Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

There is no shame in using google to program.

'Back in the day' we had phonebook sized books of documentation on our desks we would reference constantly.

Why?

No one is going to memorize a phone book sized book. Not to mention three or four of them.

Being a good dev is about creativity, not memorization.

/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

Just finished this great book! It was really entertaining and interesting 🙂
And it explained the advantages of DevOps and CI/CD in a very understandable way 😁

Do you have any other good recommendations for IT novels?

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

I need to hide myself, my computer, programming skills and computer knowledge from people. Then only, I will be safe..

Friend: Heeey, you're good with computers right?

Me: No! 😑

Friend: Come-on bro. I know you are.

Me: What do you want?

Friend: I want you to check and book flights for me for country X.

Me: Are you ok? How does this have anything to do with someone being good with computers and stuff?

Friend: Haha, see? You're good with computers. *starts laughing. Anyway, since you're good, you can find the best prices. I know you know how to search sites and how to find things online.

Me: WTF?!?!!! All, you have to do is type in your search. If you don't like the results, you simply refine it.

Friend: See, all this tech stuff I'm not really good at it.

Me: But you're good at searching for other things online, right? Do the same for your flights.

*Picks my laptop and walks away.
How can a young man not be able to search for flights online but knows how to use several gadgets. Nonsense.

Good use of data structures book.

!rant but recommendation:
"JavaScript: The Good Parts" Douglas Crockford.

I really like this book.
It's chewed away my misconceptions of JS. Especially coming from C++.

Small and precise.
JSON, JSLint and JSMin developer is the author.

Yet another Windows rant but boi Redmond deserves it.
For our new office I took a leap of faith ordering 15 iMac 5k. (btw HP quoting us €10k each pc for same spec).

There are two young guys insist on Windows. Good for you so we ordered two top of line surface book. He religiously unwrapped and said “who want apple trash more than this beauty.”

It’s been 5 hours that shit spent on “Getting Ready Windows for you”, once done it prompted another updating at 4% until we all left work.

So this morning I’m ordering another two MBPs...

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

A late rise up *check*
A good cup of tea *check*
A nice breakfast *check*
A rainy day today *check*
A bunch of time for reading
a book and playing with
python and elixir *check
Nobody seeks me for
tech support *check*

Did I die and go to heaven?

UPDATE: devRant Trans-Oceanic Journey Community Project

It was a mere 12 days ago that I asked the question; 'Could devRanters, as a community, build a 21st Century Technology-Laden ‘devRant devie-Stressball-in-a-Bottle’ and send it on a journey across the Atlantic ocean?

I am thrilled to report that devRanters enthusiastically accepted this difficult challenge. A core team quickly formed and a tremendous amount of research and progress has been made in a short period of time. I want to give you a high level-flavor of what we are doing. Please keep in mind we still need your help. We welcome all develops to take part in this journey.

I want to give appreciation to the devRant Founders @dfox and @trogus. Without your support and sponsorship this project would not have been possible. devRant brought us together and it a reality. Devie journeying across the Ocean the Columbus sailed will stir the imagination of children and adults worldwide when we launch on May 1, 2017.

Some of the research and action items in progress:

- Slack and trello environments were created to capture research and foster discussion.

- A Stony Brook University Oceanography Professor suggested the Gulf Stream would be a good pathway across the ocean. We researched it very and agree. The Gulf Stream has been a trans-Atlantic conduit for hundreds of years. We are deciding whether to launch from Cape Hatteras, NC or the Virginia coast. Both have easy access to the rapid currents in the Gulf Stream.

- We are researching every detail of the Gulf Stream to make the journey easier and faster for devie. We have maps and a team member gathered valuable ideas reading a thorough book – ‘The Gulf Stream’.

- We decided on using a highly resilient plastic rather than glass for the bottle material. Plastic is much lighter, faster and glass breaks down more easily. The lightweight enclosure will allow us to take full advantage of waves and ample trade winds. We are still discussing the final design as we want to minimize friction and mimic the non-locomotion fish that migrate thousands of miles riding the Gulf Stream.

-The enclosure might be 3D printed unless we can locate a commercial solution. We have 3D specs and are speaking with some experts. There are advantages and dis-advantages to each solution.

- We will be using Iridiums' RockBLOCK two-way satellite technology to bounce lat-long coordinate pings off their 36 low-orbit satellites. The data will be analyzed by our devRant devie analysis software. IOS and Android public apps being built by the team will display devie's location throughout the journey in.

- Arduino will be used as the brains

- Multiple sensors including temperature and depth are being considered

-A project plan will be published to the team Friday 12/9. Sorry I am a few days late but adding some new ideas.

There are still a lot of challenges we must overcome and we will.

That’s all for now. I will send updates and all ideas / comments are valued.

I THOUGHT I JUST DAMAGED MY PHONE SCREEN LIKE AN IDIOT.

I haven't slept for 3 days, so I'm kind of out of it.

I was using my phone for a few hours non-stop, because if my mom sees me on my laptop she might take it away lol.

I had to edit my manuscript, so I didn't put my phome down, and it's really hot in my house for some reason even though it's cold outside (63°f).

So my phone overheated, and being the sleep deprived idiot I was, I realized how squishy it felt when I kept pressing my screen down. For some reason it felt good to push on it.

I know, I'm stupid. I kept pressing down until I snapped out of the trance, and realized what I was doing, so I stopped. Then I saw these distinct patches on my screen. Like when there's water in your phone, and you see these roundish splotches. Also, I couldn't move the screen.

I panicked because I thought I ruined the screen, so I turned it off. I kept it face down on my table, and read a book for an hour.

When I turned it back on, the patches were gone. I guess they were present because my phone overheated or something.

Still, that was kind of scary. I thought I ruined it.

Worst experience with cs profs? Oh boy....

Databases lab: "You'll need to work of this snippet, if your IDE tells you it's deprecated you don't need to care about it"
If you want to imagine the quality of the code base we were expected to work upon just think about that attached xkcd comic, basically an undecipherable black box.

The instructions where at the same time micro managing everything (he gave us frickin variable names to use, and no good ones, no the database connection had to be called datbc, yeah very descriptive) and yet so obfuscated that I'm not completely sure he didn't resurrect Kant himself to ghostwrite for him.

He also didn't like us to use any Java feature that was to 'modern', for example for each loops since "they offer no benefit over normal for loops".

Further, everything we wrote had to be documented with a relationship diagram and a uml. So far no problem if he hadn't invented his own flavor of both (which can be read about in his book).
Oh, and he almost failed me because I used a lambda expression in his 'code on paper' exam and this "arrows are a C command" I "must have been confused"... which is glorious coming from the guy who can't get operators and commands straight.

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

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

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

Hope I get this.

Hey you,
yeah, YOU.
Listen here: Don't EVER lend a book to a friend. Why? Just got back a book I lent to a friend, was in perfect condition. Got it back SOAKED in coffee and as CRUSTY as a KEYBOARD used by someone who EATS CHEETOS without washing their HANDS.

It twas a good and useful book on Linux commands... most valiant in my early days of exploration. R.I.P. my good friend.

