I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

Thank me later

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

I'm helping a friend with programming in c#
He's a beginner and wants to learn. He learns as easy as I do.

I saw his project yesterday and everything was written in one method. I thought I was dying. Then remembered my first project... he will be fine

!rant

My girlfriend sat on my lap the other day when I was helping a friend of mine with some assembly code. She look at the code an said

What are you doing?

I explained the code and said that is the lowest you can get before machine code. She didn't run away in fear....

This is a great sign...

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Never again will I fucking work for anyone close to me! It's not fucking worth helping them.

Backstory is too long. Lets just say that they fucking expect too much as we're friends. Assuming that paying 10$ for your domain every year entitles me to work on every ducking detail of your website. Not to forget I gave this person an insane discount on the entire project.

I lost a friend or someone who I assumed was a friend

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Worst of 2020?

Well, I've learnt never to do free / voluntary work.

Been spending many weekends helping out a former friend, mostlyby creating APIs, sites, managing servers & scripting.

Now that I have a girlfriend, my weekends are spent mostly with her.

He got really mad, said he doesn't want to waste time.

Then went to *pay* someone else to continue what I've been doing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

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

It's been lonely. ☹

Friend of mine at college is struggling with his cpp class.

Have been helping this guy since forever with it, he is not a coder by any means nor does he display any sort of affinity or "talent" for it. But he does make up with intense dedication. Still he knows that he will not be pursuing a career in software engineering, this is just a class.

The thing is, he showed me a video of his class. The instructor is middle eastern with a thick accent. Accent so thick I need subtitles for this motherfucker.

He has learned more from me that he has at uni. And at my day job the interns say the same thing. I love teaching and far prefer it over working on projects.

This week we have a meeting with the head of the i.t dptmtn at school as nd I will try to pitch myself in as a faculty member by popular demand.

I would love to teach, i have experience in the field and learn a lot from going over shit as an instructor. I can make one go from wtf is JS used for to handling promises and writing Angular in days.

I really want to teach man.

Have a friend ask me helping him with a project for University.
Make an application in Java for Matrix and numerous applications.

Done, but I hid an easter egg. If you divide the matrix by 0 scalar output
FAP FAP FAP FAO FAP FAP.
He doesn't know.

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

As a side project, I've been helping out a friend build a website for free.

friend: I need more of your commitment for this project. We're about to get a huge client!

Me: Yeah you've been saying that for a year. Dude, I just don't have time to waste in projects that are not givine me any money.

friend: HOW DARE YOU! ARE YOU BLACKMAILING ME?!?!

ugh... not my friend anymore

Story time

I really love helping and teaching others about code. Recently I had a friend that wanted to get into web development. Being me, I told him that i would teach him all he wants but that he needs to do some research first to show me that he feels comfortable with as a minimum requirement. I told him to research the minimum technologies required to build a web page and to tell me about the request response cycle and stuff like that. When he came back I was expecting small explanations such as "html stands for bla bla and is used for bla bla".No. this dude comes back all proud to tell me about flipping Laravel. I sit there quietly listening to him go on about the "Laravel programming language". He likes anime, I like kendo (and have trained in it) so while he is talking I slowly move us into the part of my office where I keep my boken (wodden sword). As soon as he sees me sitting down with the sword he asks what am i doing with it.
"Well, remember when in some anime that you like you see teachers beating their studets over stupid shit?"
"What?"
..."WHAT DOES HTTP STANDS FOR?"
"The...the err the web language that.. er"
BOINK
"what is javascript?"
"Like the updates thing?"
HARDER BOINK

:) guarantee he wont forget what http is after that and what js and Laravel are from now on :) needless to say he will continue learning with much more care.

Coding dojo for real mofockas, ya dig?

Helping a friend who's a brilliant at mechanics and has his own patents, and got this question when downloading on his 10Mbit line:
"This was supposed to be a fast computer, so why is it taking so long to download?"

