Bought a Logitech G13 a few years ago knowing that the Linux support isn't good. Thought fuck it, I'll develop something for it.

That didn't go as planned. Tried numerous times to write something but the fucker is proprietary and I couldn't figure out how to get data from it.

Decided to try it again tonight with a "You're not winning this time, motherfucker!" mindset.

Figured out how to read data from it, looked long enough at the data coming in to discover patterns and started programming while testing my ass off.

Two hours later I have "mapped" all specific data points that the device sends to the hardware keys and now, whenever I have the device connected and run the program (node, no kidding), it displays which key I'm pressing when I press a key!

I finally fucking won.

Let's get rid of the developer training: Pair Programming

Let's get rid of the software testers: Test First Programming

Let's get rid of the project managers: Agile

Let's get rid of the project planners: Scrum

Let's get rid of the system admins: DevOps

Let's get rid of the security guys: DevOpsSec

Let's get rid of the hardware budget: Bring Your Own Device

Let's get rid of the servers: Cloud Computing

Let's get rid of the other scruffy guys: Outsourcing

Let's get rid of the office space: Home Office

Let's get rid of the whole fucking company: Takeover

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

1. I'm a programmer, that does not mean I know every possible programming language. Yes, I can build Android apps, standalone softwares, serverside frameworks. No, I do not know how to build frigging websites!

2. "You can build a website in 2 days, you're a programmer". Tell a single mechanic to build an entire car in 2 days or tell a civil engineer to build an entire building in 2 days and I'll build your website in 2 days.

AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
Why does your family think that being a programmer means being a magician who can just pull any kind of software, hardware, app, website out of their hat?

So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.

Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.

I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:

$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"

$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."

$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"

$me: "What...What new thruster?"

$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"

WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!

Hi everyone!

So. A while ago I was on OkCupid, trying to find the Pierre to my Marie Curie (without the whole brain getting crushed under a horse carriage wheel obviously) and I decided the best way was to have my profile lead with my passion for technology. It turned out pretty unique, if I do say so myself.

At the end of it, I amassed some interesting and unique messages:

- A Java pickup line (that I never responded to. Yes I'm a very basic Devranter)

- A request to turn the man's software into hardware (to which I politely informed him that this was scientifically impossible unless a reader proves me wrong)

- Another impossible request to turn his floppy disk into a hard drive (how outdated too, why not HDD to SSD for faster speed amirite? That was awful don't mind me)

- A sincere request to help troubleshoot a laptop (Honestly I would've helped with help requests but this is a dating site...)

- A sincere request to help debug a student project followed with a link to a GitHub repo

- Another sincere request with studying for a computer exam

- And lastly, my favourite: a sincere job offer by a guy who went from flirtatious to desperate for a programmer in a minute. He was looking for *insert python, big data, buzzwords here* and asked me for a LinkedIn. I proceeded to inquire exactly what he wanted me to do. He then asks me to WRITE a Python tutorial and that he would pay a few cents per word written so he could publish it. Literally no programming involved.

Needless to say I went to look elsewhere.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.

ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!

Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!

I hope computing heavens have:

-One brand of hardware
-One OS
-One browser
-No closed source software
-No ads
-One monitor aspect ratio
-One fucking programming language with a fucking big standard library.
-Phones are just the same exactly the same OS as in computer, not stupid adaptations.
-All pages are only HTML/CSS, without JS.
-Due there is one browser and one OS, when you need a dynamic page, you can display a desktop app in the browser downloading its binary.
-There are one fucking brand on printer with standard drivers which are included in the OS.

We are so far from heaven

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

God knows how many morons try to brag to me on how they know hardware programming because they own an Arduino, whenever I say I study Electrical Engineering.

Just because a developer is a programming wizard does not mean we are physical hardware installation wizards as well.

I hate when people ask me to setup their personal home systems; especially networked printers.

PHP is my main language, but I haven't had a single problem with it yet.