My graduation project partner was strange person

Favorite IDE is VIM

Forget how to use git

But somehow she could code most of the app

I asked what does she do when mistake happens, she answered "delete and write again"

I suggest github but she is "to embarrassed to show her code on internet"

She send .zip file of her code to me

Go to univ library to copy some code because she don't believe random code on internet

Of course verson of code on book in library is too old, but she prefer fix herself

But she is overall good person, so I can graduate next month

Age 19, got a government sponsored chance to go to India to study. Was called to study for Law. But didn't like it. Decided I wanted to change to Computer Science cause that's what I was interested in. Go to India and apply for computer science course but not law despite Parents wanting me to do law because hey Lawyers job is a good status in society.

Got a spot in BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) . Totally new in programming. Started with C. Was freaked out with all the new things. Variables, comments, Pre processors files. All was new to me. Although the lecture tried her best, I couldn't understand her well because of language barrier. It was a mixture of Hindi and English.

Luckily she gave me a book to read, Let us C. That book helped me a ton. I realized I really liked programming. When summer holiday came I taught myself C++ . Then next summer Java. Then Android. Then some Web Development. That was last summer. But I kinda settled in Android and did some projects in it. Right now I am about to sit for my final exam. Then I will try my best to get an Internship or a job.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

From the guy who wrote all the Programming Microsoft books and the Annotated Turing book. Comes this book.

This book is great for beginners great for people who don’t know a lot about software and how computers work, simple read. I like it because it also gives a different prospective, beginning at Morse code and works up from there all the way up to high level languages.

The book gives snippets of code to discuss it not really a tutorial book. It’s a different type of book that all people could understand.

Good read

Book: I dont feel so good

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

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

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

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

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

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

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

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

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

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

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

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

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

Started showing my brother some deep learning tutorials and I have him reading a book.

I really need for him to realize how smart he is. He was never academically inclined. I always told my mother that it had to do with the same dislike of school that I always had and how a couple of really shitty teachers could run one's motivation to the ground.

I always found him brilliant. Had a good standing with common sense amd logical thinking. He was interested in math for a while(same as me) but school made him hate it. He managed to pass all the state exams needed to graduate from H.S and was able to succesfully pass the military ASVAB with a very good grade.

But after H.S he went down the drain with what he wanted to do.

I love my brother and really want him to find out just how smart I think he is and this would probably be one of my biggest experiments with him. Maybe, just maybe if I get him to realize that he can understand these advanced concepts without a teacher his(fear?) Of school might go away enough for him to give it a second go. Fuck man I don't even need for him to go and get a B.S in comp sci, an associate degree would be just fine. It can be on anything, I just want him to do something.

Sometimes I feel as if this was my fault. At one point he told me that he feels shadowed by my grades. And my family was always proud of what I did in H.S and at uni. I feel(sometimes) that I should have paid more attention to him as he was going to school, help out a little more and encourage him more.

He feels as if he is meant for a dead end miserable working life, and I really can't bear the idea of him wasting himself away to something like that.

I really hope this shit works man...i really need for this to work, he doesn't even need to like it, just realize that it is possible.

The Humble bundle currently offers a bunch of Linux related books. Some gimp shit, and some blender shit.

The thing is, they have the Linux Programming interface by Michael Kerrisk for 30 dllrs(in total for everything)

Ladies and gents, that right there is a DAMN good deal. That book is fucking gold. Used it during Uni, didn't get to keep it. 30 bucks for a bunch of pdfs, ebook and mobi plus a book that for itself is worth more? Shiet son. It will pump up both your Linux and C chops I would tell ya that much.

I'd made that deal.

What about you Utivich, you'd made that deal?

Utivich: I'd made that deal.

I don't blame you. DAMN GOOD deal.

Typical conversation between my parents and me

Parents: Can you make stuff?

Me: Make what?

Parents: The thing you do all the time.

Me: "Computer stuff"?

Parents. Yah...

Me: Well, yes, why?

Parents: What can you do?

Me: Well, I know C# the most...

Parents: Can you then make software like Facebook, Twitter, etc?

Me: Well, I can, but that will take a lot of time.

Parents: You should really make something and make money.

Me: Ok. (goes into my room, and turns on laptop)

(a few monents later....)

--[[CHORUS START]]--

Parents: U DOIN COMPUTER???

Me: Uh-huh.

Parents: When did I said to do "Computer stuff"?

Me: Well, you said to rest.

Parents: But I never said to do your "Computer stuff"!

Me: But you said to rest. For an hour!

Parents: WHY U SHOUT AT ME!!!! TURN OFF THAT **** NOW!

Me: Ok.... (turns off and opens C# book immediately)

Parents: What's that?

Me: C# book

Parents: What's C#?

Me: Programming language.

Parents: Where can you use it?

Me: Make stuff.

Parents: Like what?

Me: (lists my personal projects)

Parents: Show me.

Me: (turns on the computer and shows one of it)

Parents: Good. (leaves)

--[[CHORUS END]]--

Me: (deep breath) Can I FINALLY use the computer?

--[[CHOURS]]--

The year is 2018. You buy the latest mac book pro and also the latest iphone. You can not connect your iphone to your mac, nor use the iphone earphone in your mac without an adapter. Who tought this was a good idea?

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

This one was probably last week of my highschool education so everyone including myself were drunk as fuck like 90% of the time.

Came home drunk one evening and woke up in the morning with a working keylogger waiting to be deployed on school computers. Apparently I've even implemented FTP upload, some basic firewall bypasses and autostart feature. Everything was actually quite good, excluding my stupidness to upload captured data on server through FTP, but there was anyways no-one smart enough in that school to decompile a Windows executable binary.

What's more interesting is until that moment I've never written anything remotely so complicated - I was doing examples from the book and didn't think I have enough knowledge to make program that has any real life application.

After that day it started coming to me that one day I could actually earn for life with programming.

When you've got a job you're happy with.

That's it in my book. Studied it and persuaded someone to hire you to do it? Enjoy that job, and it pays the way? Good work. Of course you'll likely go further than that in time, which is great - but there's no great magical point to "strive to" so to speak.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO BUY THE PROFESSOR'S BOOK JUST TO BE ABLE TO PASS THE COURSE?

It's so stupid, I'm currently attending a Operating Systems course at university and the professor NEEDS us to buy his book because all of the tasks and seminars are based on his book. It is stupid! There are thousands of books out there on Operating Systems programming! Free ones too! But instead we have to spend 800SEK (100USD) on his book.

And guess what? There is literally one task based on his book... To summarize the chapters about Fixed Priority scheduling and Dynamic Priority scheduling. Which is 15 pages out of 200+.

All the students attending the course are going to the director of studies and complaining next week. This is unacceptable. If it was a good book, sure. But the book has the same exact information as multiple free e-books we've found.

Ridiculous.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

I have this one chick on Twitter that she used to be a fellow classmate of mine while I was going for my Bachelors degree.
She would always bitch and complain about how the teachers we had were horrible at teaching. I had to interact with her because of one assignment and EVERYONE in the team was good and well with the items, we finished it rather quick (build a terminal emulator) and we were just thinking about ways to make it look cooler. It was challenging to be honest, but everyone was so interested in it and had all the materials requires plus a very nice instructor to go with that would be overly happy to answer questions and provide additional content, the instructor in question made no book requirement for the class and provided instead free resources, be it video content or his own code on the matter to make sure that everyone got it.

Dude was amazing (most of my university instructors were truly fascinating or people that had worked for very interesting projects) and so when she complain that the guy "had no idea how to teach" I decided to investigate a little.