To explain the reason was surprisingly hard, considering that this is a guy who's been invited to give a lecture about innovation at a top tech university.

i was helping a friend who just started learning how to code and i realized that tutorials don't teach you how to read error messages and how to debug. that's stuff we learn from people, it's tacit knowledge. that's crazy to me, because those are such essential skills to a dev and i think just self learning is not enough. maybe coding is even more of a socially dependent skill than i ever thought. looking at it that way, stackoverflow is a good example of that, I can't really imagine being a dev without the dev community

Fml. Im occasionally helping a friend who is taking an intro cs class. Well today I needed to Skype him but Skype wasn't installed yet. Didn't think when clicking through the installation process so bing is now my search bar. Fml....

So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?

I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.

The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?

I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)

My life is totally fine. Right?

!dev

finally, after a week of helping my friend to learn the basics of front-end web development, he got the internship at one of my friend's office ( he set up the interview on my request).

It does feel good.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

So I was helping my friend debug her code.
A portion of text was not being displayed. We put log statements everywhere. Cross checked every line of code. We had almost started to lose it.
And then we found out that she had accidentally set the text color to white in the XML layout.
Just another one of those days.

>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.

I think I like teaching.

Today I was helping out a friend with an algorithm for an assignment because he had no idea how to do it (we're on the second semester). You could see that we was completely lost, without a clue on what to do. So I showed him how to think about programming, how to figure out the problem and the solution before going to the code. I was so goddam happy when I saw he understood it. At the start I was guiding him heavily, but towards the end I'd just loosely describe what he had to do (and, of course, explain why) and he'd know how to do it. It just made me so fucking happy and so fucking proud of him, I was dancing on my chair, you guys have no idea. He went from 0 to 60 in 2 hours, I could teach him what the teacher couldn't.

I college I'm kinda explaining a lot of stuff (mostly programming and calculus) to my friends, even to classmates I don't know (I made a few friends this way) and I fucking love it. Seeing people completely lost, shining a light on them and seeing them fly, it's fucking awesome. Idk it's just very fulfilling.

Not sure I'd like all other responsibilities that come with being a teacher, but teaching in of itself is **g r e a t**, definitely a career path I'm considering.

Today was a good day :)

By:Miss. Lucia Wright
Punchline : VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE MY DEAR

 

 

 

Dearest Friend,

My greetings to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am sister Lucia Wright I am married to Archdeacon. Collins Wright whom until his death served as an archdeacon in the St. Micheal's archdeacon in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2005. We were married for eleven years without a child. My Husband died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

Before his death we were both born again Christian. After the death of my Husband I decided not to re-marry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $22. Million in a security and finance company in London for safe keeping.

Presently, my Doctor confirmed to me that I have serious sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Haven known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a church or individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want a church that will use this fund for orphanages,helping the widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavor that the house of God is maintained. The Bible made us to understand that? Blessed  is the hand that giveth'. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don't  want my husband's efforts to be used by unbelievers. I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way,

this is why I am taking this decision.

I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says That? the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace'. I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband's relatives around me always. I don't want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible.

As soon as I receive your reply I will give you the contact of the security and finance  were the amount sum is deposited for you to contact them, I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that Wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply. Due to present condition of my health,I was warned by my doctor to avoid receiving or making any call. For that,I have submitted the information of  the deposit to  my lawyer, As soon as I hear from you I will forward to you the lawyer's contact.

Remain blessed in the Lord,

Miss. Lucia Wright.

Well ok... If you want me to, I can surely help you out 😈😈😈😈😈

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

I've been struggling with some financial issues lately. I haven't told this to my family bc I am helping my mom with money, hat wouldn't help.

Sadly, I got two general tickets for WebSummit 2019 and I thought "okay, I am nearby Portugal rn, somebody of my circle could go with me and have some fun, I feel so blue..."

No one. Not a single one. Nobody.

"Maybe with those Telegram groups of JS developers..."

No one.

Maybe it sounds like some fraud or something, so they didn't answer. I even mentioned to an old entrepreneur friend of mine, and he didn't even answer me.

Disheartened is the word for today. I don't know, I am not expecting that people can join this adventure just bc is awesome, we all have bills to pay, but at least an answer would be fine.

I know it is not a fun story, and there are people in worse situations than mine. I just wanted to do some catharsis bc I lost my laptop.

I still have bills, two tickets, and a new kind of miserable mood.

Thank you for reading.

Helping a friend study for a midterm for a web development class at the university I went to. They have a new teacher this semester and I’m reviewing his slides about javascript to see where the confusion is...