Nodejs it is.

How can you possibly make it SO GODDAMN HARD to just implement ANYTHING synchronous. THERE ARE REALLY FUCKING GOOD REASONS YOU *WANT* YOUR CODE TO STOP EXECUTION WHILE DOING SOMETHING

EVER HEARD OF HARDWARE PROGRAMMING? YEAH, APPARENTLY NOT

GRAAAAH

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

What really helps me is knowing electronics, having a solid understanding of maths and experimenting around with computers and hardware in my spare time.

At some point you start to see programming as being more than just "kreating" (as Karlie Kloss would say) an "app".
I see programming as pushing your machine to go beyond its seemingly narrow boundaries.

Cousin: So what are you learning at school?
Me: Programming, PC Networks, Hardware and so on.
Cousin: Oh really? I just have to make presentation to school. I will send it to your account thanks I appreciate it... 🤔

36 hours here.

It wasn't really work, but I went to FOSDEM 2 years ago with a friend of mine that's also a hacker (hardware stuff mostly). So on Saturday we went to all the talks fully energised, when that was done we got back to his home to "sleep", but there's so many other projects to do!! At the time we felt like we really needed a weather fetching thingy in our IRC client (I think it was Hexchat) but that didn't exist yet. So we built it, kinda in a pair programming way, all night long. Oh, it's morning already?! Time to go to the Sunday talks! We were both complete zombies by then, but somehow I still remember a little bit of it.. some ass who was showing oh-my-vagrant (boring as shit) and some other stuff. All in all, 36 hours on the counter when I got in bed completely wasted, but it was so worth it ♥️

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

Computer Scientists:
Programming close to the hardware requires different strengths. That‘s why we created a manifold of systems programming languages

Also computer scientists:
Lets do everything the browser does in javascript lol

!rant

How I think the process for designing a hardware-driver is like

CEO: "Alright everyone, we have designed and created this great product, now let's write a driver for it!"

PM: "Great then! We just code for Windows, create an eye-catching UI but leave the actual at the worst possible case that could work!"

Dev: "B-But isn't there other OSes, like Linux and Android that people use on their computers too?"

PM: "Shut up! We are going to JUST support Windows and f*** no absolutely other OSes!

Dev: "But what if they are also developers, and want to control and use this great product by programming it themselves? We should make the driver open-source, or at least give them some APIs!"

PM: "Nonsense! They are only going to use this product on M$ Windows, and with the program we provide to them, even if it's crappy and crashes most of the time!"

Dev: "But-but..."

PM: "No buts! That's our final decision!"

And some other consumer devs are like, "F*** it, we just reverse-engineer the codes and write a new driver ourselves!"

:|

Was helping my dad with his Arduino project when I realized something beautiful about being a programmer.

I have never worked with Arduinos and I'm clueless about hardware stuff but I was still able to debug, go through documentation, example code and fix the issues.

Programming is equally about the passion, dedication and ability + curiosity to solve a new problem as is writing some piece of quality code.

I might have taken a while to realize it but it sure is a wonderful feeling.

Going out on a limb here... have any of you done any bare-metal phone programming (not counting compiling like AOSP and such, like totally arbitrary code at boot-time, or bootloader coding, ideally) or know someone that has? A friend got bit by a bad iOS app on a jailbroken iPhone 8 (checkra1n, so no unsigned firms or anything) that has installed a bad iCloud lock on the device, and I need checkm8 shellcode to zero most of if not all of the NAND to get rid of it (since an iTunes restore preserves that data) and I can't figure out jack shit about how any of this works, since ARM isn't strict on what goes where in the address space or how to access hardware.

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

None, actually.

Tho I should thank Mr. S, calculus teacher in my last year of highschool, and most of my physics teachers, and that one lady in first year of highschool teaching maths. I think those were way more important in teaching me logic than the folks who pretended to teach me stuff later in uni.