You see, she had NEVER taken any consideration that maybe you should advance your studies in the field, particularly in programming, by doing your own fucking research. No, the professor is not supposed to hold your fucking hand while you are trying to understand how a fucking function IN FUCKING PYTHON works, dude gave a full length lecture and the only retard that did not understood the topic: was you. He went to you to help you and instead you gave the man an attitude because for some fucking reason he was accounted for your own fucking stupidity. Motherfucker was there for more than 30 minutes trying to explain to this dumb chick the nuances of def hello(): return "hey there" and for some fucking reason you were too daft to understand that.......

The chick complained to us in the team how because of work she had NO time whatsoever to dedicate to reading programming or general software engineering materials......yet her twitter was FULL of book reviews concerning novels and self help books and bullshit like that.

If you are like that, and blame it on your teachers: fuck-you.

To this day she still bitches about the teachers from time to time, I legit told her once that she had no business attending a C.S degree.

Do you think you can get into Julliard without ever touching a fucking instrument? no. Do you think you can tell some Terence Fletcher-throwing-a-chair-at-your motherfucker to show you how to position your hands on a drumstick or what keys to press on a piano? FUCK NO.

If you were being DAFT on a ProGraMmiNg101 for which they picked Python to be the language to use and blamed your fucking stupidity to a teacher then yet again: FUCK-YOU

brain: ABSTRACTION ABSTRACTION ABSTRACTION too much ABSTRACTION!

me: jeez calm down a lil i just deployed a boilerplate ember web app with cli tools with next to nothing amount of 'my' code.

b: YES U SUCKER THAT'S WHAT WENT WRONG U DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT THE LIL STUFF THAT HAPPENS BEHIND THE SCENES THE FUCK MAN U CALL YOURSELF A CS STUDENT YOU CAN'T EVEN WRITE A COMPILER YET

m: sooo remember when we were studying logic gates and binary conversions and you sigkilled all my threads cuz it was 'boring'?

b: why yes why do you ask

m: WELL that's where we'll end up again if you don't stop nagging me about going down. Trust me, I KNOW how to starve you and you'll beg me to use Python again. You start making advanced data structures in C and the next thing you know you're writing assembly code 'just for fun'.
I have a hackathon coming right up and I have to use a framework or my team loses the advantage. Are we good?

b: well if you put it that way...BUT AFTER THAT YOU'RE TAKING ME TO AN ALGORITHM SESSION

m: *eerily stares at the dusty book in the corner*
you... have a deal

MENTORS - MY STORY (Part I)

I've had several great mentors during my career. This is the story of the three most important.

1.- Professor E.
When I was on my first year (University - Computer Science), all my professors were 'normal' except for this one.

E. was the Programming I - Laboratory professor. And the most important thing he teached us was to think. To be independent, and to look for answers beyond simple solutions.

He was always pushing us beyond what was requested and to try new things, to try to improve our own solutions and to look at them as always improvable.

In a regular class, this would happen:
Student: Hey E. How can I do this X requirement?
E.: Use function xyz with A and B parameters.
S: Ok thanks...

...10 minutes later...

S: Hey E. that function doesn't work very good for my case.
E.: You have a book, you have internet connection. Don't waste 10 minutes trying to abide what I told you. Investigate, find a way or even a better way; use your resources.

Other example, in the first year all projects were requested to be delivered with text based interface (console projects).
What about E.?
"Well, you CAN deliver your project with a text based interface BUT you definitely SHOULD try to make a GUI, something simple but effective. Just so you learn more in the process"

Good E. He gave me strong foundations for this industry.

Yesterday, a very good friend of mine who is a philosopher has given me a present: the book "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin.

This summer is going to be very good. I'm very greatful.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

🐉

I once wrote a room planning application on unity, to allow people in my company to book meetings using tablets attached to the room doors.
Turns out the c# Datetime object unity uses was highly localized and therefore had a different formats on each different device.
I saved those timestamps into a SQL database and eventually all devices crashed due to having some Datetime format they could not parse.
Had to fully bypass the datetime and reinvent it essentially and had to reset the database.

I think it's needless to say I'm not particularly good in dating.

I seear man fucking shit php devs make it hard for people to appreciate the language.
To start, i don't think there is anything wrong with php. As a language I know damn near all of its pitfalls and have successfully deployed huge applications with minimal fuss.

The thing is...this shit seems to happen only when I AM THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT DOES IT

In any other scenario i am constantly cursing the original author under my fucking breath hoping that they choke on their own dicks. Fucking cunts.

Really man, some of the fucking code i have seen. This shit is dangerous as fuck and i can't believe that in 2019 motherfuckers would not have the decency to google for best fucking practices or learn it from a fucking book and shit.

Writing proper php code is not that fucking hard people, every fucking update to the language, every fucking tool that comes out is for the betterment of it.
Guess proper oop or functional paradigms are too complex for some dickheads. Hell, not even top to bottom procedural code.

Fuck me. Good thing is, boss is happy, the entire faculty is happy, the board is happy. Everyone is motherfucking happy.

Dez negroids better remember this shit cuz I just asked for a $20k raise.

I got a raise literally every time i ask for one so this one better make the cut.

Fuck shit php developers man. Y'all don't deserve the language, y'all make the language look bad, y'all make the community look bad.

Fuck you, die and eat a dick. Do all that shit in whatever order you prefer.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

Hope this is as good as it looks!

So I finished my first semester in NYU as a CD master. During the first semester I took a class called heuristic problem solving. Every week a competitive game will be introduced to us, and will be played in two weeks. And trust me, the games aren't easy. I teamed up with another guy who I had no idea was and named our team as we don't know. At the end of the semester we won seven out of nine games, and by won I meant that we beat the whole class in the match. And my teammate became a really good friend.

By telling this story, I want to make a point. I love problem solving, and not problems in a algorithm book where you apply an algorithm and do some trick to solve it, but real world problem where you hope for the best and anticipate, predict your opponent's move. However, American's school system doesn't teach that.

When I applied to graduate school, no school wanted me because I have an average GPA of 3.6, and no outstanding achievements. I can solve problems in my dream becaus I have an active mind, I can propose solution to a project one month before my teammates realized they essentially were doing what I told them the solution should be. But so what, I can't write those on my application.

One of the professor told me that my professor shared the story of my team during a faculty dinner, and they were very impressed by our achievement. So I guess I'm not dumb. But after all, companies and schools will look at your transcript and decide who you are.

I love myself for having random thoughts all the time that can lead to innovative problem solving. But I also hate myself for not able to study like the good kids are.

sitting with friends and trying to book movie tickets online. the cinema simulator shows all good seats as booked. Me: "don't worry guys". open inspect element, changing the seat image from booked to available. now everybody think im hacker... :)

The company I work for offered a Javascript Course/Training for every developer to enroll, which happens to take place on 3 days. In the description it was ensured to be for everyone, doesn't matter if you are an expert or beginner: there's something to learn for everyone.

The company described him as a top coacher in Austria and that he is overbooked for 2 years. High in demand indeed. "Has to be good", I thought. As a relatively average JS developer, there has to be something to learn for me.

Sitting here the second day, I fucking regret to join this shit. I have never seen such a bullshit in my lifetime. Why the fuck would you even book this man, he doesn't even understand basic concepts of software engineering. Just reading down the script, opening the script on one laptop and showcaseing it on the other. When someone asks a question, there's a 70% chance he doesn't know the answer. It takes this scumbag 30 fucking seconds to define a function; probably making spelling mistakes alongside.