First slide: based off of Java, hence the name JavaScript, but is not Java. Borrows most syntax from Java.

And they wonder why employers comment on the surveys: “unprepared for the workforce”

Looked up the professor.. no experience teaching or any background in cs. And people pay 6-12k / semester for this state university.

Couple of months ago a friend of mine got a new charge in the company as director of software development, he is an awesome person, always helping and trying to hear all opinions, but his wife also works there, she is an absolutely awful person, since the new charge of my friend she feels like the boss trying to control the time of the people, and the ways the things are done in the company, and if you don't agree she warns you about telling to his husband, but my friend just try to calm down the things and get to an agreement in both parts. So I mean, bro you are an excellent boss but you should put limits on your wife, at least in the job.

i was helping a friend with their coding assignment - snake game.

we spent about 45 minutes of trying to figure out why the snake's self-collisions are not working.

then we realized that she's using two separate arrays/grids - one for the food, one for the snake itself.

she was checking both for food collisions and self-collisions on the food array.

it was very painful to realize it took me so embarassingly long to notice it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking brilliant.

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

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

A friend is trying out linux and I am helping him with it. Helped him to install and configure linux on his laptop. Tried several Arch distros and different Ubuntu flavours. But it is not about distros,but about strange glitch...

Imagine, you are having 2 monitors. One is your laptops and second is plugged in via VGA. You're dragging windows from one screen to another, doing you things, etc..
You can see and configure VGA display in display settings and so on.
So situation is exactly the same with my friend, but here comes the plot twist:

There is no monitor connected to VGA.

I can't explain it, but linux is always detecting a non-existent display. So you can drag windows to nowhere. You can see resolution on 2nd monitor and so on. Luckily, you can disable it.

Sooo

Wat

Such glorious Wednesday...

#1: Friend needs me to keep her cats, hasn't called yet to give me keys (and she's leaving tonight).

#2: Got an e-mail from a job I applied, rejected cause I flunked the impromptu technical interview (with the usual pretty wording).

#3: Helping a friend with his dissertation code in Java. Just a marvellous spaghetti code with minimal semblance of a structure and a hodgepodge of various solutions found on the Internet. 2H 40M and still nothing... At least I have my stress ball to save me from mental breakdown...

Helping out a friend how to code, and he said:

"Can't we just use a string? An array is just like a string anyway."

We were looking at some setting types in Visual Studio.

I was helping a friend with her computer when an alert from the antivirus tells me there is a virus in the computer. I tried to delete it and the computer shows this alert (the translation would be something like: The action couldn't be performed as the file is a virus).

FUCKING WINDOWS I KNOW ITS A VIRUS SO LET ME DELETE IT. 😩😩

I read the other day here about people not reading the error messages shown by the IDE and thought "there can't be people this dumb..."

Well, today I was helping a friend out with his java project and he was trying to figure out an error for at least 10 min so I told him, read the error message, he goes like nah, that won't help, I kept repeating it till he did it and guess what? The explanation was there and helped him figure out the problem.
His excuse? He didn't have the patience to read the message, it was 2 lines long...

How can you be so stupid to the point where your first thought isn't checking out the damn message the IDE gives you? It's there for a fucking reason.

Earlier I used to help my college batch mates and juniors in coding and development stuff. Sometimes I used to do some projects with them myself to help them learn. Sometimes I used to go beyond limits to debug their errors, even spending hours with them physically or through TeamViewer.

But now I have realised that I had been no more than just stackoverflow.com to them. They just call me when they need me and don't even care about me as a friend.

So that's it. Now I have stopped helping such people. I don't care if that's rude or arrogant. I just don't want to do this. If they still are a friend, well and good otherwise they can leave. I don't care anymore.

I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)

(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗

First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂

Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.

I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.

IVE FINALLY MADE FUCKING PROGRESS AFTER ALL DAY OF FUCKING CODING AND A FRIEND (who is teaching me the networking concepts) HELPING ME THANK FUCK

i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.

as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)

-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)

previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...

but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.

friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.

no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.

so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone

------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.

once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.

but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.

if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.

i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.

mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?

but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔

!rant

So I got my first rails jobs today!! After learning ruby for a little more than a year on my own I spent the entire summer slaving away helping my Sr dev friend gaining really awesome really world experience and great practices. Now I'm officially a software developer in title haha so excited!