Oh, and that dude, Sir O.D., who was my professor of embedded microcontrollers in uni. Didn't teach me much programming, rather taught a memorable lesson on VHDL and how hardware really works.

I dislike the damage web development tools have done to my programming habits.

The rapid feedback provided from the development environment (e.g. hot-reloads) encourages me to constantly bang out code with very little consideration for its side-effects.

This tendency has become a handicap when I write instructions for hardware with much less resources, such as a microcontroller.

It is still blowing my mind how a button on my raspberry pi is programmatically functional in the same way as if I was programming a database and web app.

Fucking eh, why haven't I been doing this hardware stuff sooner? You can literally make physical shit happen. That is so cool!

Hi devRant;

What’s your opinion on ‘open source’
Pros for and cons against its use. I’m curious

Reason for my question

I just met a programmer on the bus who is vehemently against open source starting he goes out of his way to not use anything ‘open source’

I myself use open source tools everyday in both my programming classes and outside projects. I vehemently believe the global collaboration potential of the open source concept is key to building bigger and better software and hardware in the future

How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.

And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.

Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.

tl;dr I know that I know nothing

New programmer who just pick up Python be like , C is shot , is bad , python better blablabla....

Why anyone hate C so much? I personally use C for Embedded Programming, for hardware or is better compare to using python for my case.

I love python , but I love C more. Because without C the rest don't exist. Right?

So stop hating on C. Because you might use it someday.

Question from curiosity:

Does anyone know of interesting things to try on unused electronics, like phones or game consoles? Does Anyone have any stories of such or something? Software and hardware wise?

[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.

with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).

I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)

So what do you think devranters ?

Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

How often do we come across IT managers who don't plan their work properly?

I teach software development and programming at a vocational school. Our IT manager said that we got a certain budget influx and that he can procure new computers for our teaching facilities. I happily agreed and hinted that i would really like some new hardware with proper graphics cards so i could do a few small projects with Unreal engine, Unity3d or use adobe products without hardware lag. The new computers arrived about a week ago and then the "fun" started.

He had ordered some PCs with proper graphics cards and processing power and talked about putting them to up in my classroom, so wheres the "fun" i meantioned? He only ordered half a classroom worth of them - i guess the budget didn't allow for more. A week later i was supposed to move to a new room and was waiting for my new computers to be installed and yet the IT manager said that my computers would be moved along with me. I was appalled - what had happened to the new PCs he promised?

Turns out he had put em up in another building without notice, a teacher there wanted to do an extracurricular movie making activity (that included a bit of video editing at some point). That classroom is always in use so me getting more than 1-2 hours a week in there is nigh impossible.

In the end i got no new computers, hardware or software.... he didnt even bother to switch out the 2 "temporary" laptops i had in my classroom since 2 years ago due to a small shortage back then and even these have an old image that didnt include a third of the software i normally use.

PS. He had about another 2-3 classrooms worth of new PCs but those were promised to the other IT teachers back then....

Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)

Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of

I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.

Coding chalenge.
So... Spent almost two hours to put this little device to work with the keypad.
The device is a arduino micro, special one that can work as mouse /keyboard or any kind of input on most devices (pc, Android phone,...)
The objective is to make a macro keypad to:
- Fast insert text
- Play sounds in games over voice chat.

Think of it like this, you start a new html file, press one key and all the base code is inserted.

So... Why so long? Tought was the hardware, tought the keypad could be set differently that most, code mistakes...

My error was all here, masked from the debugger by a if:

char keys[ROWS][COLS] = {
{'1','2','3','4'},
{'5','6','7','8'},
{'9','10','11','12'},
{'13','14','15','16'}
};

Easy to figure right? Only saw it after reading all the code twice.

When I was in school I was in a vocational school and my program was a Computer Service and Networking class and that’s what it taught it’s pretty self explanatory. BUT we also did some programming.

I was the only one interested in programming really considering everyone else loved the hardware. But when they would ask for help it was awful.