I don't even want to know how much this dude will make from this "coaching". Hoped that it'd get better over time but I don't see an improvement. Contacting my boss that I'll leave this "training".

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

From a school book currently in use. I can report a good laugh.

"In Section 29.7 we introduce the Java language as an increasingly important language for Web development"

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

!rant

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

For AI, in particular Deep Learning developers, practitioners, hobbyists and otherwise people interested in the field.

If you go into the Pytorch website, click on resources and scroll down you will see a link to "Deep Learning with Pytorch" by Manning publications. This will give you access to the book, a book that if memory serves me well costs about 40+ in printing and the online book format is about 29 (again, if memory serves well)

The book is currently FREE and it does not ask you for an email address, you can just tell them why you want it for and they will give you the free pdf download.

I don't know how good the book is, but have found Manning to publish really good resources.

Do with this information what you want.

And yes, I am leaving the rant tag, so that more people can see this and take advantage of the opportunity in case of being interested and not having the money to purchase the book after the promotion is done and over with. Fuck you about tags and shit.

!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

Bring the fun and curiosity back.

School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.

First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.

There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.

I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.

What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.

Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.

The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".

When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

I am not into motivation books but I was intrigued by a title.

Nice fucking book.
Found some improvements I can make in my life.

Author literally wrote he don’t give a fuck if you’re reading it or not.

So I have the new Mac book pro for 8 months now, always thought that the butterfly keyboard issue will never happen to me.

Until three days ago I noticed my space key is kinda sticky.
I have an external monitor so I don’t recall any time I spill water or food directly on the keyboard.

So I made an appointment for a walk in.

BUT this morning, I was like: man, fuck this shit and smashed the space key.

Now it’s fixed.

Good

There are so many weird hacks in the quite legacy app I work with I could write a book about all them hacks…

But I must admit, the worst of them all is internal time. Yes, so some blockhead thought it’s a good idea to represent time in a manner completely removed from Datetime objects or timestamps or even string representations. Instead we deal with them as intervals represented by integers - and because this is not fucked up enough by itself, the internal time doesn’t start at midnight, yet the integer representations do. It’s a bloody mess. No wonder most of the bugs we face have to do with dates and time…

!rant

I got Clean Code for Christmas, it is such a good book. I can't recommend it more.

Does anyone know of any good audio book sites besides audible? Free ones are good too, of course, but I don't mind paying for them.

Likewise for a good player, since books aren't music.

Went to a thrift store last week near work and they often have old dev or technology books (I picked up a first edition K&R C book, once) and I found:

1) A book on the history of codes and ciphers throughout history.
2) Beyond good and evil by Nietzsche.
3) A modern publication of a 1673 Spanish demon summoning book (to go into a local town archive).
4) The technical information and construction manual for telegram systems from 1938.

I swear I was driving home thinking:

"Please don't crash, if CSI teams have to piece my identity together from these four personal items I dread to think what conclusions they're going to come to..."

Today has arrived my new book!!.. what a good feeling!.. 😊

I really like this book on the basis of the philosophy overall, no this doesn’t solve all problems but it’s a good baseline of “guidelines/rules” to program by. Good metrics or goals to architect and design software projects high and low level projects.

Fight Software Rot
Avoid duplicate code
Write Flexible, dynamic, adaptable code
Not cargo cult programming and programming by coincidence.
Make robust code, contracts/asserts/exceptions
Test, Test, and TEST again and Continue testing.. this is a big one.. not so much meaning TDD.. but just testing in general never stop trying to break your software.. FIND the bugs.. you should want to find your bugs. Even after releasing code the field continue testing.

We need to normalize not being a passionate CS guru. You can be good at your job and not have passion for it. You don't have to dedicate your life to your career in every facet.

I don't expect plumbers to sit around their house all day during their free time hooking up water lines. Why is it expected that I'm always reading some dev book or learning some new framework or reading some tech blog?

I do other shit, and that's fine. My job earns me a paycheck and I'll improve on the clock, and when I walk out at the end of the day I leave that shit there.

At most I might converse with you informally about tech but I'm not going to spend my little free time going to meetups and pretending like I care more than I do. If you do that's great, but I'm not you and that's fuckin fine too.

*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"

Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.

I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y

So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin

A N G E R Y

Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?

And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.

Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.

Refactoring! Refactoring! REFACTORING!

This is one of “those desk books” that you gotta have imo. Personally I love giving names to categories of things, helps us better recognize patterns if we can classify them.

Software can always be improved, this book give you a good majority of the most common refactorings it’s like a recipe book almost.. shows you the code smell... give you the detailed recipes to fix it. Great to have in code reviews.

Doesn’t matter that this book is in JavaScript the concepts and ideas are the big pictures in this book.

Classic “one of those” books.

Ughhhhhh. This fucking code is a disaster! The guy says he built it DRY, but it's WET as fuck! So much fucking repeated code!

I'm annoyed most because I know that it'd be a fucking waste of time to try and rebuild what these guys have built over the past 5 years, but goddamn it, it shouldn't be an excuse to keep on making code like this!

I know that I'm not super experienced in C# but pick up a goddamn book on good coding practices. This thing is a disjointed mess and it never had to get this way.

So many fucking interfaces!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

In my school, eleventh grade (so nearly "Abitur", A levels), we got the task to create a program which will be running on every computer here which should replace the Classbook (like a book where homework and lessons and stuff is written down).
Now, the class before mine already did a part of that, a program to share who is ill/not at school, with a mark whether it is excused or not.
So far so good. They all seemed not that bad when they were presenting it to us. Then, the first thing: they didn't know what git is. Well, okay I thought.
Next, there was this password field to access the program. One of them entered the password and clicked enter. That seemed suspiciously fast for an actual secure login. So fast, the password could have been in the Code...
Yesterday I copied that program and put it into a decompiler.
And... I was right.
There were the login credentials in plain text. Also, haven't thought of it but, IP address + username + password + database name were there in plain text, too.
Guess I am going to rewrite this program down to the core

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Literally anything that comes out from Anders Hejlsberg, always liked what the dude brings to others. I fucking loved his work on the Pascal Programming language, back then it was all over the place in Mexico. I can only imagine that in the U.S it was just as big since a lot of mfkers in here are still pushing Delphi from what they found with Turbo Pascal.

His work on the C# programming language is absolutely incredible and C# is one of the best languages in my book. And I fucking adore TypeScript, so literally, everything this dude puts out, I pay attention, listen to and learn. As far a language designers go, him and Rich Hickey are my top favorite mfkers in the field, but Anders it to me a personal idol.

I also happen to really fucking like C# and Clojure man, like come on those two are just legit good languages.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

I’m slacking been so busy, forgot to post yet another book..

Soo here ya go..Engineering A Compiler.

For those who don’t like the Red Dragon compiler book for whatever reason, most don’t like it because they don’t believe the dragon book covers topics in a “Teachy way” and doesn’t explain certain things. As well as not cover one topic.

Then this may be the book for you. It’s significantly newer than the “Dragon book” and I believe it does do a better job laying out for “learning”.. I could see this book being used in universities.. I’m sure it is, but mine never had a compiler course so whatever. Good book

Fun fact.. it references the dragon book, as well as the other books the dragon book authors wrote as well as articles in the ACM..AND! It also references Knuths art of computer programming and other books of knuth AND references the Algorithms book. All books I have previously posted.

