!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

What advice would I give a new dev?
"Learn COBOL"

No one specified that it had to be 'good advice'

If only more manager would think like this! Constant interruptions are poison to the performance of any dev team.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?

Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!

Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?

GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!

I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.

it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google

THANK YOU FOR NOTHING

A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.

also, whats up with

AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);

ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????

WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?

Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!

Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!

Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!

THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!

thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.

If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!

fuckers.

Advice from my neighbour:
" Don't use laptop so much, you know eyes are really soft, virus can easily enter to your brain through your eyes. If you take my advice it's good for you."

-_-

“Yeah, the database password has to be ‘password’ or the code won’t work”
—My PM

Note: I don’t actually believe this to be good advice.

When I first joined the profession, I had a mentor who refused to give me straight-forward answers to my questions / queries. He always had the same answer, "Google it. Find the solution yourself." I hated him for that. Sometimes he used to explain that it was for my own good (blah, blah, the usual stuff) and not because he didn't know or couldn't give me the answer straight-away. I still thought it was just that I was too smart to ask all the right (complicated) questions and he didn't have the answers.
(Of course, that is a bit too exaggerated; he used to help me out with complicated stuff when he knew I was blocked and couldn't move further; he wasn't a sore mentor; he was a good one, in his own way.)

Several years later, I find myself giving the same answers and advice to juniors I mentor. It turns out that push to figure things out on my own did me a lot of good. I'm able to approach any problem head-on and not freak out even if the specs or the deadlines seem surreal. I know how to "figure" answers to problems that I come across for the first time. In the process you learn a lot of stuff that "keep you ahead of the curve and not grow old".

First time dealing with front and backend web programming. Any advice or tutorials that can help me get on the track with good MVC? I hate having a giant discombobulated mess of an index.php file

Violent psychopath knows where you live

My Texas Hold'em ML algorithm keeps deciding the best strategy to make the most money, is to lose the least. Which is why it constantly folds after a certain point... *sigh*

Kids, don't gamble. Math has spoken, you'd be wise to listen.

Week 66 has taught me that I must actually be quite privileged!
I can't recall any bad advice given to me. It's either been good, or I completely forgot about it.

Or on the other hand, it's all been bad advice and I'm a rubbish developer...

Week 26 advice - you all probably know this but good to refresh!

Eat healthily

Sleep well

Document clearly

Annotate your code

Use version control properly

Keep yourself in check with project management tools

Your peers are your friends... And competition.

As much as your boss is an idiot respect them and your life will be easier.

With great power comes great responsibility; don't touch that keyboard until you think through what you are doing chances are your first idea is not the best.

Don't write quick fixes and say you will go back to clean it up later on when you have time. That time will never come.

Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.

I did it alone and with almost no help.

I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.

-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding

I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

Man in the event of some newcomers to the development game, those that will mostly work in the web domain or sys admins that are in training I want to offer some small advice:

Do not neglect vim

I know it might be a bitch to use at first. And I will never use it as a replacement to vs code. But fuuuuuck me I cannot count the number of times that vim wizardry has helped me when dealing with servers when dealing on a machine with windows and nothing but putty.

The thing is a lifesaver yo, and it makes for an impressive show when doing something in front of senior executives.

Learn it, love it, live by it

And exit is :q, save is :w, to copy and paste is :v then surround the text and then y to yank it and p to paste it.
:vsplit and :split are your friends and to move around splits is ctrl w and direction.

Good luck my friends. Stay classy.

!rant

Advice
[1] Don’t panic! All will become clear in time.
[2] You don’t have to know every detail of C++ to write good programs.
[3] Focus on programming techniques, not on language features.

just read in "A Tour of C++11" by Bjarne Stroustrup

It's not just true for C++, that's true for everything

Good advice never stopped me from making bad decisions :)

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

Word of advice: never buy the UMIDICI C Note 2.

Bought it myself and it's an utter piece of garbage.

Just bought another phone which runs stock android 7 and Lineage OS might be installable.
Also it can be rooted, good enough for me!

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

!rant
I would like to ask you guys for advice.

I am a content manager who is gradually given more and more dev tasks. That is great because I want to become a webdev. However I have one big issue. Whenever I write code (any code) I feel ashamed because I know that anyone else could do better. I am also ashamed to show my work to my colleagues because I am afraid of what they might think of me. I know that they are good people and they would probably help me out but still...

Someone once tried to explain to me that I am not my code and whenever my code is being evaluated I am not the one who is being judged, it is my code, my current knowledge. I understand conceptually what he was trying to tell me but I just can't feel it.

Did you have similar feelings when you started out?
Thanks in advance.

Hey so this is more of an Android advice post rather than a rant

So it's​ to do with the app I'm working on, I want to make sure that the app images are working on different size screens and I was wondering if using the developer option for changing dpi a feasible option in terms of testing, so far I've tested for xxhdpi and xxxhdpi, and just now tested for xhdpi and so far so good.

But I can't seem to test for any smaller screens (240dpi and below)

Just thought I'd ask you guys because this is the best community ever!

Let me share a piece of advice to entry level devs that are getting ready for job interviews that I wish someone gave to me when I was first looking for work straight out of school. Do not focus making yourself look good to this company by trying to make your resume flashy or trying to oversell yourself. Although its important to present yourself sure, but it should not be the foundation for you to base your interview goals around. Rather focus on the company itself. Find out whether the company itself uses modern technology,practices and upholds to project management and the software development cycle, find out how they work,communicate and develop as a team. Simply put focus on whether they are worth working for instead of looking like your worth being hired. Can they collaborate,communicate and solve problems efficiently. Otherwise you may end up getting hired and hating your job. Just a thought and some advice on my own experiences. Hope it helps someone.

Good advice, I guess?

So the story start like this, 6 months ago i left my job in a big company for an oportunitiy to work on a new one without all the bureocracy and shit and with better benefits , the first months were wonderful we were using a nice stack of technologies and the team that was assembled was a nice one with smart and hard working people with a few exceptions, but overall very good. One day out of the blue the manager started to presure us to release a project that was on time and wanted us to make extra hours and work on saturdays, sadly we blindly did because we cared for what we were creating, fast forwarding to yesterday, the whole team was called to a meeting and our contracts were terminated without previous advice because the company could not afford to pay us for more time and blahblahblah..., soo here i'm feeling used and sad but with renowed feelings about starting my own business!!

Good advice

!rant, advice, !mine

Q: I'm [xx] years old [xyz] professional. Would that be a good idea if I try to change my career to software development right now?

A: Age is mostly doesn't matter. You can learn programming at any age. And, software is everywhere. Every background knowledge will be useful. Your prior knowledge will not be wasted.

But, should you change career?

- YES, if you deeply interested in programming.

- NO, if it's only because you feel there are better opportunities.

It's true that there may be better opportunities. But, without deep interest in the subject, you may struggle to become good software developer. Without being a good developer, your opportunities will be limited and you are likely to regret the decision.

Software development is easier for those who passionate but very difficult for those who doesn't....

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

I'd say one of the best advice a dev gave me, was that, I should not write duplicate code, but rewrite these parts to a single function.

And another one: If you use specific values in the code, instead of putting it in multiple places, assign it to a variable at one place and use the variable later on.

These advices sound quite trivial, but I think every beginner should learn these as eary as possible.
Boiiii have I seen shitty code from people who don't give a hobo's ass about maintainable code.

Be a good coder.
Write for quality, not quantity.
Care about your successor.

Thank you.
If not, I will fucking find you, fill your guts with napalm and light you up alive on a rusty pole while laughing hysterically.

Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”

◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)

◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.

A good quote everyone should follow:
"Find a job you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.

Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.

Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.

I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?

Any advice would be helpful.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

People telling me what to do. I am 19 yo. I havent got into university, i have passed the bachelor's degree exam with 83.5% in computer science, i am employed in web development and i like it. Im not even thinking about going to university for now, not even getting a driving license, the stress is too big for now. I love traveling by bike. I enjoy listening to heavy metal and hard rock and I love peace more and i enjoy talking with people.
The biggest hurdle is people who tell me "do that because everyone does". And I'm not talking about my mom. She supported me everytime. I'm talking about people who doesn't belive in someone's knowledge and bothers the others. It's good if you give me advice and talk with me about it, but never be strict about that advice.

!rant

Trying not to suck at code.

A good coder seems to be some one who does mistakes quickly and has strategies on how to resolve them even quicker.

The speed at which you create/resolve your problem is the experience curve at which you are learning.

How do you deal with headaches and frustration when spending hours on the same issue?

What are common efficient strat for debugging?

I know this sounds very generalised but i feel like it takes me days to do small things and need to take breaks all the time to relieve the pressure.

Any advice for a rookie?

To anyone asking for tips and tricks to start programming or become good at it, here is your ultimate golden advice: learn how to google and stop asking stupid questions like this before doing a quick research.