The book we used didn’t format the python properly on the page so you can’t really tell if there’s an indent if you dont know python well (they didn’t) which is okay.

But what isn’t okay is asking me for help and SENDING ME A FUCKING VIDEO OF THE COde LIKE FUCKING WHAT THE HELL MAN THAT SHIT ISNT EVEN READABLE AND YOUR HAND IS SHAKING LIKE YOURE HAVING A STROKE AT LEAST SEND ME THE CODE OR WORST CASE A PICTURE.

This happened more than once. 😤

Well, I've been reading 'rants' in this community, and I'm amazed at how people discuss various softwares, languages, and sometimes even hardware!
I'd say I'm a noob. Can't even compare my 'coding knowledge' with what people know in this community, and I don't want to. I like that I'm now a part of this community. But I feel intimidated at times by the amount of things there are to learn! And I don't know how to start. I mean, we had a course on C for a semester, and I tried to build up on that myself. Other than that, I've been trying to learn web-dev, made a browser based game and tried to learn some back end. But I don't know exactly how to build up my proficiency with code, and solving problems, from here on out. So I would really appreciate if this golden community could help me out.(Not trying to flatter anyone. I don't express much, but all this is what I genuinely feel, and am grateful about.) I want to know how to go on about learning knew things in the realm of programming, and how I can apply it to solve actual problems. What language should I learn first? What will be valuable in this rapid-paced time? And some courses to help out?

I stumbled upon devRant one day out of nowhere, and I'm glad I did.

Senior argue with me that Java can’t do serial programming, I prove to him by read the hardware protocol in HEX , and convert to ASCII using Java. He said the F word to me , I was like “他是什麼意思啊？”

started programming in high school, realized during a hardware lab in my computer science class that I wanted to be a developer.

we hade to set up a network of 5 routers, and I was the last to finish because of a typo in one config. spent an hour debugging, the frustration and eventual feeling of success made me love working with computers!

The number of scripters and 'data scientists' that call themselves developers will increase, the true art of development will become sidelined and the world's code will become progressively more bloated and inefficient as the rift between hardware and software widens to an echoey chasm.

Then quantum processors will come along, requiring new logic, languages and practices, and once again the true developers will rise up and pave the way for a bunch of entitled, know-it-all and self-promoting QuarkaScripters to come along decades later and pretend like they invented programming.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

I took me the whole day of wondering and debugging to see that I was checking if a variable was 0, to set up some stuff, and the variable was only incremented after that check, but I had a return statement inside of it. So it just went in, saw that it was 0 and returned, over and over. And I was wondering why the fuck nothing happened... because that method got executed every second or so and should've moved the motor.
Gotta love your hardware programming. Either you do it right the very first time, or you spend the whole day staring at a piece of code, compiling, throwing in console prints etc.

Its 1 am, where I live btw.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

I have been using Windows for decades. Recently got a Macbook Pro. In just a week, I realise that I have been working in such a slow paced environment. Constant updates, background tasks, internet chewing, more load and build times. I don't know about other stuff, but for programming and development, I have completely replaced Windows with this new machine.

Btw, this PC has better hardware than the Macbook Pro.

it would help if i had time to learn even a little more C, as I'm bumbling my way through the Linux kernel and GodMode9 (an amazingly powerful 3DS manip tool for everything from the SD card to the NAND to literally raw FIRM0/FIRM1 bootloader access) to try amd patch some code from GM9 into the kernel to handle the SD card *properly* so Linux 3DS doesn't constantly hang when reading/writing to the SD card, to enable Wi-Fi access (same bus location and similar bus structure as SD/NAND access, different processor,) enable NAND decryption and access (yes, really, NAND is encrypted via software, which is... ...fun...) and more.

tl;dr: the 3DS hardware, C, and others' code collectively make me wanna slit my fucking wrists. Hopefully my sacrifice allows higher-level programming languages to be visble for low-level jobs in the future.

