As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

I quite dislike the fact that Python is growing in popularity. It's a fun toy, but the syntax is so fucking annoying after a while. Forced indentation is certainly not my style. Furthermore, Python is generally not extremely performant, even as far as interpreted languages go.

I love python as a language but using it to work (Like... for money...?) seems very outlandish. It feels akin to scratch to me... very bizzare to think it is powering many complex AIs. Python is a toy.

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Is the way people solve problems intrinsic to the native language they learned growing up? Can the shape of our thoughts be optimal for solving certain kinds of problems? Like sentence structure, grammar, etc.

If the pattern of thoughts a language promotes can help us solve problems. Then is there a spoken language that can help promote solving computer science problems?

I know I have to work to think differently to program in different styles of programming. I wonder if we can learn from different spoken languages patterns of logic that are applicable to engineering.

Mathematics, while not a spoken language, has helped me re-frame things in programming. I think programming has also helped in other areas. Like using binary search to find the end of a pipe in the ground.

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

++'s used to be so relevant to me until swift 3 came and requested the +=1 syntax instead

I’m too dumb to learn frontend frameworks.
I’m a backend developer, not the greatest but I get the work done. I can understand different programming languages even if I don’t write in them, you just understand basic principles and know what’s going on.
I can do some work in HTML, CSS and some JS.
But what the hell is with those popular frontend frameworks. I thought I pretty much understand how it works, so started doing some crap on my own, some pretty responsive navbar with dropdowns to start. Nevermind a million of npm packages to just start working and some weird errors in website source (“JavaScript is not enabled”, I spent few hours trying to fix it, but it’s just there, everything is working fine even with this message there). I have pretty navbar, nice, time to add dropdown.
Nope, not working. Maybe classic css solution?
Nope.
Ok, time to Google. What do I find? A million of npm dependencies that provide dropdowns, for some you need to pay, wtf.
But I want to write one on my own.
Found few tutorials that wasn’t even remotely helpful, it’s like with the online recipes, “when I was growing up on the farm…” and then something that it’s not working.
Finally found some nice looking tutorial, was following that and then.. it ended. It was maybe half of the solution, dude forgot about some components and just left.
I quit, I’m going back to writing jsp, my brain is too smooth for frontend frameworks

!tech
i am a fan of everything mcu but recent ms marvel feels so cringy and awkward as an Indian. the main actress is okay, but almost all of the casting is from non Indian/pakistani descent. thankfully those guys don't try to speak hindi/urdu otherwise i would have snorted while watching 😂. the blend of languages feels so weird i neither like their hindi nor English.

imo squid game like adaptation would have been better , having everyone from same descent and speaking the same language while having everything dubbed by professionals for other languages.

and what's with the colors? mann that's too much color for even the most colourful countries of the world.
and songs? wow. when i was growing up, the movies at that time had dialogues like "when you are in love , you hear background music" , but even those movies didn't had any background music so cringy as this.

also from what i know pakistani culture is way more punjabi than indian culture in general. but here , pwople are speaking perfect hindi even in a mosque!

makes me wonder how the world sees these 2 countries. every 5 minutes i felt that this is more Indian adaptation of a story than pakistan. they just blended the countries' culture brutally. i bet the conversation between director and scriptwriter must be like:

d :hi there
s : hello
d: so you have a movie for me
s : yes sir i do . it's called miss marvel
d : oh so it's about carol denvers? i thought that wasn't until 2024
s : no sir it's about a Pakistani girl with superpowers
d : oh okay. wait did you say Pakistani?
s : yes sir. a pakistani girl born in n-
d : yeh yeh yeh. listen we need to add lots of colors
s : why-?? ok sure sir.
d : and elephants. and borses. also , everyone must occasionally.
s : bur sie those are all the cuisines of an indian wedding . and why we want horses?
d: doesn't matter, i want horses.
s: buf s-? ok fine