Reasons why:

1. You will most likely to learn better if you do your own research before asking for help. Even if you can't solve problem, you will be better and better at googling over time.
2. It is instant source of information. No need to wait for response (except response from server of course).
3. It takes only YOUR time.
4. Much more possible solutions/answers to your problems/questions.
5. Your quality of life will be improved over time. Not only your dev life but your daily life too.

To anyone new to the corporate world I have this advice: there's a game no one tells you about in school or university. It's a game of politics. The good news is that you can choose not to play the game. The bad news is that others who do can change that decision for you, if you give them a reason to. So here's my tips to keep yourself from common bad situations:

* Some people will say they'd "prefer that people were honest". This is an outright lie.
* Be guarded - if a scenario could be taken out of context assume it will be.
* Mimic the office culture, don't try to rock the boat.
* Be polite, but always stay neutral between colleagues, picking a side means you're playing the game. Unless that side is your company vs another company in which case-- you are 100% on the company side and everyone else is stupid and incompetent.

This seems like a good place to give this advice: whenever I'm having a bad day, my console consoles me.

Since apparently lots of you are into Linux, I would like some advice.

I'm wanting to install a distro to use as my main OS, but there is just too much choice.

I'm coming from Windows 10 so I read that KDE is a good choice for a desktop environment and the Plasma version looks pretty good.

Yesterday I've tried Deepin OS but I'm not a huge fan, looks good but not enough content / customization.

So right now I'm hesitating between Manjaro (with KDE) and Elementary OS.

Would you recommend any of these, and why ?

Btw, this is my first rant 😎

!rant

I need to pick a CSS framework for a[n eventually very large] React/React-native project at work. Any suggestions?

While I'm very good with CSS, nobody else is,
and eventually everyone is going to be touching the project, so it needs to be pretty easy to use.

I'm thinking of picking Bulma, or one of the newer, lighter frameworks, but I just don't know. (I'm also getting a lot of pressure to pick Bootstrap3 so we can... copy tables from unrelated sites? I guess? idgi)

Anyway, I have until Wednesday to completely convert over (it'll take me a day), and I still don't know what to pick yet.

Suggestions/advice welcome!

For the passed couple of years I've struggled with depression. This passed year has been so much better. I found a career path I enjoy, I learned a lot about myself, and I got a full time job.

I live with my grandparents and God bless their souls but I really want to move out. This realization really came last week when they left for a vacation and left me home alone. I've already lived away from home, volunteer work, internships. But now that I'm back home I'm bored, I have no responsibilities. I should also mention that I can't be myself around them, partly because I no longer believe in their God and partly because there never really was any transition between child and adult.

I talked it over with some older friends and they agreed that I should move out and offered some regally good advice.

I'm gonna wait until they get back and attempt to talk about it with them. I mean it's more of me telling them I'm moving out they can't really stop me at this point.

Anyway just wanted to get this off my chest. Hope you have a wonderful day.

!rant
Neighbouring nursing student asked me to recommend her a good laptop. I take a look at her existing one and it's an ultra book in pretty much decent condition. I ask her what her issue with this one is and turns out there's not enough space on the hard disk (30 GB SSD). I advice her to consider upgrading instead of buying a new laptop and she agrees. She also asks me if I can fix the track par of the laptop as it's not working. I take a look at the system tray and then work my computer science magic (press the fn+F9 to activate the trackpad) and boom! It's a miracle and she's squealing with delight. I even ran a disk cleanup and wiped 3Gigs of space so that she could continue downloading the episode from Netflix.
I hear a lot of you people complain about being asked to do outrageous tech shit because you're a computer person but man, I sure love being the "tech guy". :D

I am participating in a project i called "Game of Thrones"

We pretend that we are a team, but in reality everyone hate one another.
It took only 3 weeks for Team Leader to turn everyone against him.
He is constantly fighting for power with Architect who is terrible at his job, and doesn't listen to his advice even if they are good.
We hate Team Leader because he is an tyrant, who is ruling from high tower his peasants. His favorite task is to create various rules that everyone has to accept. You have to write "I accept" in a chat but this is the only choice. You cannot disagree.

Moreover there are developers from client side. They "committed" current project which is full of bugs and generally doesn't work. I don't know why they are still working there, but I presume every of them is working for 5+ years, so they are the only ones able to dig thru the spaghetti they made.
They constantly fight with us about the how code should be written, they commits are garbage but they are very peaky when it comes to ours PR.
They always drag our PR as long as they can. Even sometimes pointing they mistakes as ours.

So as all of you web developers know. If you are stepping into the world of web development you stepping into a world of unlimited possibilities, opportunities and adventure.

The flip side is that you step into a world of unlimited choices, tools, best practices, tutorials etc.

Since even for a veteran programmer, this is a little overwhelming, I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you guys for advice.

I know that 'there is no best' and that everything 'depends on what you want to achieve'. So how about just say the pro's and cons or when to use and when not to use. Or why you prefer one over another. Everything is allowed! :D

Maybe it will help others too. Start a nice, professional discussion:)

These are the parts I'd like advice about:

- frontend: what frameworks, libraries
- backend: language, framework, good practice
- server: OS, proxy (nginx, Apache, passenger), extra tips (like don't use root user)
- extras: git, GitHub, docker, anything

Thanks in advance everyone willing to help!:)

Also, if you only know frontend or backend. No worries, just tell me about your specialism!

When it comes to the indentation or look I am fully consistent.
But when it comes to naming I am inconsistent like a crack whore telling she's clean.
Camelcase, underscores inconsistent variable and function names. I use all of them within a single file. On some days I even switch languages.
I truly am miserable in code consistency. Is there any good advice to keep the code consistent?

I know we have a lot of talented people here. Piece of advice, what ever you build, believe in it. See it through. No matter how good of an idea incompleteness won't get you anywhere.
After all every other day we all analyze different successful products and say "huh... that's nothing. Even we can do that".
Well thats the difference "We" can do that, they DID it.

See your ideas through. Stay motivated =)

!$rant

"Always make sure to have good documentation in your code."

And I still struggle with this advice xD

I hope not too many people followed this advice. It was a tutorial for making your Raspberry Pi act as a network-accessible CCTV camera, and the tutorial was good, but that end part... yikes. Don't just port forward your http stream!

At least I know how I can just have it accessible only through my OpenVPN.

A free advice: Dont let people recognize you on devrant. Its too good to not let your coworkers/mentors know about it and you should realise you must have ranted about them already.

Abstract anything dealing with external services where if they go out of business, change their internal policies, or you get a wild hair up your ass you won't have to change your entire code base later.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

Have to do a jee project without any knowledge in java, in 2 weeks.

Why ? My classmates put me in a group when i wasn't here, of course they know nothing and are not going to code..
Fuckkkkkk you!

Well, any advice with jee ? Where should i start to get a good grade x)

!rant
Looking for advice, serious advices.

I work in C.
Also, I work in Python.
I have worked for a couple of year in C++.
I have a fair knowledge of the Data Science workflow, and some experience in Machine Learning.
I have tinkered with some other languages (Java, Ruby, Go, JS among the others, nothing serious nor professional)

I'm the kind of person who needs constant problems to face in order to keep engaged, satisfied, happy. And I need to learn new stuff, or refining my knowledge constantly, or I stagnate. I believe that this is true for quite a share of people here.

I would like to spend some spare time (I seldom have) in a project. Personal projects are rarely good enough to improve one's cv, so I thought I could partecipate in some Open Source projects.

Does anyone here have some suggestion about some interesting and satisfying OSProject, or some general suggestion on the matter?

It would be so apreciated.

1. Learn to use Google.
2. If you don't know English, learn it. Most good resources are in English.
3. Be patient and don't give up. You'll get *very* frustrated, believe me.
4. Don't bother other people with stupid questions, refer to item 1. Only ask in forums/answer hubs if you can't find what you're looking for through Google. Yes, that means going into Google's second result page.
5. Don't get discouraged if you don't have friends your age that like programming. You'll find people with the same interest later :)
6. If you don't understand stuff right away, don't worry. Copy code from YouTube tutorials and change them a bit. No Ctrl + C Ctrl + V though, copy it by writing. Little by little it'll start making sense and soon enough you'll be able to write stuff of your own.
7. Most importantly, have fun!

(This advice comes from someone that started programming at age 10 in a county that doesn't speak English)

Bad managers, rude clients and annoying colleagues...

A lot of the stories here I read have at least any of the words listed above. My advice to most of you guys is: LEAVE.

And do it NOW.

The thing is, most of the stuff you're complaining about won't change. And you will be stuck there longer than you want to be and/or notice, trust me i've been there.

Especially the rude client part is where I've had lots of experience in, you have to search for a company which will abstract that layer for you. If you're on here most likely you're a developer and not everybody is a team lead. So why the F in hell are you even in conversations about budget and/or are you doing the most of the talking in the retrospective? If your project manager is ANY good he is doing that all for you.
There is so much to choose from (my experience in western countries) so please dont be stuck in a dead end job. Or start freelancing or whatever..

