This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

The Linux Kernel, not just because of the end product. I find it's organizational structure and size (both in code and contributors) inspirational.

Firefox. Even if you don't use it as your main browser, the sheer amount of work Mozilla has contributed to the world is amazing.

OpenTTD. I liked the original game, and 25 years after release some devs are still actively maintaining an open source clone with support for mods.

Git. Without it, it would not just be harder working on your own source code, it would also be harder to try out other people's projects.

FZF is possibly my favorite command line tool.

Kitty has recently become my favorite terminal.

My favorite thing open source has brought forth though is a certain mindset, which in the last decade can be felt most heavily in the fact that:

1. Scientific papers with accompanying GitHub urls, especially when it comes to AI. Cutting edge research is one git clone away.

2. There are so many open hardware projects. From raspberry pi to 3d printers to laser cutters, being a "maker" suddenly became a mainstream hobby.

A year ago I would have said:

"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"

Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.

I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.

The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.

So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:

"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

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

I was interviewed for a gaming studio, when I showed them my hobby projects for play testing we encountered a bug, convinced them it was feature and put on my best poker face.

Boy was I shocked when I got hired.

Someone who noticed that I do programming as a hobby and therefore set harder work for me in class. He also encourages my side projects and at the moment is helping me build a native app for the school :)

WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..

I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.

WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.

Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?

It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.

Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Do something brainless.

Like taking a shit.
Showering.
Hear music loud and dance.
Talk to people but don't listen.
Surf in the internet.
Masturbation.
Sport.
Take a walk.
Watch TV.
Cook.
And so on and so on.

Most of them are doable for hobby projects at home. Some are also suitable for work. Choose appropriately.

But if I am stuck, then continueing to try solve the problem most often keeps me stuck. So doing something else is my solution. So far it worked well.

I decided I needed a hobby. I spend most of my time on work or personal projects...I thought I might just get something I can tinker with without feeling like I have to produce something that is intended for release. Although knowing myself I'll probably start thinking about how I can build something to release! Haha!

The reality of Android hobby projects:
First 25min of each coding session goes to updating Android studio and plugins...

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

So happy I found GitLab! Best feature is the integrated CI. No need to pay to have CI for private repositories for my hobby projects 👍

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

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!

Just got accepted for a game developer. Ive been making games since I was 12 as hobby. Did a few months of university level of Game Development. Then started as web devloper professionally. The company I work for found a project as game dev for me.

I love my work and the sales team for finding me that job, even though its out of scope of their regular projects.

I've been programming for a career and as a hobby for more than two years now. I want to start contributing to some projects on Git hub, but I'm not sure where to start. What advice do you have for me for first starting out on Git hub?

Professional .NET Developer here:

After years of using Windows and C# for everything at work and at home, I finally switched yesterday from Windows 10 to Arch and from C# to Python for my hobby projects. Feels good!

I feel like when I was a less experienced developer I was way more productive and undertook more complicated hobby projects.

I used to not give a fuck. Use a language I've never used before? Fuck it, let's learn it on the fly. I need to use a weird library with last commit 2 years ago? I don't care, let's import it. Make a computer vision project even though I know nothing about it and I end up just making up the techniques without reading any research? Let's make it my uni year project.

Now days I have so much doubt whenever doing anything. I always spend too much time thinking about what's the best way of doing it and doing research to see how others have done it. All of my experimentation spirit has been sucked away.

My biggest dev career dream is to have a useful SaaS with a solid user base and then reduce work to 40-50% and use the rest of the time for hobby projects and a family.

!sure if rant

i think i just realized the main reason i hate programming even though i love programming.

i love being able to think about whatever i want to think whenever i want to think.

but programming jobs inherently and many segments of own hobby projects often require me to think about something specific which someone else requires me to think about...

does that make any sense?

This would be my first official post.

Been a IT Technician for a managed service provider for the past 9 years up until last year August. Managing director pulls me in with a movement to App Development after coming across some personal hobby projects I have done in the past.

Started in the new position in November as Junior Developer and workloads get dumped on me and left to figure it out. 4 weeks of running through code without documentation and the solutions started to make sense.

Started a new solution for a Large remote customer with documentation and timelines in December and I get pulled in again for a second time in front of the MD.

Good News:With effect in January I have been promoted to Head of Application development.

Bad News: The existing department head is leaving end of the month and I am to go 900km from home to hand over all responsibilities for the next 3 weeks.

Better News: Department has started shifting to DevOps and it is up to me to set the policies and work flows to how I see fit.

Worse news: it starts by expanding the team asap as 10 projects accounting to 4000 man hours with deadlines in Q3.

Wish me luck. It's going to be twisted Rollercoaster ride...

-Publish a paper
-Get into one or more of the many camps I applied to
-Get a social life
-Start in open source
-Get to at least USACO Gold
-Improve my bots for various social media
-Stop using non-open source services as much as possible
-Contribute to devRant
-Do more exercise
-Get a hobby
-Start and actually finish a side project
-Get a job
-Start at least 2 more research projects and hopefully get quite a bit towards publishing a paper in each.