I’m being taught some network programming, and my friend/teacher is helping me on the project to teach me, and I’m learning a lot but I don’t feel like I’ve personally done a lot.

I mean I’ve debugged and asked questions and make sure I understand what’s happening but I still don’t feel like I’ve done a lot. :/

Was helping out a friend yesterday with word macros.

Never did that stuff before, but thought, it can't be that hard...

It took me almost 3 hours to figure out, how to fill a fucking textbox based on if a checkbox is selected or not. was also kind of a throwback to MFC Applications (because of how bad the UI was)

Out of curiosity, is there anyone else who feels a bit late to the game in terms of their programming skills and training?

I got my start at about 10 with a slightly obscure BASIC dialect for classic MacOS, and while I got the logical bits down strong, I never really branched out too much at the time because I had difficulty understanding some of the more advanced examples I had available on my own.

Skip ahead to college and I tried CompSci my first semester, and did fairly well on paper, but could not get the compiler to work, even copying out known examples character for character and verifying them repeatedly. So after my first semester (and the hardest-earned D I’ve ever gotten) I ended up switching my major.

Skip another 10 years and I’m talking to some people about setting up a website, but the programmer flaked out on us, so I decided to start experimenting in PHP, and while that project never went anywhere I got good at developing resources for helping me keep my Japanese skills up (lots of logic/DB work, minimal interface).

Finally, after 10 more years of tinkering and during a bout of unemployment, I had a friend lament that he needed another programmer for his shop, but didn’t know anyone reliable. I apprenticed under him, learning WordPress along the way, and these days he’s moved on while I run the shop on my own, picking up new skills as needed.

There are times I feel absolutely confident in what I’m doing, but there are several areas where I feel like I’ve got a lot of fundamental gaps I can’t figure out how to address due to my near complete lack of formal training (like when I’ve tried to do non-web programming).

Anyone else have a similar path to where they are now? Ideas on how to break out of this limiting feeling?

No ranting here but

Started doing web with POCO in C++. Could not be as pleased as now. Syntax is cool, framework is cool, GNU Makefiles are cool, aclocal isn't, but... Go to hell automake. I am happy, helping a friend and enjoying what I feel as the chilliest programming language is becoming the way I do web.

Ik was helping a friend and needed quick a dev environment. Great, github codespaces to the resque! Fast dev environment with vscode editor online running a debian container. Perfect. But then it happened: "You're at 100% of your included usage for this billing period. For more information, view your billing settings.".

I can't access my source files anymore. Fuck, it was so much research

We're finishing some projects for uni. I've done mine, and am just helping out with others.

There was a friend who is doing her write-up. My other buddy was just just troubling her for fun. He threatened to press the power button on the laptop, thus sending it to hibernate. Minor nuisance; she just need to turn it back on after all.

She pleaded to leave her & let her complete the write-up. So I asked her if I could quickly re-configure the power button. You know, go to the windows power settings, and tell it to do nothing upon pressing the button.

She said no. But the way she said it struck me odd. As in "No, why would anyone do that!?". Debatable. Just to make sure, I asked whether she understood what I requested. She made a quick hand gesture of plucking the power button off!! 😐

Me & my buddy just stare at each other. "Yeah you're right, you're right, what a stupid idea...". We just slowly scoot from there. 🏃

No idea how she reached this far...

This is the story of probably the least secure CMS ever, at least for the size of it's consumer base. I ran into this many years ago, before I knew anything about how websites work, and the CMS doesn't exist anymore, so I can't really investigate why everything behaved so strangely, but it was strange.

This CMS was a kind of blog platform, except only specially authorised users could view it. It also included hosting. I was helping my friend set it up, and it basically involved sending everybody who was authorized a email with a link to create an account.

The first thing my friend got complaints about was the strange password system. The website had two password boxes, with a limit of (I think) 5 characters each. So when creating a account we recomended people simply insert the first 5 characters in the first box, and the rest in the second. I can not really think of a good explanation for this system, except maybe a shitty way to make sure password are at least 5 characters? Anyway, since this website was insecure the password was emailed to you after the account was created. This is not yet the WTF part.

