 unit tests with total coverage. 1000pages long, its no walk in the park.

I gave it up when my time was short, and focused on higher level concepts: building apps, learning tools of the trade.

Now that I am getting plenty of exposure to that level, I am thinking my free learning hours may be better spent going down into the complex worlds shown in this book. A couple of things I found there really stayed with me and shaped how I think about problems. It was also very illuminating to see how complex algorithms work “in the wild”. I cant stand learning algorithms in isolation, generally speaking.

Has anyone seen this book? I know the framework itself is older now, but I don’t think that is much relevant for this learning use case.

I only know of one student who completed this. Took him a few months. He is an absolute machine.

For f*cks sake, why can't I just remember certain pages I visited some time ago? It drives me nuts! Am I getting older or what? I am just in my thirties, what the heck should I expect from myself in a few years? I'll sure be a drooling old man as soon as I get 40. Dammit!

This time it was some JSON API for reverse lookups of phone numbers, it was a blue-ish site and you could take a test drive just by entering a number, and it told you the name and some details of the caller. And it was cool, and not for free, but still cool.

NO IT WAS NEITHER NUMVERIFY NOR TWILIO. Does it ring a bell? No?

!dev, sort of

So, apparently my Play Store settings get reset when I restart my phone, so Google decided to update Google Keyboard to Gboard for me (and god-fucking-dammit, that shit is absolutely useless to me). I can find older .apks on websites like APKmirror for Google Kinstall but they won't install, saying that "it seems like the package is corrupt". I'm not sure exactly why this might be happening, but according to APKmirror’s FAQ it might have something to do with cryptographic signatures or that a newer version is already installed on the device. Gboard is disabled and I assume that should be enough for that, and I don't know if it would even detect it as the same app in the first place, so my best guess is that it’s got to do with the former which is why I'm turning to you guys.
Does anyone have advice for a solution? I don't have any problems getting another keyboard either if needed, but I would really like something that both has separated layouts per language, as well as a similar swipe-to-type function, since excessive tapping really aggravates my CTS. :/ Any suggestions?