This is meant as a follow-up on my story about how I'm no longer and Ada developer and everything leading up to that. The tldr is that despite over a decade of FOSS work, code that could regularly outperform a leading Ada vendor, and much needed educational media, I was rejected from a job at that vendor, as well as a testing company centered around Ada, as well as regularly met with hostility from the community.

The past few months I have been working on a "pattern combinator" engine for text parsing, that works in C#, VB, and F#. I won't explain it here, but the performance is wonderful and there's substantial advantages.

From there, I've started a small project to write a domain specific language for easily defining grammars and parsing it using this engine.

Microsoft's VisualStudio team has reached out and offered help and advice for implementing the extensions and other integrations I want.

That Ada vendor regularly copied things I had worked on, "introducing" seven things after I had originally been working on them.

In the almost as long experience with .NET I've rarely encountered hostility, and the closest thing to a problem I've had has been a few, resolved, misunderstandings.

Microsoft is a pretty damn good company. And it's great to actually be welcomed/included.

I just got started in my web development course in college now but I'm really not interested in waiting another year or two to finish my prerequisites when I could be learning and making my own stuff by now. I'm learning HTML and doing pretty well. But any tips for a guy trying to get into the industry? I know CSS and JavaScript are some of the basic tools I should know and also WordPress. Any advice is appreciated? Any good online courses I could also take to speed things up a bit?

Need some advice -

I have over one month spare time before joining the company. I have always wanted to learn an instrument but I'm also 'thinking' of joining a gym but I don't have any fantasies for big biceps and I am a big time foodie.

I have read that learning new instruments would help you in critical and out of the box thinking which is a definite plus while programming. While joining a gym would be a good way to keep myself fit in this hectic world of programming.

I'm torn in choosing between these two options. Which one should I join as a developer? What would my fellow devs suggest? 🤔

Biggest mistake I've made in my life is assuming other people knew more than me and asking for advice and integrating their advice. I suffered many years being tortured by terrible advice that had no actual relation or usefulness in reality but caused me stress to have to follow, and I was too inexperienced to know any of this.

The other problem with bad advice is; how do you know it's bad advice? If you got the advice when you were naive, and you followed it, never strayed from it, you will still be naive in that area, because of the dutifulness by which you stuck to that advice. You literally imprison yourself, forever, especially if you are very good at putting effort in and have high conscientiousness, reliability. You will never know you were wrong.

College male computer science student here:

Even when I find attractive girls who want to date me, the thought of it stresses me out. In reality if I can truly chat and have a good time with a girl she has been friend zoned.

Advice anyone?

I just found out last Friday that my team collegues (all of them are team leads) are suffering from depression or the so called burn out syndrom. I guess it's my boss' fault. He never gives clear jobs, changes his mind from day to day, we have to manage unclear responsibilities and the baddest thing is that we think that our boss is too stressed out himself.

Do you have any advice for me how we as team could solve that besides changing employer? One thing to mention is, that my boss likes to hear himself talking. That makes it even harder for a guy like myself who is more or less introverted to come up with good arguments which are not overheard or overtalked immediately. What are your feedback strategies to your own boss, how do you bring such stuff on the table?

I fear that when nothing happens, my company will suffer very hard when the whole product engineering departement will fall apart (¼ of the whole company and is responsible for engineering and maintaining of internal services and managed services for our customers).

Well at least it was worth writing about it, maybe my subconcious mind will come up with a brilliant idea itself in the near future in some asynchronous way. But you might be the one with that valuable input, then don't hesitate to share, it will be welcome.

I really don't know how to please StackOverflow people. I did my due diligence on a bit of code but, like we all do, I got stuck and needed a bit of advice. I posted clearly and concisely and still my question got downvoted twice. What do they want? For me to post the question AND the answer? Only ask Ph.D.-type questions? Why am I never good enough for these people?!

The presumption of incompetence:

Has this ever happened to you?

Starting a task and chatting with a fellow dev-- my first time implementing analytics in this particular app. I mentioned to them that I've been doing analytics implementation on various apps at our company for years, but our current apps' analytics setup is the most intense and this will be a good learning experience for me to dig into.

They responded by sending me code snippets of existing analytics implementations to help me. Not hidden or lesser-known classes, very obvious ones I already had open and was working off of. With advice like "just search the codebase for 'analytics' and 'trackPage''" lol.

I like this person a lot, but this definitely caught me off guard. It felt like something her obtuse manager would do, but not her. This would probably not be a big deal to most but I'm so used to being given unsolicited/unhelpful/irrelevant advice from male devs, and having to be pleasant and thank them, this one was tough to witness.

How do you respond to unsolicited "help"? Does it bruise your ego the way it bruises mine? lol

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

Not quite a rant, but looking for opinion/advice.

I have been programming for a little over a year now, excluding those cringy Lua scripting days with if statement hell. I'm pretty far ahead most of the people in my course (1st year Software Engineering), but I'm at this awkward point where I know quite a bit but not enough. All of my projects so far have been small 1-2 source file programs, mostly in javascript although Python is my main hoe. At the moment I'm reading a book on machine learning and I feel like I'm doing fine, not struggling too much with it, but I don't feel confident at all in my abilities. I had two programming internship interviews half a year ago, both of which I wasn't accepted in. I've been thinking of contributing to an open source project lately to get some "real world" experience but I can't find a good project to start with and just don't feel like I'm good enough. There are also a lot of small things I come across such as async and coroutines in Python which I'm not familiar with yet and they make my confidence drop even lower. I'm guessing most of you have been in a similar position. Would you have any advice for me? Should I search for a project or should I keep on studying with books?

It is easy to believe something is over-engineered as a junior. You open a solution and get slapped in the face with a wet fish of many classes, with strange names, doing very little, with everything coming together in ways you don't understand.

My advice is to learn about design patterns, clean code, clean architecture, and model driven design. Until that point I don't think you can make such a distinction. And indeed once knowledgeable of patterns and techniques as well as the domain, the same solution can look obvious, elegant and readable.

In a field where everyone is saying 'dont over-engineer', one must be able to tell if something is actually bad, or just uses techniques you don't recognise.

Telling your senior you think something is over done just because you don't understand it is not good. First learn techniques, understand the code, then form opinions that are at least relevant then.

From someone who committed that crime.

Learn php. It's the future!

Actually it was good advice at it's time.

Coding YouTubers existence is the reason the quality of new age software engineers is going down the hill.

Learn MERN stack,
PHP's dead,
Buy my course, it's 20% off
Learn just good enough that you can land a job
Learn how to prompt ChatGPT better

These shitty pieces of advice will never enable software engineers to truly understand the core concepts of what they're doing.

It's sad, really.

People of devRant. I am in need of some advice.

So I joined this new firm around an year ago and ever since my team lead resigned, we have been managing it ourselves. Then a senior member suggested me that I could be a good fit as a team lead role. Now there are members in my team that are more experienced than I am but they either don't want to lead or are not good at it. I never had a formal leadership role before although I have driven projects. Higher management is open overlook my lack of experience but has also said that I may not find lot of technical growth as I am moving to a more administrative role. Any piece of advice on what I should do? I would love to have a leadership role but would it really affect my technical learning?

I'm bored af working on crappy php56 legacy apps written by short sighted programmers, makes my life miserable, but the pay is pretty good for a remote job which is pretty rare in here. Meanwhile I'm interested on exploring fundamental stuff on computer science and experimenting new techs.

I'm thinking about doing a PhD but too afraid if I can't finish it or the future opportunity isn't good enough since I live in 3rd world country in southeast asia. Also it probably takes ±8 years to finish it including the preparation.

I have no question, but it would be great if you have some advice.

Got a senior dev at work.

The guy is good at his job, no doubt, but his insecurity drives me up the wall.

- Constantly double checks work done by non-seniors.
- Setup a policy where only seniors can code review.
- Tells non-seniors not to give out advice as they don't know what they're talking about.
- Edits pull requests for you.
- Demands unobtainable quality for insignificant pieces of work.
- Patronising teams messages on the regular.

We're all just trying to get work done and he's always acting like we haven't got enough stripes on the badge.

This year has been rough. No programming. 3 great job applications snuffed. Currently unemployed, and all my recent job experience in a field I don't want to continue working in due to not making my 3 career options. (Military and policing sort of thing)

So since I'm off for the holidays, and looking to really get back into computer work, I've come back to devRant. Missed you guys. <3

Now I've got to actually get good at something, and preferably employed in doing it. Any advice or stories are appreciated :D (but my mom said not to listen to strangers on the internet, so...)

Turns out I'm terrible at meeting people. Go figure, it's the cliche of being a dev.