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

For all things, for all men, that a man compliments a thing does not imply that this man at least attempts to understand this thing. However, for all men, that a man criticises a thing implies that this man at least attempts to understand this thing.

For all computer programs, that a computer program is terrible implies that scrapping the current implementation of this computer program and beginning anew may be the best method of fixing this computer program.

With few exceptions, for all programming languages $l$, given sufficient effort, $l$ source code can be human-readable.

The UNIX philosophy never became outdated.

For all computer programs $p$, $p$ should be written sufficiently well that the author of $p$ can be prideful of $p$.

For all computer programs $p$, a specification for $p$ should be written before $p$ is created.

For all good computer programs, a good computer program can run on terrible hardware.

Every clock cycle is valuable.

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)

My older brother introduced me to linux and android custom roms when I was like 11. So I flashed my old sony Ericson phone with custom roms from xda and tried Ubuntu live CDs on my mother's old 40gb hdd laptop.
But my introduction to programming was when I saw some videos about the raspberry pi on YouTube.
I was like 14 and programmed basic scripts for my raspberry pi in nano over putty or notepad++.
At first I didn't even knew to intendent but in the process of my first project (Python sunrise alarm clock with tts) I learned many valuable things about Python and Linux/Debian.
The years after that I learned more with my now multiple RaspberryPIs, Arduinos and other hardware.
So in conclusion RaspberryPIs, the diy/open source community and especially my brother introduced me to programming.
I am now doing bigger projects with my brother and have (really basic) knowledge of java,Javascript,php,html,Arduino/C++ and Python.

I remember that my granddad and I built a computer with old crappy hardware that we disassembled from other computers.
I mostly used it for playing games like Age of Empires or Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I really don't remember a lot about but I remember I also had internet. Never got any Malware tho haha.

Then sometime my friend came over and he showed me a website named "Scratch". We made a lot of crappy games and a cat that farts when you press a button.

So yeah I instantly fell in love and did a lot of "Scratch"-ing with my brother.

That's was the time I found my love for programming.

I think about 2 years later I got a MacBook (the old from my father) and finally started with real programming!

Now, after 6 years I have an awesome little ZenBook and am programming everyday.
Love it!

Learn more languages (programming and verbal wise), expand my knowledge beyond web technologies and build something with hardware, also get paid more.

the one that exists (c#) seems underused compared to where it could (or even should) be used. and the place that uses it the most (enterprise) butchers and mangles its use, just as enterprise tends to do with everything.

the one that i'm designing... the fact that it doesn't exist yet, and that even as i'm zeroing in on syntax and philosophy that i'm very much starting to be proud of, i still don't have a proper idea of how to implement even the most basic parser/interpreter for it, not because it's in any way difficult or unusual, but just because... i've never done that before, so i get into weird circular thought paths that produce weird nonsensical code...

... on top of that, i still only have a very, very fuzzy idea of how will it (sometime in extremely distant future) actually implement the most interesting and core feature - event-based continuous (partial) re-parsing of the source code and the fact that traversing the tokens at the leaf level of the syntax tree should result in valid machine code (or at least assembly) that is the "compiled" program.

i *know* it's possible, i just don't yet know enough to have a contrete idea how exactly to achieve it.

but imagine - a programming language where interactive programming is basically the default way of working, and basically the same as normal programming in it, except the act of parsing is also the (in-memory) compilation at the same time, so it's running directly on the hardware instead of via interpretrer/vm/any of that overhead crap.

also then kinda open-source by definition.

and then to "only" write an OS in that, and voilá! a smalltalk-like environment with non-exotic, c-family syntax and actual native performance!

ahhh... <3

* a man can dream *

Update the method books and lectures, first and foremost. Nothing better than studying outdated versions of languages just because university's technical base can't accommodate anything newer.