I have not read this book, only skimmed as I have recently received it this one. May do a follow up or even at it to the list to make a YouTube playlist going chapter by chapter thru the book.

Very few general embedded systems books exist, most are specific to chip, or architecture. Very few cover overall ideas, and concepts that are common across ALL embedded systems regardless of architecture and things you must keep in mind while designing software for them.

I think this a a good book. As a primer for deep diving into embedded systems design philosophy

At the beginning of my IT career I was so desperate to get into this field that I even read a PHP 4.3 intro book and applied for a php dev role

yes, I was THAT desperate. Good thing I wasn't hired.

Historically I've done Java but have recently moved to C# and got the book to do a cert.

Who thought it would be a good idea to start chapter 1 with threads, concurrency, asynchronous calls and PLINQ, then covering boolean expressions, if statements and loops in the section after??

People: "Well we could put this data in the address book.....?"

Me: "Wait, what does that data have to do with the address book? Does a given address need that data / is it specific to that address?"

People: "No it's not related to addresses ... we just thought we could put it there."

Me: ....

Me: "So if you use that address you always want that specific data you want stored in the address book?"

People: "Oh no it's not tied to addresses."

Me: ....

Me: "So help me out here, when do you use a given piece of data? In the example here, what made you add that information?"

-Silence-

People: "Um, I'm not sure."

Me: "I think it would be a good idea if we found out. That might provide us some important guidance here."

Here’s book most of you have either read a newer edition or some variant based on this book, as computer science students you had to take an intro to logic course.. prior to digital logic.. or atleast that’s how it went for me and many others I know.
Which regardless how much the universities screwed up teaching comp sci and programming.. this is one aspect I think they nailed. Requiring philosophical logic course for comp sci.

Again this isn’t a digital logic book. It’s just philosophical logic. The first edition of this book came out in 1953... and I think they are edition 14 or 15... for a book to have this many editions and last this long thru time it’s a good book.

It’s a book that should be a must read for anyone venturing into AI and working on human machine thought processing.

It’s a great book to have around as reference, considering philosophical logic is not a walk in the park atleast not in the beginning because it requires you to change the way you view things.. more specifically it requires you to think objectively and make decisions objectively rather than subjective emotional reasoning.

Programmers need to think objectively with everything they do. The moment you begin thinking subjectively .. ie personal style, wishes and wants, or personal reasons and put that into code for a code base with a team u just put the team at risk.

Does this book teach objective thought? No... indirectly yes, because it teaches the objective rules of logic... you don’t get to have an emotional opinion on wether you agree or disagree or whatnot, logic is logic even philosophical. Many people failed the logic course I was in university.. infact the bell curve was c- / D ... many people had to take the course more than once.. they even had to change the way the grading was done.. just to get more people to pass...

But here’s the thing it’s not about it being taught wrong.. people just couldn’t adapt to thinking objectively, with rules as such in philosophical logic courses. Grant it the symbols takes time getting use to but it literally wasn’t the reason people failed.. it was their subjective opinions and thought process interfereing with the objectiveness of the course exams and homework.

Anyone have any good book recommendations? They can be language specific or universal. I'm halfway through clean code and love it. Wondering if there're any other world class resources y'all have used.

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

This book isn't at all what I thought it was going to be. I hoped it would be patterns and practices to writing better code...it's more like a philosophical Chicken Soup for the Developer's Soul. Self-care for syntax geeks.

And by that merit, it's actually quite good.

A very good read if you want to learn about dependency injection in .Net. (I might have an older version of the book though)

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

- Think YOU'VE got a personality complex? I'm a software engineer who majored in marketing.
- Think YOU'VE got a phobia about failing? I wrote a book on developing for Google Glass. And tech edited another on Hailstorm.
- Think YOU'VE got self-confidence issues? I had a run of 7 straight rejections by companies in the Fortune 500.
- Think YOU'VE got reservations about flexing your certifications? I held a MCP in FrontPage.
- Think YOU'VE got paranoia about your degree? My MBA's from the University of Phoenix.
- Think YOU'RE a glutton for punishment? I - Think Android Content Providers are a good idea.
- Think YOU'VE got a confusing skill set? A hiring manager told me I was "too passionate about technology to work here at Microsoft".
- Think YOU'VE got issues with intellectual property? I was given a cease-&-desist order for the first domain I registered.
- Think YOU'VE got false bravado? I had over 400,000 followers on Google+.

While all of these are hilarious quips and great social ice breakers, they're all 100% true. Enjoy your day. ;)

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

"If flowers could grow on the moon. I'd plant you a garden of stars. So you could see in the dark,
that you're not alone."

I have a poetry book coming out (eventually) called "Steal this poem."

To date, my poetry has gotten one guy laid. Thats good enough for me.

And if you ever wanted to know what it feels like to be a poet, now you too can be one.

Steal this poem.

What's a good book to read about hacking and/or cyber security? Doesn't have to necessarily a how-to guide, rather, just something to read on the subject.

I once failed a subject during my masters (complex analytics and measure theory).
Next year I decided to give it everything I've got. I had grown to love it and could solve most problems they threw at me. Hand written an 80 pages long "book" distilled from all the notes, proofs and visualisations from all the lectures that year.

I only exerted this effort (even though I could've just "passed" this subject) because the lecturer was so damn enthusiastic about maths. Even though he wasn't a CS teacher this course was my best experience of a teacher at uni. He loved the beauty of the maths he was teaching and managed to make me love it too.

He was a maths geek and when I aced my final he told me he actually writes code too. He showed me some simulations he wrote while he worked on some theoretical nuclear physics stuff, because that's what he was into. Really cool guy. I wish more CS lecturers were as good teachers.

!rant

So, I've been wanting to learn C++ for a couple months now - decided to get a good book yesterday (Professional C++ 3rd Edition) on the language to help guide me through the more advanced concepts.

Fast forward today and I'm having a blast! Still uncomfortable with the syntax but I'll get used to that over time.

So fun 😊

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?

I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.

When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.

So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.

I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.

I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.

Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.

Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?

Somewhere in the svalbard vault where github buried all our code is about two hundred megabytes of pictures of my ass and other pornography stenographically hidden in innocous pictures hosted on github. Why? Because I can.

I did the same thing with stock photography back when I used to be a photographer. If you've used pixabay or a dozen other stock sites theres a good chance you've unwittingly looked at my magnificently sculpted ass (and other parts of me).

Future shenanigans include massive (and unsolicited) deliveries of half finished dildos (courtesy of dildo factory dumpster rejects), public accesible blue tooth speakers put in inaccesible spots, deepfakes of opposing politicians banging uglies, public book burnings not because we hate books but because who the fuck reads anymore?

And orgies, lots of orgies.

Its the end of the world. Let loose with the craziness and party.

Context: Madre recently got a new laptop to replace her old HP, but since she doesn't know much about computers, I picked it out for her. I went a little overboard on the specs because I new it was a "family laptop" and I would end up using it more than she would.