I just moved into a pretty nice apartment in a nice area, but I I know literally nobody here aside from coworkers. The only friend I have left that hasn't moved away is in jail for a good while. 😧

The only place I can think to meet people is at a bar/club - which isn't really my thing. Even then, just walking up to a stranger and striking up a conversation just seems fucking weird to me.

Anybody have any advice on making new friends in basically a new town?

Need Advice + Rant

I am an Android Developer, pursuing an Internship, which i thought would be good for my career. But I am being assigned the task to build search feature for the App using Elastic Search. I intially was halpy to work on Search since it had to be Algolia. I am hating the work now because I am getting so stuck with Elastic and there have been other factors which also have decreased my productivity, but I am being quite inefficient. Now the deadlines are coming closer and if I dont give output I will be laid off. I am thinking about quitting myself because now I feel extremely demoralized and demotivated to work because we first decided to work on Algolia and it was all ready before we thought of shifting to heroku and now on AWS. What do the experienced once suggest? It's not that its impossible to do, now i just have to write queries in Java, again I am stuck and not really looking forward to since I was given the deadline today, for 2 days later.

The only issue is, I may have to return the new phone (OnePlus 3T) which I bought planning to later return the money to someone through my stipend.

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

[vent]
I am java dev with 5 yoe at a place which has really good engineering talent.
Was assigned a feature request.
Feature request requires me and one more older dev(in age, not in exp at company) to write the code. My piece is really super complex because of the nature of the problem and involves caching, lazy loading and tonne of other optimization. Naturally it makes up 90% of the tasks in the feature request. On the other hand, the older dev simply has to write a select query (infact he only needs to call it since a function is already written).
Older dev takes up all the credit, gives the demo, knows nothing but wrongly answers in meetings with higher ups and was recently awarded employee of qtr.
It looks as if I do the easy work whereas he is the one pulling in all the hard work.
Need advice to justify my work and make others realise it's significance, nuances of area and complexity of it.
Do not expect monetary benefits, just expect credit and recognition for the worth of work I am doing.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

I just used booking.com and good fucking god is the whole website a shit infested hell hole. They use scammiest and pushiest techniques to make you book a place asap without giving you space to breathe and read details.

They try to obfuscate what's actually necessary with what they want to take from you. For example just before reserving a room there's a checkbox that's close enough to words "terms and conditions" and "privacy policy" for unsuspecting user to habitually check it to proceed. However, you clicking "reserve" is considered your consent and that checkbox simply adds your email to their spamming list.

There are countless examples of absolute asshole design within every inch of that place and I don't even want to imagine what they do with my data.

Suffice to say this was the first and last time I will use their services and if I were to give any advice, is "don't be the dick responsible for website/app/service similar to booking.com"

any advice for a junior dev that can't get any fucking help from the senior devs? I can only in good-conscience try to solve a problem for so long before I know I'm seriously wasting my time

when I ask for help I often get "I'll get to your question in two or three days"

like damn I'm pretty stuck here guy

Any advice on some good SQL book or resources?

I need to start learning DB designing and theory.

I know jackshit apart from the basic commands.

!advice

So I've been self teaching myself Python, which I've loved learning. However I hit a wall. I'm terrible with large project ideas, which has brought everything to a halt.

Being that I loved learning python, I'm thinking of picking up a second language to fill the void & expand my knowledge. I've dabbled a little bit in Java & Haskell. Go looks pretty interesting.

In your opinion what would be a good complementary language to Python?

I've seen a lot of people design great websites here on DR. Since I'm being dragged into quite a bit of front end, I've decided to quit complaining and up my design game. Suggestions and advice on good design considerations?

Our creative lead sent me a few reference websites that had a lot of "wow factor". It had stuff like trailing text animations, slow motion menus and what not. For some reason, I found all of it to be annoying and pointlessly bloated. I'm more into minimalist design and simple transitions but idk if this is just my taste or lack of competence in making such fancy ass design that makes me not appreciate such sites. I need advice and I'm not sure on what. You'd probably know what if you've been in a similar situation before.

me giving advice to beginners: don't feel bad about your code. as long as it gets the job done, it's good

also me: don't look at my code. it's terrible!

I really love my mother but.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.

Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.

Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.

Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.

Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.

I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.

Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....

FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.

Most memorable co-worker for me is my senior dev at my first job. He is awesome. He taught me everything and he never complained even if I ask some basic things and never got irritated when I made dumb mistakes.. he just simply explained and ask not to repeat that mistake. He gave me one advice that never ever be egoistic about your code, Yes you can feel proud but don't be like I will never tell or explain to my junior ones. Cause of Him I am good mentor/trainer also :) along with developer. Thank god at my first job he was mentor.

First day back from holiday.
CEO announces everyone the pandemic is over and everyone has to return to the office.
Talked about how good it is to come and crack a joke with a colleague and that they care about our wellbeing.
I have barely been able to even focus on work because of all the chaos in the company since the beginning of the year (many interviews for hiring new devs, company events, meet etc.)
Colleagues talking about the fact that nobody can work from the office given all the chaos in the projects and nobody will come because they can't fire us all.
I have to answer to an outsourcing company today for a new fully remote full stack .NET developer position for the same pay, but might be risky in terms of what I can actually deliver in terms of code.
What advice can you give me? Jump the boat or not?

!rant && anxiousness

So, I applied for several jobs because I started hating my current job and the boss.
On my CV and motivation letter I really only wrote stuff I am confident enough with to show if someone would ask me.
I only have 2.5 years of work experience and a B.Sc.

In 3 days I already got 2 answers out of 3 companys, I applied at, who would like to meet me.
Tomorrow is the first meeting.
Now I am anxious that I might still not live up to my CV or motivation letter although I know that I use the techniques mentioned there daily.
I fear that I might be not as good as they might think now, even feel like I know nothing at all.

I never really believed I would fall in the imposter syndrome trap, but here it is.

Any advice? I really want to find another job and I don't want to screw up the interview because I am too nervous.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

So I need your advice guys. Our team is in crisis mode right now because of a vendor's attempt to extort money out of us. So for the next 6 months I am going to be taken off development and made to do sysadmin work...which I hate.

There is another team at work that was trying to woo me over to their team, working in security...which I love.

So would it be a dick move to leave my struggling team that is trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver and do what makes me happy? Or should I be a good person and do work that makes me miserable and go home and drink every night instead?

"keep interviewing every 6 months" ~ this is a shitty incomplete advice.

if you are interviewing , you must realise that its not a play thing. some companies are spending millions to get the perfect candidate and other companies are spending millions to retain their perfect candidates.

If you are just interviewing for the sake of getting an ego satisfaction that you can 'crack interviews and reject offers' then have a believe in karma my friend. what goes around comes around.

if you are really made up a mind to leave your workplace, then its only logical to go for interviews and crack them.
Apply to the companies you see yourself working in, or apply in companies you don't see yourself working in but will give you good money or whatever, its upto your ethics and professional plans.

But if you get an other offer, you shut up, resign and leave for the next job.

maybe the original company wants you to retain, or some other offer comes up. but the least thing you can do is to graciously accept first offer and then judge the other offers in hand (whether staying back is worth than first offer, or whether 2nd offer is better than first)

So I just ditched Windows, but then realized that my music production stuff (mostly REAPER and a few free VSTs) are all Windows/Mac only.
Audio on Linux is fun (as in, pain). JACK seems to be really flexible but is a pain to set up correctly.

Any of you use Linux for music production? Any advice?

I'm using Elementary. Essentially, I need:
1. A good DAW for recording, minimal MIDI.
2. A good sampler.
3. Standard plugin suite - reverb, eq, filters, compressors, delays, etc. I'm not too choosy.
4. Basic synths (I'll be happy with a simple saw/square wave generator, but the more the merrier).

How's Ardour? Compiling it from source right now.

REAPER on Wine doesn't run well for me, so that's out. And they don't have a native Linux version yet.

(no Bitwig, please, I'm not ready to pay $300 or whatever right now)

About two weeks ago i posted a rant containing an email from the big boss. Today they held a "virtual town hall" where people could ask questions, get answers, and generally just be online. Went fairly well, good info was handed out, and i think people mostly enjoyed themselves (even if it was at the expense of the higher-ups).

Then comes the email. The same person as last time had this quote:

"I’m good at giving advice, so I need to take some of my own.  I intend to take it easy this weekend, watch Netflix, do some household chores, play the piano and maybe even read a book! "

Jesus christ. Remember those memes about zuck being a robot because everything he does it looks and feels like it's an alien trying to blend in? That's what this feels like. On a normal workyear i would hear from this person 10 times TOTAL. I have heard from them this amount in the past 2 WEEKS.

Maybe it's the virus, but this is driving me INSANE. If there's any lesson you can learn from this, it would be:

Dont pretend like you care by not knowing or learning anything about the people you work with.

Jesus they even sent out surveys to see what the telework experience is like... THE RESPONSES ARE RECORDED AND PUBLICLY DISPLAYED!!!

Ugh.