Upgrade the universities' hardware and software (I studied CS subjects on 1998 hardware with Windows XP and Lubuntu on board).

For the love of anything holy, stop making students program on paper.

Make professors available via e-mail. A surprising number of my professors weren't teach savvy enough to use it.

Introduce programming in highschool. Use a language that is easier to grasp than Delphi or Pascal. We had informatics as a class, and it never covered anything aside from Microsoft Office.

Any one here have a degree in Electrical Engineering or Electronics Engineering? I'm thinking about going back to school, but I'm not sure it's worth the money since I live in the US. (cries in over-expensive education costs)

I do a lot infrastructure work and some super basic programming/scripting but I think I really want to get into hardware maybe zone in on either RF or take a stab at amps/effects pedals for guitar and bass.

as an aside, I'm not trying to go back to school for job or career related reasons, I just want to noodle with stuff and maybe create my own circuitry for stuff.

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.

At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!

Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).

The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)

Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.

Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.

Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!

I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95.

I work on my high school's tech team but all we do is hardware replacement work which I've been doing since I know how to read disassembly instructions. (I was a bored destructive kid)

I thought I was going to enjoy work and learn. Now all I do is work with immature children who know nothing and learn programming on my own when we don't have parts in

Also attempt to educate my 'coworkers' when we do have software issues I know about

I don't know but, I want to buy a Raspberry Pi. I quite good at programming and want to learn a few hardware tricks.
Not expecting much from it but I guess I can program (play) with it.

What can I do with a raspberry pi that I can't do with my laptop already??

First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P

Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.

Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think

Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee

And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output

Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)

Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D

Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude.

Few of my frnds are doing a small hardware project , they need to make an android app for that, they arent much of devs and hadnt used an IDE yet.

They downloaded Android Studio and installed it. On trying to start project , an error poped up saying SDK is missing .😑.I have to set the path of sdk for them. After that they tried to start the first project. It worked and after a minute or so everything was done. I just waited for all squiggly lines and red colour in code to disappear , but they didnt. 😶

"Messages" showed lot of errors. I am also a noob so most of them were unfamiliar to me. I was a bit busy and was about to leave, so i couldn't say much to them other than to "google the errors, there will be simple solutions for all ".

My point is, if this is the kind off problem someone faces while starting out in android programming, wont they feel like quitting even before their "hello world" application is done.

Being a native Android dev for most of my college days(yet to start a full time professional life), i often feel scared of my life choices.

Like, i chose to go into a field in which am totally on my own . Android is not a subject taught or supported by colleges, so a virtual shelter that every fresher gets, i.e that of a "he's just a college passout, he wouldn't know that" is not for me. I am supposed to be a self learner and a knowledgeable android dev by default.

Other than that , idk why i feel that am having a very specific skillset which would be harmful for me if am not the best at it.

I feel the same for entire Android dev. I mean, its nothing but a very specific hardware device with a small screen and a bunch of lmited sensors. Our tools and apps are limited to just manipulate them to do little fancy stuff offline. Other than that everything (and sometimes even this too) could be achieved by a website/webapp of a web dev.

A particular native android dev don't know how the ML/AI stuff works, don't know how backend stuff works don't know how the cloud stuff works, jeck we don't even know how those unity games work!

We are just some end product makers taking data from somewhere handled by someone and printing them in fancy gui.
(But we are good at ranting about stupid mobile hardware manufacturers, i tell u that)

So am not sure if being an Android dev is a going to be good for me in the future. I mean , a web dev always gets to interact at every level of products, but we can't.

I always feel my future will end up being limited to being good in Android, later shifting to IOS to being completely unemployed because everything is controlled by js and web dev tools and native programming is no longer a thing anymore :/

Programming embedded systems from scratch. All hardware, memory, timers, peripherals, etc, must be set up correctly at startup, and if you set even one single bit incorrect in any of the sometimes hundreds of 32- or 64-bit configuration registers, you are screwed. There is often no terminal that prints error messages to help you, but if you are lucky you have an (often very expensive) hardware in-circuit debugger to step through the start up code.

