I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Good 'ol days.

Reminded me of the good ol' days while moving house

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

So dear fellas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days ago I had a party with a big part of my good ol' highschool classmates who I almost never spoke to. Let the stories begin:

- Guy who made fun me in when I said I wanted to do computer science: "Man, I wish I had done the same study. It looks fun."

- Guy who has a startup for like 1 year: "Sooo what are you good at, ios/android development? webdevelopment? contact me if you want to work with us.(for free)"

- One of the friendly guys: "Do you have any sites where I can learn some basic programming or something?"

What I thought: WTF HAPPEND IN THOSE 3 YEARS, WHY THE SUDDEN INTEREST IN PROGRAMMING AND STUFF?! ESPECIALLY YOU FIRST GUY!

When I told John our newest colleague “I understand your frustration but you need to calm down because collaboration is key”

John:
Okay okay okay, I get it. Collaboration is key and all, but these meetings freaking killing me. We need a better balance, where we can have effective meetings that actually drive progress without sacrificing our precious coding mojo.

At the end of the day, I just wanna do what I’m f*ckin paid for. But these damn meetings are killing my vibe, and it's downright frustrating. Can't we just get back to the good ol' days of actually getting sh*t done!

{Bro is in for a long ride}

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Anyone actually took part in the psp community back in the days?

We ran fucking everything on these things.😁

was devrant way more visited during those good ol' covid days? i can't help but feel like i see a maximum of 100 people around now... feels weird to me, probably feels normal to those who have been here longer

curious what happened, maybe just the insane users remaining scared off all the plebs

Ah the good ol days

That moment when you would get graded 4.5/5, but you got 3.5 because you made a joke about Java.

Did you know that back in the good ol' days (1-2 years ago lol) - If you wanted to have a function with optional parameters, you would need to create an overload without that parameter?

Which isn't that bad, until you realize that a function with 4 optional arguments would require 16 overloads (basically n^2).

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

A recent post by someone else regarding dial-up made me wonder: Why did it have that specific, trademark noise when connecting?? What was the purpose of that? It's not like it was useful or anything, right?

Boy oh boy.. Reminds me of good ol college days. I was in my final sem when Amazon came to our university for campus hiring. I was very confident that I will get selected. Funnily enough I went till the final round and I had a feeling that it went well if not excellent. It was a Friday night and we had to wait two excruciating days for the final shortlisted result to come. On the evening of Monday my friend T called me and told me my name is not on the list. I was heartbroken. I asked him who all got selected and he said our friend A did. A was, and still is a good friend of ours and I was happy for him. That night we sat down for drinks and as the night progressed I anguished over my selection. I still remember solving a binary tree problem holding a glass of whiskey in my one hand. The next morning I woke up at 6, detoxed myself with fruit juices and sat in front of my laptop feeling full rage from last night. I sat till lunch and hacked a chrome extension in one sitting. Mind you I had no existing knowledge of extensions at that point of time. I sometimes look how my life has turned since that time and now I am one of the devs in a team which work on a product that itself is a browser extension. :)

The Coding Apocalypse: A Dev's Rant

June 14, 2024

Okay, gather ’round, fellow code warriors, because it’s time for a good ol' developer rant. If you're reading this, chances are you’ve already faced the dragon that is modern software development, and you’re somehow still using "Agile" as a life preserver while the ship is sinking. So let's dive into the chaos that our world has become.

Here’s the thing: We’re living in a paradox where every other day there's a shiny new framework promising to be the “ultimate solution” while ignoring that it's just recoil from the last big mess. I mean, can we talk about JavaScript for a second? I’m pretty sure if you stand still long enough, a new JavaScript framework will spontaneously generate from the void. Do we really need another one?

And don’t get me started on Sprint Planning. It’s like playing Tetris with stones while blindfolded, hoping that all the blocks land perfectly. Spoiler: They don’t. The product manager’s eyes glaze over as they nod approvingly to your estimates, secretly extending deadlines in their minds. The 'flexible' deadlines then become rigid, unattainable goals, and who gets the heat? The devs, of course.

Also, can we address the insanity of microservices? Sure, splitting a monolith into microservices sounds fun—until you’re drowning in API calls and Docker containers. Debugging a distributed system is like trying to untangle a pair of headphones made of spaghetti.

Oh, and if one more person asks if we’re "leveraging AI" and "blockchain technology" for our simple CRUD app, I might lose it. Sometimes, folks, the wheel doesn’t need reinventing. It just needs a little grease.

Finally, remote work. Blessing and curse. Sure, I enjoy the freedom of working in my PJs, but the endless Zoom calls are killing my soul. Breakout rooms? More like breakdown rooms. The Slack notifications? Let’s just say my sound settings have a hair trigger on mute these days.

So here’s to us, the devs. The ones who stare into the abyss of JIRA tickets and laugh in the face of mounting tech debt. May your coffee be strong, your code refactored, and your deployments ever in your favor.

End rant. Back to the trenches. 🚀💻

(a slide acoustic guitar plays on the background and the cowboy starts speaking)
It was a dry october day, back in good old 2017. I had this job from a client that I never met and was doing some coding for money.

After days of no sleep, no food and no rest, I finally decided to take a nap so I paused my music.

It was at this moment I found out my machine was making funny noises. Like a dingo makin' a run from it's enemies with a whelping noise.

Clicked on my computer and tried to find an ol' file from the archive drive but the machine won't let me, sayin' the disk ain't ready yet.

I tried disk manager, disk scanner, whatever the tools at my disposal all in vain. Then I said what the hell, I'll just restart my machine and it'll be alright.

The machine rebooted but the disk was gone. It was dead like a deer I ran over. I was upset, but not aware of the calamity headin' my way.

In just a few days my other 2 disks died suddenly. The loss of data, all the effort, none of them mattered. I felt numb and decided it was time for a fresh start.

Plugged in a Windows install disk, started the sequence, a screen came up askin' me which damned and alive disk I wanna install the fresh OS. I had two same make and model SSD disks, chose the one thinkin' it was the Windows drive, hell it wasnt... It was with all "my documents", "downloads", "pictures" folders and now I had two SSD drives with two Windows installations and nothing else.

The folks in town took a dab at me for months, even the bartender of the salloon refused to give me a drink. Sayin' it was a matter of reputation...

Turned out the bastard who fried my disks was the Madde Dog PSU Tannen who had a bad temper so here I am, tellin' my story to milk breathers and cherishing old days of data...

Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.

VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.

Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.

This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead

Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.

The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.

I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.