As a teacher myself, I will always advice young people to go to school. Though I imagine it differs on the quality of education in your country.

I live in the Netherlands and here it's quite good overall. It's no Ivy League and there are plenty of exceptions but overall any technical study here is a good study.

I also teach at a small school (220 software engineering students) so I actually know my students and what generally need to get ahead.

But my main reasons for actually doing a study instead of going the self-taught route:

1. You spend +/- 4 years in presence of peers that are more or less in the same life phase as you are. You will make friends for life.
2. Companies value a diploma. Good for you that you landed a job on your 19th. Just wait until your 25, wanna switch jobs and don't even get to the second round of any application process because your CV does not list a diploma. This might change in the future but not for the next 5-10 years.
3. You will learn foundational stuff about most thing IT-related. Some things you'll never use. Some thing you'll use unknowingly every single day
4. It teaches discipline without major impact on your life if you fail something. OK, you failed a course. So what? Take it next year and take the time to do a side-project or internship during your study delays. It will teach you some life lessons without it costing you a job or your life savings, and you get some extra time to learn as well!
5. Retirement age by the time you retire will be 75. There's plenty of time to work. Why not spend 4 years with peers in a relatively safe and fun environment first?

TL;DR - small schools are actually fun, attend one

As a part-time student, I have been having a very hard time getting a job. I have worked as a developer before but I had to leave my job due to various reasons but I never stopped brushing up my skills on different levels. So I have an employment gap in my resume. So what?!

Now, the moment an employer hears that I'm still a (fucking part-time) student, the assholes immediately turn their faces away and never call back. And I know that I'm a good developer (at least I can pass the stupid assignments they ask me to solve) and that there's a shortage in good developers in my country anyway. It's just depressing!

Anyway, I had to let it out somewhere. Also, if you have some advice for me, I'd love to hear it.

In my previous job, they made me feel like they were lucky to have me. In my current job they try make me feel like I’m lucky to work for them.
I certainly preferred the precious position where I felt valued for what I brought to the company.

If I have any advice to give, it’s the following: if your current employer appreciates your work and treats you well, you should stay there a long as possible.

Also I’m wondering if my current employer purposefully makes its employees lose their confidence so they don’t go job hunting as they may feel they’re not good enough anymore to apply elsewhere.

I’m thinking of jumping ship but damn have I lost confidence over the past months…

Hey guys, I've always loved and adored what programmers and developers do, so I really do need your advice on this...
After around nine years in the journalism field, I'm considering a career shift into development, for many reasons including that the journalism field seems to be going down in my country, so I started where most recommendations would tell a beginner to start, learning HTML... Now, is it a good idea for starters to change my career into this magnificent and enormous field? I know it won't be easy, but is it possible to be something in that career?

Tldr; Do not go to the bathroom when you are stuck on a problem.

Most of you will know that when you are stuck on a problem for a while, that it is worth to take a break to look at the problem with a fresh pair of eyes.

It's good advice and I have been doing it for years, however now I have developed a problem with it.....

I don't drink coffee or tea often so when I'm stuck I always take a bathroom break and most of the time an Idea will pop into my head how to solve the problem.

The problem now is that everytime when I am even a little bit stuck I need to go to the bathroom even when I just went.

It's really annoying because now I need to find something else to use as a break because my brain has associate being stuck with needing to go to the bathroom.

It's probably not a good idea to take a coffee break instead because if my brain starts to associate that I will be a coffee addict in no time.... Haha

Do any of you have a good suggestion to use as a break?

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

Feels good to be back! XD In the last few months I took peoples advice and ditched windows went for Kbuntu and 4 months down the line I'm never going back to windows :D

Started to learn java! Loving it so far.. Coming from Python 3 i thought this was not gonna be easy but so far so good.. Can someone give me some advice or tips on what to tackle next after java?

First time posting. But I need an advice, I want to learn a programming language to get a better job. I have just the basics of C#, should I keep going with C# or go with F#? I heard a lot of good thing about F#. Thanks. You guys are awesome!

Former coworker had a Post-It on his display:
"When in doubt look char by char"

Often a minor typo can give you a large headache, so this is a really good advice for those WTF moments where you thought the universe isn't working as designed.

So I have to build a frikkin site builder at work. It's supposed to run in the browser. Anyone has any good advice on how I should approach this? Should I use an already present library like GRAPESJS, or should I build it from scratch?

Okay before you read on this is a stupid question!

So the most common response I get when I ask for advice is contribute to open source projects but theres some problems.

> I dont know how to find projects on github or anywhere

> I dont know how or where to start when I actually find a project

> I'm way too intimidated by huge projects like linux, browsers, etc

> I don't know what to add

> I'm too afraid of messing up the project

> my understanding of github its self is very limited and I'm not good at using it. (Which isnt a problem for the open source development but since I'd be using github it is a problem)

Theres always smaller problems too but those should sum it up

Hello everyone !
I am a self taught programmer. Currently in last semester in electronics engineering. I want to become a software developer but can't decide the right career path for me to take. I like back end, Android, Data structures and algorithm, Parallel programming, Machine learning and computer vision, and even security. I am afraid I will remain the jack off all trades and won't be the master of any. This way I won't be doing any good in my career. Any advice as what to do ?

For those who are involved/want to be involved in a start-up (or even if you just like a good blog), look up James Altucher. He writes really entertaining and informative stuff about entrepreneurship, software, and good advice about keeping stress under control, coming up with ideas, and staying positive.

Hello guys, I really need some advice today...

I'm currently 18. I got accepted in two pretty equivalent colleges. One is in my city, 1h with the bus, and the other one is in another city.

Both are somewhat equivalent schools, the one in another big city is much nearer to other colleges I'd like to go to later (this one will last 2 years, then I'll have to go to engineering school for 3 years).

I have to decide monday where I'll go. It's horrible.. here, in my city, I have the person I love and the comfort of living by the parents (even tho it's a discomfort too). But the other city attracts me a lot too, independance does too.. it's horrible, I can't decide, I don't know if it's a good idea to leave, and I fear having regrets if I stay.

Have you some experience to tell me about? Some regrets you have? Or basically some advice?

It would help me so much, thank you!!

I could use some advice. Immagine this: you recently started a new job where the people are great, the product is pretty cool and pay is good. But the code you have to work with is the biggest pile of shite you've ever seen and your manager does not want to change any of this, even after you suggest you would build something that would be a thousand times better, not only "code wise" but for the users too. What would you do?

>>Server sind für mich "Neuland".<<

I want to switch to a new server with my website. I have a bunch of questions and hope you beautiful people will help me out.

1. I've decided to switch from shared hosting to an virtual server. Therefore I am going to rent the cheapest VS from hetzner.de. is this a good choice?

2. What do I have to care about and what stuff there is to be done in the beginning?

3. The reasons I want to switch are more root accessibility and I want to switch to https. What about that? Is let's encrypt enough?

4. How do I move the server from a to b?

5. What OS should I choose?

6. What about security?

7. Any further advice from experienced people is welcome!

Sry for those noob questions, but I've never been in touch with server work...

Does anyone here have any good resources for introduction to embedded, low level development, or anything on advanced C concepts? I've been having trouble trying to step into more complicated topics like bit manipulation and stuff I can do with memory management. Also any advice is also appreciated.

I keep posting that I need job and I appreciate the feedback but I feel just saying that makes it seem like I'm not trying.

Like. I legit don't know. Could it be my cv that's a dud? Thinking of paying a resume writing thing

Cause I'm actually trying hard af to learn new stuff as well keep doing what I'm good at.

I got one interview in a year and even then they didn't gimme the chance to show tech side. It's soo tilting.

I'm actually competent though inexperienced I think.

Any advice or questions please. I legit need to sort this out this year. Like its very important that I do.

Help.

Any professional pentesters or someone working in cybersecurity as a profession? I need some advice. The company I intern with right now wants me to test their web applications for security (they really don't care so much about security). I just wanted to know is there a standard set of procedures or a checklist that is usually followed? I know automated testing is not all that effective against web applications but what are the steps you usually take?
As of now, I have run tests and am now performing a code review but it's in PHP and I'm not really good with it. I'd like to know what more is done as a standard please.

Need some advice again. I'm a junior backend developer or that's at least what I try to call myself.

For the first year at this company I did a lot of backend which I love and really enjoy, eventually they let me do devops and migrations. Okay, but not really what I wanted.

Two months ago, I started my internship at the same company. Now they wanted me to do Shopify, I hate to do frontend, only thing I enjoy is the JavaScript. Fucking sucks but okay, eventually it will be done.

And fucking today I heard they wanted me on support mostly, isolated from the rest into another room with the (dumb) zero experience trainee.

I honestly don't know what to say? Should I refuse? I do have some power because they accepted 3 other projects which require my expertise with migrations. Like why don't they use me were I'm good at, backend?