Mum: *yelps after typing on computer*
Me: "What's wrong"
Mum: "This computer is too fast!"
Me: 😐
Me: ... "What?"
Mum: "It loads things too fast"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Mum: "When I click on the apps they open almost immediately"
Me: "That's a good thing"
Mum: "No it's not, it startled me!"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: ...
*goes back to reading book*

I started watching Silicon Valley some days back. Just finished season-1. I'm fucking sad and pissed off right now... No, don't get me wrong...Silicon Valley is good. I loved it.
Problem is, there is an Indian YouTube series called TVF Pitchers which had almost same story as silicon valley. I loved that series, when I watched it in 2015, after completing that I really was very impressive with the channel because of the originality and very off-the-track plot. Now after watching Silicon valley, I'm fucking sad... THEY JUST FUCKING COPY PASTED IT. yeah, some people with their "courtroom skills" will tell me that no it was different story... Fuck you! It was a copy and that's it. They removed Gilfoyle character and there was no product information in entire series... That was the biggest change in it. But overall it was a copy... A fucking copy.

The problem is they themselves, in their other videos, make fun of our movies/songs because of them being copied... Now, they are fucking doing it on their own.

I know it's not much related to devRant. Sorry about that.

Some times back, I joined a startup and they pitched in their idea as if they created it on their own... Later I found out that the same idea is running in a successful Palo Alto based company. And just like TVF Pitchers, they also used to make fun of an Indian e-commerce startup (a big one) because it was a copy of Amazon... THEN WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!!!

I don't know, but for some reason I just fucking hate it. Everybody here is busy copy fucking pasting US. They laugh at others, but they are also same... I'm going through Peter Theil's Zero to One.. and the book is making much more sense to me now.

Does anyone here know a good book about algorithms? I'm looking something a bit more advanced

So I'am reading this 'JavaScript the good parts'-book. I start liking it more and more now.

!dev

I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.

The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.

As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.

This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.

My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.

That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again.

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business

- ai is just another squeeze of money to cloud from our pockets, no matter what you do as long as you’re not selling/renting hardware or have high profit customers your product will die

I don’t believe in any ai product right now that can’t be self hosted and opensource and many of them are not.

I use mac, like 64GB m1 mac book pro so I can host load of things like llama, wizzard-lm, mistral, any yolo, whisper, gpt, fucking midjourney or other stable diffusion for me is no drama.

I’d say there is no consumer product for ai right now. OpenAI is scam given what we got from mistral.

We are very early in this new but old technology and my worries are that we are not there yet. We will need to wait for another iteration that is approximately 10 years to achieve what we have in mind because current hardware is 10 years behind software.

We don’t have an affordable computing power to go for our dreams.

Sad but true.

There is a book that is supposed to be the best book on its subject... but I just have to say - This book is not a good book. It's a bad book. That's right. I know the author well, - but it's terrible and I just need to tell someone. Thank you for listening.

Just completed learning HTML from Jon duckett book! Feel so good. Wanted to learn coding so long. And I finally start. Starting CSS very soon. It's my first rant !! Reading rant almost more then 4 months from diff. Account. Just a newbie here. Saying everyone Hi😊 Doing #100daysofcoding !

For the love of GOD, if you're an architect or someone in the position where you can make drastic changes to the overarching design of a software system, if you're so keen on enforcing something "cool" just because you've read about it in a blog post/seen it on a youtube video, READ ABOUT IT THOROUGHLY, as in, pick up a fucking book or do actual research. An architect overseas just informed us that a whole legacy PHP application (a fucking monolith with a dysfunctional database, yes, I think someone demented designed it) should be rewritten to a microservice architecture (without a messaging broker, just plain API interaction through HTTP) AND WE'RE KEEPING THE DATABASE WHICH BEGS TO BE PUT DOWN FOR GOOD. So now we're gonna have a clusterfuck of tons of PHP microservices (Q_Q) which interact through plain HTTP APIs (swagger's gonna be put to a test) and all have a single broken database in the center. Talk about a microlithic design. Jesus Christ.

When you realize that all those years using windows washed away all your knowledge about using Linux.
I feel like a dumb idiot now while struggling to get shit done on my newly installed mint distro. Younger, I used to read that very fat book my father had on his desk, with all the basics on Linux, I don't have it around anymore.
Any "up to date" good book or website of reference to refresh that rusty brain of mine?

I've spent a lot of time messing around with C, having struggled with object-oriented programming (due to not really knowing how best to structure things, not knowing when to apply certain design patterns).

When writing C code, I'd write OOP-esque code (pass around a struct to routines to do things with it) and enjoyed just making things happen without having to think too much about the overall design. But then I'd crave being able to use namespaces, and think about how the code would be tidier if I used exceptions instead of having every routine return an error code...

Working with Python and Node over the past couple of years has allowed me to easily get into OOP (no separate declaration/definition, loose typing etc.) and from that I've made some fairly good design decisions. I'd implemented a few design patterns without even realising which patterns they were - later reading up on them and thinking "hey, that's what I used earlier!"

I've also had a bit of an obsession with small executable files - using templates and other features of C++ add some bloat (on Windows at least) compared to C. There were other gripes I had with C++, mostly to do with making things modular (dynamic linking etc.) but really it's irrelevant/unreasonable.

And yes, for someone who doesn't like code bloat, working with Node is somewhat ironic... (hello, node_modules...)

So today I decided to revisit C++ and dust off my old copy of C++ in a Nutshell, and try to see if I could write some code to do things that I struggled with before. One nice thing is that this book was printed in 2003, yet all of its content is still relevant. Of course, there are newer C++ standards, but I can happily just hack away and avoid using anything that has been deprecated.

One thing I've always avoided is dynamic_cast because every time I read about it, I read that "it's slow". So I just tried to work around it when really if it's the right tool for the job, I might as well use it... It's really useful!

Anyway, now I've typed all this positivity about C++ I will probably find a little later on that I hit a wall with what I'm doing and give up again... :p

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

Really loving all these Udemy sales and humble book bundles, a lot of is for programming and some of them are actually really good!

It's a good time to be a Dev!

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Well I guess my first dev project will probably end up as my last (For good reason).

Not long after dippig my toe in the programming world by messing with Minecraft mods, I decided to take a gamemaking class at my high school which introduced me to gamemaker, straight away I was able to use my java knowledge to sort of become the go to person for help, so while everyone was following tutorials for a basic pac man clone I had started work on the final asignment which was to create a fundamentally playable game.

Taught myself how to use spritesheets, tilesets, external libraries and the like and decided, fuck it lets make an RPG based around looting dungeons, ended up decidng on the title 'Plunder', since then the project grew and grew in scope to the point it is now unrecognisable with my goals as of now compared to then.

Now that project has been placed on hold as the story and world just grew in scope to the point I litteraly do not have the knowledge or time to actually work on the game, so I've started converting that world into a book which is slowly motivating me to almost slice up the game and work on individual pieces.

But considering the drain and effort that has gone into this, pretty sure IF (And that's a big if) I ever do release this game that took basic concept 9 years ago, don't think I would ever be able to top that achievement.

Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.

(Just for shits and gigs I might try and did up some old projects related ot this and post them in the comments if anyone may be interested ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

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"

I have nothing but good things to say about the book “Building Microservices” by Sam Newman.

Very well written, high-level look at Microservices. It took a lot of the assumptions I had built and dissected the different options and approaches with drawback included.

Now, onto “Building Microservices With Go” by Nic Jackson!

Just been cleaning out an old cupboard and found the book that really helped me to understand OOP ... Python for absolute beginners .. Before I picked it up, I was having a hard time getting my head around it all. Good times, good book :)

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

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.