The CMS forced sidebar with navigation, it also showed the currently logged in users. Except for being unreadable due to a colorful background image, there where many strange behaviors. The sidebar would generally stay even when navigating to external websites. Some internal links would open a second identical sidebar right next to the third. Now, I think that the issue was the main content was in an iframe with the sidebar outside it, but I didn't know about iframe's back then.

So far, we had mostly tested on my friends computer, which was logged in as the blog administrator. At some point, we tried testing with a different account. However, the behavior of sidebars was even stranger now. Now internal links that had previously opened a second, identical sidebar opened a sidebar slightly different from the first: One where the administrator was logged in.

We expirimented somewhat, and found that by clicking links in the second sidebar, we could, with only the login of a random user, change and edit all the settings of the site. Further investigation revealed these urls had a ending like ?user=administrator2J8KZV98YT where administrator was the my friends username. We weren't sure of the exact meaning of the random digits at the end, maybe a hash of the password?

Despite my advice, my friend decided to keep using this CMS. There was also a proper way to do internal links instead of copying the address bar, and he put a warning up not to copy links to on the homepage. Only when the CMS shut down did he finally switch to a system where formatting a link wrong could give anybody admin access.

Made a friend when I did my first cosplay last October. This year was my 3rd year of studies, and I had to do ab internship sometime in the year. Friend hooked me up with their SO's company. This company shares the office with my current company due to long stories (it's an amicable relationship). After my internship the CEO of the other company offered my a 3 month contract back in March, which got extended until January. So here I am, working in Edutech helping the local South African colleges.

Been way too long since I did something that wasn't WordPress, so I decided to take some spare time this weekend to scratch-build something and get around to finally learning how to transition from Foundation 5 to 6 while I'm at it (since jQuery compatibility requirements mandate I finally make that jump going forward...).

Started off with a plan for a custom-designed CMS built around a personal research project I've been doing. Worked it all out mentally. Then got started and realized I probably want to start by securing the system and provisioning for user accounts, so I've been working on that all weekend so far...

On the plus side, I've written a pretty nice user management module for any future personal projects, and have *finally* gotten around to learning how to do prepared statements in MySQLi.

On the neutral side, I still haven't gotten around to building any of the substantive stuff I set out to work on this weekend because I've been helping a friend out IRL with some non-programming stuff.

Such is the way it goes, eh? Hoping tonight I'll finally finish up with the administrative items and be able to get down to building the actual meat of the project.

How do you go forward with a project you're stuck on and you can't find the motivation to keep going?

I'm working on a relatively small and simple project for a friend. It's not that complicated overall, I've completed most of it already, and there are no stringent deadlines, so I can take my time.

But the last part has turned out to be a bit more complex to implement properly than I expected, and due to the fact that I can't seem to find a solution that satisfies me I'm completely put off from continuing.

Which is completely stupid of course, I want to finish this (and get paid), but my motivation to even open the project files is nowhere to be found.

The whole coronavirus lockdown situation isn't helping either for that matter, I feel like I'm going crazy stayin locked inside these four walls all day every day.

Sigh

I've been helping a friend of mine with his postgraduate project the last 3 months.
It was a Java based program made in Processing. Though I am not a Java developer and I never used processing before, it wasn't that hard to write the logic of the program.

I noticed that sometimes Java made me use loops for almost everything.
Also I had to communicate between server and client via JSON but I had to write it manually as string due to the lack of keys in Java.

The main trial though was with the logic of the project. It was supposed to be made as a framework to be extended from custom user classes. I had to change the core classes I made many times because the user class had methods that should run while the parent class didn't have them declared. That could be my fault for not knowing how to write desktop application framework but you can't expect a framework to be extended in a compiled state, or so I think. Processing on the other hand doesn't seem to like the idea of an external java library. At least it didn't workout for me, it should be able to work normally.

In the end the project was never as completed as we wanted. It could rum a basic sim but we hadn't the time to test other possibilities.

!rant
Just started a side project, helping a friend make his Android app more stable and add a couple more features. We'll release the sources sometime later.

Gotta say, his code is just terrible. And it runs on top of some code written by someone else, and that's even worse.
But I don't know how I got the motivation to spend the whole Saturday cleaning it up, fixing warnings, making abstractions, extracting features to separate classes, converting some stuff to Kotlin, even adding a couple coroutines. It felt good fixing bad code.