There's seriously a girl here following DAE (Game development) with one of them fancy tiny macbooks. Yes the one without escape. I wish her good luck and congratulations on being rich and a retard who ignores school advice on laptops

!rant, just asking the wise devRant community for advice:
What is a good laptop that works well with linux? Thanks in advance :)

My workplace is a generally nice place, but there is a lot of gossiping and complaining. Voices carry and we have a lot of people coming through, so there’s a risk that if people are gossiping, other people could end up overhearing colleagues talking about them or someone they know. It doesn’t help that some of our employees work all of their time in the office (including me) and the others come and go, which I think creates an in-group and an out-group. When gossip comes up, or the urge to gossip, it’s tough to be as empathetic if you don’t have a real in-person relationship and primarily interact with someone over email.

I am a good listener and generally want to hear people out, but there is so much potential for problems when people are talking harshly about others. Could you give me some advice about how to politely shut it down when people are gossiping to me?

In particular, I’m interested in knowing how to shut it down if the gossiper is senior to me, versus a peer, or versus junior to me. Also, should I handle it any differently if I agree with the comments being made or if I don’t? What if the person is sharing something confidential that I know they shouldn’t be talking about? And does it make any difference if the information is work-related or not?

Any marketing advice? It’s difficult building an Instagram audience.

Any other ways to reach your targets? Are google ads any good?

I really, really need some help here.

We have a service provider that is utter shit. Due to their shittyness we have a server to which our customers point their domains and then we forward the request to our shitty provider. This worked well until our provider blocked our server's IP.

They can't come up with a reasonable explanation as to why it's happening, and even though they've whitelisted our IP it keeps happening. I've tried changing the server's IP, but it takes 5 minutes and we're blocked again. Probably some traffic that they deem fishy.

Does anyone have any good or bad idea on how to work around this fuckery? The server at our provider is running PHP, so I'm thinking if I can set up some sketchy tunnel or something, but even then it might be caught on a lower level.

I'm really, really grateful for any ideas or advice. Even of the shitty kind.

Any tips for keep motivation as freelancer? Any advice is good

Does anyone know a good book for learning PHP? I want to know more about back-end development and would like some recommendations. I've been programming mostly in Java before and also have experience with SQL, HTML and CSS.

If anyone could suggest a book or any kind of advice I would really appreciate it. I've found some interesting ones online like "PHP & MySQL Web Development – by Luke Welling & Laura Thompson", but would like to hear out first people who know more about this programming language.

need some advice

i resigned from my job today , it was my first job worked 2 years here.
i kinda wanted to rest a month or two is it a good decision or i should look for new one immediately

so far so good... or is it?

after a party-beach-mountain-beach session :

the mood is high
the money is low
the relationship is at crisis ( the gf wants a baby and I'm not sure if brake up isn't better for me )

jobless on the way losing the flat too...

anyone any advice?

Kinda !rant, but still..
Most professional devs have or have had PM's/KAM's. I've had quite a few,, most I've really liked.. Now I have an issue thought, I like one a little too much,, correction there's no little about it, I fucking love her.. We do spend some time together outside of work as well, and she's become a very close personal friend.. She's really easy to work with and really good at her job, so we make a shitty working situation livable together.

But; of course, I want more, but not ruin anything,, And most of all not make her working situation uncomfortable.. I'm pretty sure she don't see me the same way..

Question: has this ever happened to anyone else? How did it turn out?

Yes, I realize the irony of asking relationship advice from the stereotypically least social group of all..

Oh, and to top it off,, my other closest friend, also works with us, and they know each other from before.. So it's kinda hard to talk to her about it..

Okay, going to delve into the world of C game programming. I come from a JS/React background and wondering where to start. I did a C project back in uni so I know some foundations.

Idea is a 4x space game with simple 2d shapes representing ships, inspired by an old game I can't remember the name of (anybody?)

Firstly, I am thinking Allegro as the lib, it seems to be more maintained than SDL. Does that seem good? Though not sure where to start, or any tutorials for someone who is scratchy with C.

Any advice on how to structure my code?

I like the idea of entity component system, is that sensible?

Cheers for any help

Word of advice:
Whenever you plan you invest a considerable amount of time in learning a new language make sure that its well documented and has a good support.

Please advice a good laptop that can handle Machine Learning and Android Studio.

Until now, I've never contributed anything to an open source project (or even created my own). My GitHub Profile is completely empty. I don't know why, maybe I'm just to "scared" of bad feedback.

But I really want to change that. Any good advice on how to do so? What were your first steps in this world?

Few years ago I was asked to give advice on a project. There was an intern doing all the work and I even gave him almost ready code to use. And he didn't use it even properly.

And best part is that they thought at the time that it would be finished in couple of months.

After few months I took over and had to deal with the "intern code". Almost all of the code is rewritten.

Status of the project is now very good. We are implementing new features and it has even passed strict security audit done by other company.

Sadly I can't drop any names etc due to NDA.

I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.

Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.

This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.

But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!

Get crucified and put on a shooting range!

I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!

Where do you search for Remote jobs?

Ive been using LinkedIn in the past but this time no luck for a few weeks. Applied only to jobs with easy apply though. Should I start applying to jobs without easy apply as well?

Tried to headhunt recruiters and expand my network but that didn't really help much.

Got a few calls but its either lowball offers or hiring process is a drag.

Anyways I think it's time to start applying in some other platforms.

From your experience, where else do you search for remote roles? Perhaps you could recommend some good western agencies that don't just search for cheap labour?

I appreciate any advice.

I failed at university, spent too long there without ever graduating. I learned a lot through self-study, though. The only company I worked at was an arrangement with a friend whose company needed people, so I stepped in, but eventually I deserted the job after the company went out of money and I went two months straight working without getting paid. Now I feel apprehensive of putting that job experience in my resume because I didn't come out of it in good terms with the company. I have many unfinished projects but keep them private on GitHub because I feel like the code is too bad to show off. How do I even get a job, now? Should I just quit the industry altogether? Aaaaaaaaaaaaa

Right now I'm just self-studying some things I had wanted to do since college (namely computer graphics and trying to build a game engine) but never actually got to study formally because I kept failing at the prerequisite courses because I always kept distracting myself from my studies and just not putting enough effort. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to your advice and your judgment alike. I feel somewhat confident that I can actually do a good job, but I also don't feel confident enough to apply for jobs since I always feel like my skills are lacking. I know about impostor syndrome, but at the core of it is the matter: is this impostor's syndrome, or am I in fact *actually* consistently bad and incompetent? Rationally speaking I tend to feel like the latter, yet I know the only thing I can do is to try and be better. I guess.

Anyway, completely unstructured thing, just me venting off my frustration and desperation in a place where at least people will read it and possibly offer some advice. Thank you for reading this far.

I have my first developer interview next week. I'm really nervous. Its an interview for both a front end role and a php backend role, and they are hiring 9 developers.
I'm a full stack developer, dot net core backend and learning React.js frontend. My html and CSS knowledge is fine but I don't quite have a grasp of js yet. As for php, I know nothing, but the recruiter said they are looking to train someone and I explained that I enjoy learning, not to mention php is very popular so it's a good tool to have knowledge with.
I've been told to look at their site, so I've written a list of about ten aspects of the site that I like and that I would change. From the lack of interactivity to images being larger than necessary, something that could be optimised.
The interview will be an hour and a half long and I'm shitting myself. Im not a confident person as is, plus I suffer from anxiety. I'm mostly worried about being put on the spot with questions like "tell me your best achievement". I will rehearse the obvious questions this weekend.
Doss anyone have any advice? Good experiences, bad experiences etc.

TL:DR linux newbie, looking for advice/links (skip to bottom for questions)

!rant
After i had been looking for a job for quite some time, a couple of months ago i got hired by "smaller" company doing web stuff. So far it have been a great place, good colleagues, and overall just having a great time!.
They seem to value me alot, so that's great!.

Anyway, yesterday i got called into a meeting - and got told they wanted me to start learning "Server stuff (linux)". That got me quite excited, because it always was something i wanted to learn - but never really got around to doing.

But i never touched a linux installation before, so i'm really on ground zero - but im not afraid, i'm a quick learner and quite efficient at googling :)

I figured i would ask here, since other people here always seems to be happy to help other people out.

So far i have manage to setup a server, install various stuff (php, mysql and so on) and done setup a couple of domains/subdomains on my server. Also got a vestacpinstallation working - so overall im quite happy so far.

I figured maybe somebody had some good links/advice for a linux newbie :).

* Performance/Security, will obviously be a big focus - anything i should look at? - any must look at?
* Monitoring tools, how do i monitor various websites running on my server? Here i'm thinking bandwitch, cpu/ram usage and so on pr site basis.
* Any other stuff i should be looking at?

Little about what the server will/should be running :)

* Centos
* vestacp
* WordPress installations only (e-commerce mainly)
* PHP 7 / MySQL / phpmyadmin

Wrote a REALLY bad, simple java method to generate the repetitive parts of c# classes

Now I’m curious about good code generation methods. How I probably should’ve done this

Think I could get some advice and links on how to start learning to write simple code generators?