"Download our app for some lovely additional ass licking features....."

Why tech industry love apps? also I hate these days not only mobile phones, but also computers are in progression of "applification."

Programs are only installed do some advanced things that were absurd and inappropriate to work on web browser. like video editing or programming, or file management.. etc. but in recent days, everything is fucking apps. why just not improve your web version of your service and make the shortcut from that? Weather app. youtube app. reddit app. 'tips' app by apple that is totally useless. news app. map app. so much wasteful. these kind of services are MUST be on the UPPER layer than the web browser laid on. also apps are taking much resources on local hardware and that makes my hardware too much slow.

That is not how tech works. that is not how software engineering, hardware engineering works, every single thing in technology must NOT work like that. If it does, then that is not technology, and just stack of cow shit.

Why do developer prefer macOS or linux over windows? Even though windows can run almost all the programs. Windows can provide great speed with newer processors and SSDs.

I find Windows to be more interactive and simple to use. What do you guys think?

(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)

Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.

I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.

But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.

Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:

defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end

Jesus christ, I hate this shit.

Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.

It appears to be written by a child.

js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.

You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.

require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.

Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".

Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.

And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)

You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)

To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.

But here's where i drop the shit.

Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.

I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.

Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.

Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.

We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.

But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.

Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.

Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.

Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.

DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".

I really want to set up led tail lights for vehicles, the programming is simple but I don't know the hardware at all

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

Do you know some good tech RSS,Atom,... Feeds?
Anything about programming, operating systems, hacking, Hardware would be welcome.

But please not something trash like nixcraft, where every article amounts to "How to do this very basic thing that is literally a oneliner but we felt its so complicated, it justifies writing an article about it."

For Apple hardware, including iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, iOS app development is the most common way of making mobile applications . The software is written in the Swift programming language or Objective-C and then submitted to the App Store for users to download.

In case you're a mobile application developer, you might have had second thoughts about iOS improvement. Every designer needs a Mac PC— Macs are more costly than their Windows-based partners. Moreover, when you complete your application, it faces a tough quality survey measure before it gets circulated through the App Store.

Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of

MyClass<T> where T: class {}

he does this:

abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}

He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.

Typically every computer science major begins with either C C# C++ java or python , creating so much abstraction from the hardware which just loads your mind with questions that remain unanswered.When ever i program something i always think of how the under lying stuff is working.They never explain how and where software meets the hardware.Why are they keeping students away from the hardware. I think a cs graduate without knowing the underpinning of a computer should not be considered a cs graduate as opposed to being a software engineer a computer science major relates to everything that is a computer that includes the theoretical stuff and a little bit know how of computer hardware. Instead of teaching this stuff and assembly as a language in the first semester they teach you java or C++. Could not speculate on why this is so.

After I graduate with my programming degree I want to get a little more exposure to the hardware side of tech beyond my minimal knowledge picked up over the years

No idea how yet but that’s a bridge to cross a little closer to July

Kinda want to start learning hardware (Arduino, RasberryPi etc), any tips?
How it works programming languages and stuff, anyone who can lead me on into it

XXXX programming language does not scale. Nope, it is your code. Review your code and improve it! Don't add more hardware to improve performance, that solution just covers the problem. Review, review and review

Sorta rant:
Tired of installing a billion random drivers and tools on windows to make something work. What is the best linux distro for programming on custom built PC that won't make me spend years tweaking to get full hardware support?

when programming fails.
when I updated the firmware on this piece, something went wrong and the device broke.
Google'd and learned that the only way to unbrick is to break the other side open and remove a non-removable battery, to reset. else it will stay bricked forever

!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one

Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).

Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.

Not even in CS or programming related courses, but got called to work as junior react native.

Fucking pumped.

Any one might recommend me a piece of hardware to develop on? What's the most ideal?