Maybe because I have some coding freedom I kinda miss at work.
Maybe because the project is not that big.
Maybe because I know the guy has many skills, coding is just not one of them.
Maybe because that project has some cool in it I can't even describe.
Maybe because that's entirely within my skills but challenging enough to have fun working on it.
Or maybe is just the mood of the moment, and in a week or so I'll lose all the motivation, as it happened too many times.

🤷‍♂️

Was helping a friend fixing apache url redirects he says I've got cent os i was a bit nervous. The configs were in httpd.conf file but as soon as i try to edit i see there is no nano editor
But there was vi editor, now I'm on call helping this dev and googling vim cheat sheet 😂😂😂😂😂, i had no idea how to edit the file. Its not that hard though.

Oh... I dont know what to pick...
So i will pick 3 projects from my 3 stages of my dev "carrier"

1.Right after i discovered programing and learned how ,if, while and similar structures worked. The launguage was object pascal with delphi 2007
That was a "safe" with a stupidly complicated lock (text inputs, sliders, ect) it opened a secret folder in the end.

2. It was a embedded code for a Atmega8 AVR, Atmel studio, pure C but without memory managment (i didnt even know that it even existed)
It was a Pip boy knockoff, 16x2 display and a small keyboard connected to the arduino like board that i made on a proto board.
It wasnt that much of a pipboy, it was more of a showoff of atmega8 internal systems, (ADC, timers, interrupts and such)

3.DataLab, after helping my friend with his master thesis, (we meet on discord long story, i was in high school) i decided that mathlab is shit and i created a visual scripting enviroment, launguage C# .net 4 (in the latest version)
I remade the whole program from scrach 1 time, significantly improving everything (code reuse, better algorithms, data processing, code redability and edge cases) I have learned good practises from everywhere. I learned how to use git.

DataLab project looks just like LabViev (i didnt notice that it even existed...), it is frozen now because of my mental status but im planning on using it on my CV when i will be looking for jobs on holidays. There are many things that i can improve in that program but ... first i have to fix myself.

I got a friend in the older class. He has C++ classes now. I’m constantly helping him, even though I don’t know C++ much 😂

Not a rant but a helping request.

A friend of mine just asked me if I can make an ERP System for his father, he wants to take control of the inventory, and the merchandise decrease.

Any advice of which database would be better for this job since I don't think he is going to pay for a license or something like that.

I was thinking using MySQL and C# or maybe Java.

Any comment is well appreciated ☺️

The "It doesn't work" response when you are helping a friend do some stuff on a computer just kills me.

So one of my friend is doing her internship now and she has to program in Java because her boss believes she is studying IT although it's not the case. She is feeling really bad because it took her a week to code what is for them a simple program... I don't know what to say to her... It's not like it's a good thing to learn Java through a specific program! Anyway it's just so annoying these people who believe that if you're studying tech, you must "of course" know a programming language...

(Asking for someone I’ve been mentoring.)

TLDR; Looking for recommended resources on how to code email templates from scratch.

I’ve been helping a friend transition their career from sales to web development and recently he applied for a position as a jr developer for an ecommerce startup. They liked him and they’re willing to create a new position for him where he’ll work with both the marketing department and the development team. He’ll start with building email templates for the marketing department and eventually move on to development as he grows his skills. I’d really appreciate it if I could get some recommended resources for learning how to code email templates from scratch and from PSDs. This would be a life changer for him and I’m trying to do as much as I can to help me out.

Sigh. I don't like the methods of first line helpdeskers. Computer problem? Restart it, or.. re-image it. The hell..

I know these are standard practices but I don't like them at all. Just because there's a small issue with a device, you're going to throw everything away? No troubleshooting at all? I don't call that troubleshooting nor helping.

My friend works as first line helpdesk and I told him: "Hey, WhatsApp isn't giving me double checkmarks anymore for my messages to you since last night. It's odd." and his response is: "Restart your phone". My god.. how much more technically ignorant could he be? Everything network-related on my phone is working, including WhatsApp, but no.. "restart your phone". Anyway.

Helping my friend with his UI part of his project. It's for saving a file directly from the download URL to Google Drive (save-to-drive)