!rant

So thanks for whoever pointed out my mistake with the “!” operator.

I tried to be devcool but i failed ;) but im allgood now!

Getting to the topic:

After scanning people's opinion here i have decided to learn C.

I have done js react and html css for the last year and have an okay grasp on it but i want to learn more.

Mainly:

-security
-network
-memory and ressources

Im a noob ant ive only scratched the surface. Im gonna be soon working on databases and backend java to master the functioning of a backoffice with its API and the handling of form and crud automisation (i probably am not using all the right words. I am learning and being told what to do).

Am i helping myself with C and if so any tutorial advice or good teaching resource that could be advised to me.

Thanks ;)

Need advice

Got placed at LnT Infotech through my college placements
Free-lanced at a company for four months and got a job offer from them with the same salary. But the work load is too much. There is no such thing as personal time. It's work 24*7. However, the exposure is good. For one of the projects I was the PM. Had dinner good exposure. But as I said, to much work. I lost quite some weight in the one month that I was the PM.

So now the problem is, should I join an MNC where my exposure will be terrible or a start-up where my personal life will be terrible

Not programming related
AT ALL

I see you guys as my wise friends so i thought u can give a good advice.

Let's say that u are a really good friend with someone . That friend is a she!
You are a "he". Clear enough.

What if after a while you notice that she is quite awesome and you start liking her.
-- By "liking" i mean loving.
Is this wrong?
I guess you don't want to ruin the friendship with her? Right?

What would you do?

PS: she is really awesome, and cool and uhhhh .. u get it

Sorry for the unrelated topic :/

Not a rant but I kinda wanted to see if anyone else feels the same way and might have advice on how to overcome this:

So I work as a student in research. Meaning there is not much documentation and things are chaneging fast, some things are also fairly complicated.
I have a really good supervisor.

However. I am super scared of asking about how things work. Whenever we discuss things and she notices I'm insecure about how something works, she explains it to me patiently. No probs. But insead of asking I just try out random stuff for hours. Having no clue about how things work and what I'm doing. In the end she is able to explain the issue to me within a minute.

The thing is, I think that trying to figure stuff out on my own, is the right approach. Not daring to ask questions or express my theories is really bad. I get super anxcious. Most of the time my theories and assumptions are correct. I just never dare to voice them.
The irony is, that I'm perfectly fine whenever I talk about or hold presentations which are not CS related. But if I have to do that on a CS topic I just die. I freezze, stutter, everything.... T_T
Like come on. They can't do anything to me except correct me... jeez.

If there's something I fucking hate with all my goddamned soul is when you post something online and people get in their fucking high horse and judge you or tell you what to do

Like I understand if you're talking shit about people in the same community, then if someone tells you you're an idiot, I get it.

But if you're ranting about someone off site, then why judge this person? What's the damage being caused to you or the site?

For example, let's say I rant about my wife and the things that annoy me about her, and I use some colorful language to get it off my chest.

There's always one motherfucker, one stupid piece of shit that says something out of line.

In general it's one of these things:

* "wow, you need to calm down, you clearly treat her like shit, she is better than you*

YOU IGNORANT PIECE OF DOGSHIT. DO YOU HAVE CAMERAS IN MY HOUSE AS TO ASSUME THAT I TALK TO HER IN THE SAME MANNER AS I DID IN THIS POST?

YOU GULLIBLE SHIT EATER.

OF FUCKING COURSE I DON'T TALK TO HER LIKE THIS. I'M NOT AN ASSHOLE OR A MONSTER. I AM JUST R-A-N-T-I-N-G.

AND I RANT IN THIS MANNER SO AS TO GET IT OFF MY CHEST AND NOT FIGHT WITH HER. AND IT TENDS TO WORK. DOES IT REALLY NEED TO BE EXPLAINED?

Jaysus fucking christ. These people actually have the imagination of a fish, they can't fucking connect the dots.

Judging someone online is an egotistical thing. People like to judge others because of that morality high. It's the snack of the morally lazy.

Repeat with me: "I am flawed too, I have problems too. I should never judge others easily, let alone without full fucking context".

* "op, you should do <terrible advice>"

these ones are better, because they are trying to help, but still annoying as fuck.

they come in two forms:
old smug and condescending washed up idiots who overrate their life lessons and think they are applicable to every person A PRIORI.

yeah, fuck case by case analysis, these dinosaurs think they're the wise elders of the village.

Age does not immediately mean your advices are valid, your advices are valid on the sole merit of being valid by themselves.

I don't give 2 fucks if you're 60 or 120. If your advices are bullshit, please spare me the idiocy and the lack of case analysis.

I had old people tell me "trust me kid, happy wife, happy life" wtf is that shit? MY WIFE IS NOT YOUR WIFE.

YOU DON'T KNOW MY WIFE. MY WIFE IS ACTUALLY COOL, BUT SHE COULD BE AN ACTUAL PSYCHO AND I COULD BE OMITTING THAT FROM MY POST.

THEREFORE, HAPPY WIFE HAPPY LIFE IS A TERRIBLE THING TO SAY.

JUST STFU.

This reminds of that disgusting reddit post where a father asked advice on /r/relationships about her wife, and people told him "dude, duh, divorce her".

Guess what, she ends up murdering both of her children.

You would think such post would serve a lesson as to be careful giving advice online. But no, people think they're fucking dr phil or something with EXTREMELY LITTLE case knowledge.

People need to talk a bit less and listen a whole lot more.

You want to know how to help a person who is expressing problems?
You want to know how to be REALLY conpassionate?

Just listen. You can give minimal advice, but listening is the most important, with some occasional "i feel you man".

Everytime a journalist asks a suicide disuader what do they do, they always say the same " i just listen to their problems".

ITS NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE FOLKS. YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO BE A GOOD PERSON? CLOSE THE MOUTH AND TAKE THE WAX OUTTA YA EARS.

There's also the younger ones who think they can help when they don't even have no experience at all.

This is being naive, but I Iike that more than the smugness of old people.

!rant - seeking advice

So I found a new job and will start at the beginning of July.
I will have holidays (approved) 3 weeks in June.
My resignation can be handed in after midst of May (1 month notice period).
The main reason I'm leaving is my boss/the company structure/the way we are forced to work. Therefore I fear having a bad time when telling my boss early that I will resign.
But I also want to leave the company with a good feeling for everybody, especially my colleagues who already know I leave.

So, the question which is torturing me right now: should I tell my boss in the next days already that I will leave or should I tell him the day I resign.
The latter would mean that I work 2 weeks after resigning, then take my holidays I have approved and actually leave the company by taking the holidays because after those June is over.

I fear that he might give me a hard time when I tell him now. On the other hand, when I tell him so close to my holidays, he might be angry (I am sure he will be angry anyway) and try to cancel my holidays...

For me it's really a tricky situation, because I think my boss has already a problem with me (although he says no when I asked).

"New Manager: You are good with JavaScript focus on that, you can't work on back end and front end both."

I was hired by company because of my understanding of backend, server side, database, aws etc. I worked on both in past and learned, got better with JS later. I like to learn new things and have knowledge about web development.

Worst advice I guess.

!rant

Any devs from Scotland here? A few friends and I are planing to visit Scotland. We'll hike down from Buckie to Perth and then continue on to Edinburgh.
Any advice on good pubs or sight seing stuff is appriciated (:
Cheers a Swiss dev.

Need some advice.
A few programmers told me when I started programming that instead of learning many languages, just focus on one that I am comfortable with and try to get really good at it.
But when I look at other people's resumes or Devrant profiles, most of them have multiple languages in their skill set.
That's why I have been exploring different languages but haven't found the one yet that I think I like the best.
What should I do now? Explore more?

age++;

Normally, I'd leave it there like most other people. But this is devRant, not Facebook [citation needed], so let me take the opportunity to talk about a dev-related project I'm mulling over.

A number of years ago, I dropped my music hobby in exchange for focusing on my computer science/programming skills. I'm now at a point where I'm working professionally as a developer, and I've wanted to get back into music for quite some time. Specifically, I want to make music, not just perform it.

Thing is, I've had difficulty trying to find a good platform for uploading WIPs to get feedback from. I'm hesitant to post them on social media platforms for a variety of reasons (though I'm open to budge), so I've been considering alternatives.

So here's my idea: A personal blog made from the ground up that details my journey rediscovering music, including tracking the resources I've used for others to refer to, music samples, etc. I think it would be a great opportunity to not only get feedback on music I've made, but to also incorporate my programming skills with my music hobby.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea, as well as any advice/recommended tools for taking on a project like this.

Imposer Syndrome

Something we may encounter at somepoint in our careers. I've been reading a few articles after feeling some of the effects of this yet none seem to offer helpful solutions.