Books. I love them, I buy them, where ever I go. My favorites are the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, but I will read any sci-fi/fantasy-styled book I come across. I would attach an image, but my phone's camera is pretty shitty, so just imagine some shelfs filled with books.

Music is imortant to me too. There will always be music playing when I'm around. I'm trying to make some myself. It's not that good but still fun. I am also a collector of vinyl records.

And then there are games of course, because sitting at a pc just for coding is not enough :D

Little brother wants learn programming and asked me if I could help him learn it.
"Sure, I'll show you how I learned it."

Gave him a book for starters to go through it. To have a slightly better time, I'll read his code and recommend some ways to go.

In my opinion it's important to learn to learn by yourself and learn to help yourself. Therefore I think this is kinda a good way to start with a bit of supervision from me.

What do u think of it, or how would you have done it?

I mean sure I could be some kind of teacher, but with a fulltime job + uni I don't really have time for that.

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.

FUCKING SYSTEMD PIECE OF CRAP.
*Punches a wall or something*

Ugh, newest version of PHP-FPM apparently has a dependency on a Systemd package. The package doesn't change the system's init daemon to systemd, but just the fact that it has that, that more and more stuff is becoming dependent on that crap of a bloated piece of software is driving me crazy.

I hate systemd from the bottom of my soul, not for being a bad piece of software by any means. The systemd environment is quite well fitted together, but for being a monolithic monstrosity that is taking over more and more of the traditionally independent system services.

It would be absolutely good in my book, if it allowed a user or admin to choose which parts of SystemD they are going to install, and so, in the core, it would be a mere init daemon.

But noooooo, systemd has to take over cron, system dns resolver, home and user management and I bet its not the end.

GNU/Linux is becoming GNU/SystemD/Linux...

Hey guys
I'm starting my first programming intern job in a week.
It's a big company and have many projects and they liked me because I knew some Java from college.

I obviously have no industry Java experience but am looking to review the book used in my class & the projects I did.

I'm still kinda nervous a little cuz I don't have any idea what it's going to be like.

What could be advised to do while waiting a week? Any good Java brush up idea

Thanks

Not a rant

After coding, cooking/ book reading is my favorite hobby.

Before last 3 month I took dcsn to give a shot to my other hobby cooking and pause on coding for few months.
I decided to give 100days to my cafe.

Arranging money and perfect location took 2 months , on 16 july I started my cafe not so fancy, just sweet simple.

Means 30 days we're completed,
I was earning 1000 inr as software developer, i am earning 10000 inr daily . My net profit is 1500inr

Moral of the story

Don't hesitate to take risk
Believe on yourself
Never never never start with partnership

Currently I have to pay 1.5 lakh to my ex business partner who left cafe in first 15 days

N

Forget personal life. Your business is your priority.

Not spend even १ full day with my family and gf in last 3 months.

Soon I will back in software.

Have a good day to everyone.

Quite a few years ago (late 90s, early 00s maybe) I remember watching a TV show where they demonstrated what virtual reality might be like. It was all rough polygons, no lighting or texturing etc.

I'd heard about the Oculus Rift and considered trying it. I get motion sickness sometimes from certain 3D games (Deus Ex, Portal, sometimes even Minecraft) so was hesitant. Last week, decided to just get one and see how it went.

Didn't expect it to be as good as it is - compared to what was envisaged ~20 years ago. No motion sickness. Not only was the graphics detail amazing but the responsiveness is insane. In another 20 years time what will there be?

Anyway on dev topic: Now it makes me want to play with a 3D/VR engine. Considering Unreal Engine but not really sure where to start learning. Maybe a book? Though reviews tend to say they go out of date quick, I do prefer a physical book for learning tech stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

“Millennials are picking up their phones on average of 237 times per day. The machines have not adapted to the millennials. The millennials have adapted to the machines.”
Started listening to this book. So far so good.

I don't like when

you have a couple of years of experience with some language and you're like "I should read a good book about it, and have some proper solid foundation instead of playing by ear".

So you get a book and what follows is a very jarring experience.

Because for the first 8 chapters they get into the basics of the language.

You're occasionally like "interesting, I did not know that".

But for the most part you're like "yes, for fucking christ I know that, everybody knows that",

or you complain about the author being redundant,

or about the outdatedness of the book, since most documentation is now in the interwebs

or you reach flawed conclusions out of frustration like "this isn't making me any money, I could get on upwork, or do some bounties instead of wasting time on this"

then you start to skim through the pages like "I know this, and this, and this" until you realize you're in some page you have no fucking idea what it's talking about, as if you ended up on the wrong side of town

so you start backtracking (frustration is going critical at this point)

but backtracking is annoying because it's not well defined where you stopped getting it, as if in page 33 you were getting it 100%, but 0% on page 34, it's more like a gradual, irregular decrease,

so you have no idea where to start re reading from.

you just shove that shit into the wall at that point.

Some of these are learning discipline problems.

I guess there are ways to mitigate them, such as writing down questions of things not understood, co reading, etc.

But the one thing I don't think I can't get past is when authors write like shit,

like being redundant, using different words to say the same shit

or using confusing sentences that can mean different things at the same time,

or using the incorrect terminology, eg: if I were teaching OOP, saying shit like "classes create objects" but later on saying something like "classes create instances".
They usually nail the definitions the first time, but then use different terms for the same thing. It's shit.

And I think that's a writing culture that I hate.
From school you are taught to bot repeat words.

To say the same shit in different ways.

To be descritive, but vague.

That's absolutely shitty for programming in my opinion.

Ok, so I have been lurking around here for a while now. Not at all knowing what to rant about. I like my work, I don't have to deal too much with annoying (or almost any at all) customers and all in all I feel fine.
However, I feel like I want to, in some way step into this awesome community in other ways than just comments and ++.

So this post will be about a book. It's almost our Bible. Well it's probably the closest thing to a proper part of the trilogy we will get.
And for not being written by Douglas Adams (the almighty) himself; this book is surprisingly good! If you haven't, and get your hands on it, do read it!

Clean Code book has some good guidelines but sometimes becomes too fanatical for my taste. For example, comments in good doses are really good.

And people sho accept it as Gospel are making a mistake.

Me: ok so let's be producing tonight, work on some new systems and maybe some of my book..

Brain: *no you won't, you'll get drunk, get annoyed and shelf another project like the millions you have and will forget about your book...*

Me: ...

Brain: *exactly what I thought, now sit down and be a good little Dev*

Even my own brain hates me haha

Tools are made for various audiences. Git is the de-facto standard for version management, so it can be complicated because people will still learn it (they more or less have to). Editors aren't as standard and they are to be used from the minute you start learning, so they have to at least be usable without a course or a handbook. I prefer the first type of tool because to use something really good I don't mind reading a book. Programming languages can fall in either category; Python was meant to be used by laics and is therefore very simple, sacrificing a lot for the sake of simplicity. Rust isn't meant to be used by anyone who isn't trained, and it comes with a great book that explains all the most important gotchas. Haskell doesn't have an official book AFAIK, but it has the best wiki I've ever seen in a programming language.

I'm doing my first steps with javascript with the book "eloquent javasccript".
Wish me good luck.