Has anyone got any advice or good tip that's helped them in the past?

I feel like I am not good enough to work at my job? Any advice?

Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.

I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.

Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.

Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.

Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.

I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.

I have a disagreement with my product owner (PO). Our team develops APIs in Mulesoft. We've got a release coming up and PO wants to release one of the APIs that has *some* working endpoints, but other endpoints in that same API have some open bugs.

Given that it's *unlikely* that those broken endpoints will be used, does it seem like good practice to release the API with known bugs in it to hit the deadline?

Understand that we're not just releasing the working endpoints. We're releasing all of it, bugs and all. PO's logic is that those broken endpoints won't be used therefore it's fine to send known bugs into production.

I just need some advice in dealing with this

You know, in my limited experience, I find the whole CS degree debate to be quite unnerving. I mean, if you can teach yourself to be a computer genius, I greatly respect you. You're really going placed. Sadly though, learning everything on my own is a bit of a challenge for me. I just find this whole degree-holding VS non-degree-holding conversation to be very confusing. I'm currently enrolled in a 4-year CS program. I personally have learned more there iny first week than I have in months on my own. Now I know all too well that development is often more of a craft or a trade than it is a typical procedural job, but I'm honestly really anxious because I have half of the world telling me to pursue a degree (which I am) and I have the other half telling me to gain experience (which I did). The thing that is stressing me out is the continual pressure to do all of one option instead of a little of both. My life is changing faster than the tech industry, and boy is it a bumpy ride. So unless there is good advice to be said regarding the path you take to become an amazing developer, why fight over the need for a CS degree?

i need advice, is this a good database structure? this is a comments table with foreign keys to users and posts table. the post_id and user_id can be repeated a lot of times so i wondered if i missed something here. i kinda forgot the 1/2/3 normalized form rules, so can someone give me a quick refresh? is this current structure good or should i change it?

Today I give a try of Rust! Any good advice?

Need Advice....
So, I moved to Bangalore after graduation this year and I am interning at a startup till Jan in Android Development. It's a six month internship. Everybody I meet gets surprised after hearing that I took up the internship even after graduation and that it's 6 months long.
I actually interviewed at a couple of places before accepting this internship and all those startups were like the next Facebook, the next Instagram, the next blah...Blah...Nothing new...And this opportunity felt like something where I would learn something new...
But as I meet people every now and then and as the financial ground below me keeps on shrinking, I keep on questioning my desicion.
BTW I am searching for good job opportunities but again can't find any exciting opportunity and the ones I find don't even give an opportunity for the interview...

I am a programming teacher in a local university, I started five years ago, but in this semester I feel very tired, the students don't want to learn. I tray many methodologies and practical protects but the interest show by they is very low. the worst thing is that in anonymous evaluation I get good score but my objective is that students become in a great programmers ¿any advice?

Having to work with my colleagues you doesn't believe on Dino's, satellites and big time believer in the flat earth (even hung up a map of it and stuff..) aaaaand.. him not understand a single proton-sized amount about IT but ignores my advice when he gets issues with his computer...

Ps. And yes, he has smelled alcohol as well, after a talk with the boss nothing has happened..

Pps.. FFS..NO not every thing is fake you stupid excuse of a human being with flattened peanut brain.. this is not the bloody Truman show (although good movie)

Ppps. Forgot the why.. why.. why?! Well.. isn't that the question with this guy.. (╯°□°）╯︵( .o.)

I need some advice. A year ago, one of my former colleagues got a job at one of my dream companies. We weren't besties but we had a good relationship. When I learned about her new job I congratulated her and told her that I'd like to work there too. A position at that company has been open for quite a while but I'm hesitating to apply because:
a) If I apply without telling her and the recruiters see that we used to be colleagues, it will seem strange that I didn't ask her for a referral
b) If I ask her for a referral she might sabotage me because she's probably grooming one of her friends for that position or she thinks that I was a horrible colleague and doesn't want to work with me again. If she liked me, wouldn't she tell me about the position?
On the other hand, the ad for that well paid position has been on their site for months so I'm starting to think it's either fake or they're looking for a special unicorn(which I am not)
Should I apply or is it a complete wasted of my time? (I already have a job)

My coworker got fired due to budget & not enough work to do (his work is done, they didn't had long term tasks for him). But he is a junior dev (1y prof. experience in IT, 15y prof. experience in total) and he is now interviewing for nearly a month. Nearly all recruiters say that they are looking for someone with 3y prof experience in his field.

Does anyone has advice on how to get a job with as good as no experience?

Hey guys i was thinking about learning web development, mainly to make web apps, I already know C# and C++, but web dev looks so much different, can you advice me some good resources to start ?

A question for all you grey beards and other more knowledgeable devs:

I work for a small grocery retail company. Work primarily as a dev, but also spend time doing I.T./HelpDesk stuff. My wife is a nursing student, and when she graduates in May 2018 she is wanting to move to a different location to work at a specific hospital, which would require me to change jobs. No problem, I'm fine with that.

Here is what I am wondering: I currently make a modest salary (for 23 years old I feel like I'm doing pretty good), but we are expecting our first child in April and I would like to be making more. Would persuing a different job for extra $$$ that I could potentially only be working at for around 8-ish months be a bad idea? Should I just stick where I am at until I actual HAVE to move?

Thanks in advance for any advice :D

I could do with do advice of the nice people of devRant!

I want to develop a mobile app for iOS and Android, however creating native apps is just too much. I've found a solution for cross platform development such as xamarim, cordova, appcelarator.

I'm just curious to what your experiences have been and which would be a good route to go?

Recruiter question: Recruiter X sets me up with an interview that went extremely well. The Interviewer ( who is also the project manager) says she would call the recruiter the same day and that I was pretty much a shoo-in for the spot. Recruiter calls b.c. a reference isn't answering and she wants another. I give another good one that I know will pick up. Fast forward almost 2 weeks and I still haven't gotten a response, even after reaching out to X via email and calls. Would it be unprofessional of me to contact the PM directly to inquire about the position? It was due to start monday, but we also got hit by hurricane matthew... not really sure how to procede. Any advice would be great.

Developers !

I need fast advice!

If i want to have a domain like instagram e.g.

domain.com/first-lastname1
domain.com/first-lastname2
domain.com/first-lastname3
...

What is the best way to define those routes? I am using only angular. Its just a landing page so no backend frameworks are needed or used.

So if i have about 50 first-last names (and i might add even a lot more), is it a good idea to create 50 different components in angular where each component links to the different person identity of those /first-lastnameN routes?

Or should i have only 1 component and loop through names from a list and display them somehow? Because i dont know how to do this way And change the URL route into a different name

I have struggled with leet code two years ago when I started university and was learning programming.
Now I am finally set to have a leet code interview at a large company, followed by a take home problem and a system design problem.

I started looking into leet code again today and I feel like I could had done so much more back then if I just had some help.

Back then I made the mistake of doing leet code problems in Java since that's all I knew and it used to make many simple problems last for hours.

I want to try it out using Python this time around since I don't have to focus on every little detail when I solve the problem. The company focuses on Python, Go and JS but I don't know Go and JS well enough.

What do you think? Is it a good idea or not? Should I just try JavaScript?

Also do you have any advice for this kinds of interviews?
i think the leet code one will be the toughest.
Some suggest I should read Cracking the coding interview, but I don't see the point of doing that
Good thing is all interviews are through Zoom since it's coronavirus season.

Just need a bit of advice here.

Background: I'm good with backend web development. Won't say I'm really good, but yeah, I've done it quite a bit and built few sites locally.

At this point, I wanna know if I should continue learning and get really good with PHP (maybe get certifications). Or, start learning Python and try frameworks like Django or Flask. Also, this coming summer, I wanna do some kinda internship but before that I need to be good with something.

Some advice would help :D
Thanks and happy new year!

Last week I hired a friend of friend to work on my projects. Hes a young and friendly guy. However he never worked in actual office and it shows. During the meeting he brings his phone and in the middle of explaining he pulls out his phone to respond someone back. Basically lacks professionalism and has this young person cockiness where he thinks he is competent to handle everything while in reality last week he did 2-3 hours worth of work. I want to set up some boundaries but I dont want to seen as a harsh dictator. On the other hand Im paying him over the top even though he doesnt have skills, but the least I want to is a decent attitude and effort. How u would advice me to approach this and teach him to get his shit together? Im already becoming resentful and next week if he keeps treating his work like a school project I will let him go.

Im really trying to setup a nice environment for him to work at, I rented a nice office in a hub space and also bought entirely new laptop plus monitor setup for him to work. I even took him for drinks and lunches but for some reason I start to feel that hes taking that shit for granted and Im being too good.

Hes not proactive, it seems that he will do bare minimum that I give him.

Any advice on buying a new mouse?
Uses: Programming, Gaming

Old one was a Razer Deathadder.
I don't mind if it's expensive as long as it's good quality. I'm basically using it all day.