From the book

Refactoring JavaScript
Turning Bad Code into Good Code
Evan Burchard

HOW CONVERSATIONS ABOUT REFACTORING SHOULD GO UNTIL TESTS ARE WRITTEN
“I refactored login to take email address and username.” “No, you didn’t.”
“I’m refactoring the code to ____”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Before we can add tests, we need to refactor.” “No.”
“Refactoring th–”
“No.”
“Refa–” “No.”

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

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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.

Any good book i should read, fellows?

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

Today I want to put an age-old question to rest. What is art and what is not? What's the difference? In art world, there is actually a consensus that was reached in the second half of 20th century.

First, the audience has no merit to decide what's art and what's not, as art has inherent characteristics. So whether a piece is art or not is left for the artist to decide.

But the artist too cannot just call anything they make art. There is just one criterion — if only the art piece itself is enough to justify its making, and the artist sees it as the only award they need for making it, it's art. Otherwise, it's not.

"But wait, that's not entirely correct, this is incomplete", you say. Well, it's in fact complete, but because our society progressed way faster than our languages, we're having a hard time to describe novel complex things with words. Language can't keep up with rising complexity.

We use "horseless carriages" instead of "cars" when we describe anything complex enough. The good explanation of how language works and why do we act like this is outlined beautifully in Benjamin Bratton's "The New Normal". A small book of forty-something pages, but I never spent that much time on every page in my life. The best book investment for me after "The Code Complete".

i was reading a book in the week. fell in love with it.

now im watching the movie of it. it's horrible.

i knew i didnt want to see it.. i knew it was going to suck

ive seen the book completly different in my eyes. am almost crying about it. the movie does not give any emotions at all ~ other than disapointement. it ruins my experience with the book to some extend now. it changes how my pictures that i imagined are.

the movie actors are bland. the setting and writing feels of and cheep. the scenes of the book are rushed in 1.50h. that book in a movie should have been atleast 3h. i feel betrayed by whoever made the movie.

sucks that i have to see it to create a movie - book comparison. im forcing myself through watching it to the end

the major point of the book that made it so good was the setting with nature. in the movie no details and focus on this are given at all.

it feels disrespectful to the author of the book and honestly to myself aswell :(

My maths book contains some nice stuff too not just good old boring stuff... But god damn killer bunnies too who will kill you with a right angled triangle.

!rant

A colleague of mine has made the right and brave decision to quit. For her it's absolutely the right decision but I hate how the company was OK and did nothing to keep her. I'd like to give her something small when she leaves. I was thinking about a book. Does anyone have any suggestions that might be a nice going-away and good-luck present for a valued colleague?

Is there a book or something similar in size that they really cherish and wish they had had sooner?

Any good website or book for basics of Linux? In agreement with your experiences
Thanks

What's a good programming tool for mac book pro?

I like sublime text but I want to get other people's comments, and reference.

(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.

All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.

TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?

I need help.
I love software and hardware development but over a period of 4 years now i have lost motivation. I hardly finish anything i have started and if i finish, it's never rewarding.

I also feel like i live a very boring life. Staring at the screen all day and doing very little.

What do you guys do for fun? What activities or books do you read to keep yourselves busy or entertained?

I have been having this desire for someone to love but something makes me think that it's just a reaction to a soul that has lost purpose and only feels like loving someone will be a source of happiness. Luckily, nobody has been available for the mess i have been.

I really admire busy people. People who are passionately working on something they have chosen to do and still have fun.

I think talking to someone about how bad i feel about myself will help a little but what i really need is help on how to restore the motivation i had 4 years ago.

Can someone give me a fun project i can work on? Not for making money but something i will do, learn and feel happy about it.

I will also appreciate if someone can recommend a good book that will help me learn. Get me motivated and also hide me from this reality.

Thank you.

Rant portion:

Fuck me, there's not a ton of great resources for Lua. I have the book, and it's actually fucking incredible, but as soon as I have a question which I would usually Google, either it's a SO question that almost hits the mark (but absolutely does not answer my initial question) or a mailing list that DOES answer my question but holy FUCK it's difficult to read!

I 100% recommend the Lua book, though. It's remarkably helpful and covers just about every little detail of the language and it's corresponding c API, and even some of how Lua works behind the scenes.

Non-rant portion:

Finished up the first version of my library and now I'm binding it to Lua and this time around I'm using all the best practices including setting and checking metatables so that Lua can't segfault. It's going great, I properly learned about the Lua stack, and I feel good. Cross-platform double-buffered command line via a scripting language... What a way to enter 2020. Everything went so smooth that I got to 3am before I realized what even happened.

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

I would run a bookstore beer garden.
I think enjoying a good book and a beer is a fantastic combination.

My Data Communication & Computer Networks (DCCN) teacher was the best teacher I've seen.

Teaching can be super hard. You're one against like sixty others who aren't interested in being there. To make that good learning environment, making the subject interesting etc, it not easy. Some justify that, "I can only bring the horse to the water" & proceed to just regurgitate whatever is on the book. Others cross question you & impose punishments - try to make you learn by fear.

But my DCCN teacher - she had the right balance between strictness & humour. So kids took her seriously (did homework, weren't late), yet never feared her - we felt comfortable asking doubts/questions.

She had some good tactics, like asking us to teach certian chapters - that made us learn better. She would revise them in the end also, incase we missed anything.

My best moment with her was when I scored the highest in my internals. She picked up my paper & showed the class - "see? Just two pages & he scored so much". There's was always those students who pump out a lot of stories/essays or whatever that comes to their mind about the topic in question. Lots of teachers just blindly give marks - "oh, s/he wrote this much, so it must be right".

But my DCCN teacher had zero tolerance for garbage. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Some even believe that the number of marks = number of lines you have to write!! Doesn't matter what you write. So, I was super glad when this teacher upped the standards.

Do you guys think I should go for a Lego Mindstorms set as a way to start getting into robotics?

I know of a lot of people that recommend going through arduino and buying a bunch of shit and throwing it together etc. But the thing that makes me interested in Mindstorms is how everything seems to be in one place. A smart brick programmable through multiple different programming languages(for example Python, java, C) a good kit that can be really modular and built into different components, all sorts of sensors.

I just think its a good option, but if someone were to recommend a particular book or resource for Arduino or some other stuff I would definitely consider it.

So, what do you lads think?

Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.

Symfony's book tutorials starts out way too invasive. For example:

Their CLI has a specific command for you to clone the book project's repository. This command won't run unless you have all their dependencies installed (including docker and yarn). In the end a good old fashioned git clone does the trick.

Next, before even writing a single loc, the book urges you to create a symfonycloud account and give them your credit card number.

Seriously what the hell.

Should I mail you a drop of my blood as well so you can check out my ancestry while I'm at it?

First: I have to give credit to my high school CS teacher. She gave us a good grounding in computer theory about: pointers, memory organization, and algorithms.

Second: Second I just read the fucking manual. Then programmed a LOT more than people who didn't get good. Hundreds of hours during college, thousands since then. I got style information from reading other peoples code and also learned about how not to code by reading other peoples code. Ever buy a book that proclaims to teach you X, but actually teaches you a proprietary wrapper they wrote for X that has a shitty license? Fuck those people. Anyway, when internet sharing became more of a thing I started watching videos by experts and reading articles. And now I learn from people here as well. Never stop learning and always RTFM.

I'm intrigued, what are you all trying to learn in your spare time and how?

I'll go first, brushing up on maths by reading K A Stroud advanced engineering mathematics.

He's got an intro level book that's also very good.