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

Im now working as a fulltime dev for 3 years. I do programming since im 9 and now that I collected some experience, I have to to say, its horrible. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with german internship companys? Letting me do 3 years of FUCKING CRYSTAL REPORTS. IN A DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT CONSISTS OF A TEAM LEAD THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO LEARN SHIT LIKE PROPER OOP AND ASYNC/AWAIT FROM ME. THEY EVEN ASKED ME IF I CAN DROP OF MY HOBBY PROJECTS TO WORK ON SAMPLES THAT THEY CAN LEARN FROM! NO! FUCK! JUST BECAUSE THESE DOUCHBAGS ARE TOO LAZY TO FUCKING LEARN TECHNOLOGY THEY SHOULD BE PASSIONATE ABOUT IN THEIR FREE TIME, IM NOT MAKING IT MY JOB TO FREAKING SHOW THEM THAT HAVING A STATIC CLASS CONTAINING ALL MODELS EVER EXISTED IN THE APP IS A BAD THING! SERIOUSLY, THERES ONLY ONE INSTANCE OF EVERY MODEL WE HAVE! AND THEN THEY BLAME SQL SERVER FOR RACE CONDITIONS WHEN TRYING ASYNC!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!! AND STILL, IF I TELL THEM WHATS WRONG, IM AN IDIOT BECAUSE IM A JUNIOR! Please tell me that i didnt waste 10 years of my life dedicating to such bullshit. Will that change? Is it company specific?

Dear Dark Side #2

Open company projects on all screens
Open your hobby project bottom left screen
Code without guilt
Update company backlog

I learned to code through constantly reading anything i could find, until i knew just enough to make and abandon 80+ hobby projects before finally ever finishing one.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

Antergos is going out of the play. And i saw a very click baity article which poised the following statement at the end:

"Is the death of Antergos a major loss? No, not on its own. Despite the developers bragging about over 900,000 downloads (over the last five years) it’s hardly a popular operating system. Still, its demise is a part of an emerging trend where developers don’t have the resources to continue a project. And both the Linux and Open Source communities should be very worried about that. Developing for love or as a hobby simply isn’t sustainable."

Now, this is, at least to me, bullshitty in the sense that the open source community does not really have anything big to worry about. Large pools of companies would make yeary investments in open source codebases due to the ammount of usefulness they present to their companies. More and more great open sourced projects come out every year OUTSIDE the all eating scope of just web development(which to an extend is fine since it brings communities together)

Saying that a hobby isn't sustainable is funny in itself really.

If people don't have the time to support a hobby project because they are moving on to bigger and better things in shit that actually pays then I am glad for them. It tomorrow Arch, Debian, pop os, ubuntu and fucking freebsd goea out then I would have something to bitch about.

Till then, stating that the community haa something to worry about is just bullshit.

Programming smth complex is literally time traveling. My clock goes in these steps:
20:00 -> so much time left
22:00 -> time to wrap up soon
02:00 -> wut? Impossible

The type of projects I do is quite limited to standard library so I also don't spend time on reading docs of some dependency. I make everything myself. Afterwards, I look up what the way to go is how others do it and compare. Mostly, I don't adjust, it's just smth for next time. That's the whole hobby. Just keep going

Ok c++ professionals out there, I need your opinion on this:
I've only written c++ as a hobby and never in a professional capacity. That other day I noticed that we have a new c++ de developer at the office of which my first impression wasn't the greatest. He started off with complaining about having to help people out a lot (which is very odd as he was brought in to support one of our other developers who isn't as well versed in c++). This triggered me slightly and I decided to look into some of the PRs this guy was reviewing (to see what kind of stuff he had to support with and if it warranted his complaints).

It turns out it was the usual beginner mistakes of overusing raw pointers/deletes and things like not using various other STL containers. I noticed a couple of other issues in the PR that I thought should be addressed early in the projects life cycle, such as perhaps introduce a PCH as a lot of system header includes we're sprinkled everywhere to which our new c++ developer replies "what is pch?". I of course reply what it is and it's use, but I still get the impression that he's never heard of this concept. He also had opinions that we should always use shared_ptr as both return and argument types for any public api method that returns or takes a pointer. This is a real-time audio app, so I countered that with "maybe it's not always a good idea as it will introduce overhead due to the number of times certain methods are called and also might introduce ABI compability issues as its a public api.". Essentially my point was "let's be pragmatic and not religiously enforce certain things".

Does this sound alarming to any of you professional c++ developers or am I just being silly here?

I got a job without trying very hard... Unless your consider all the time I spend coding hobby projects trying.

90% of my time at work is spent debugging and fixing a horrible mess of years-old legacy spaghetti. The only "real" coding I do is my personal hobby projects at home.

!rant
How do you find inspiration for hobby projects? I'd really love to do more programming in my spare time. My head is empty for ideas and hungry for problems to solve.

I was too concerned whether or not I should extend a feature, that I forgot to check if I could do so.

Now I've shot myself in the foot by breaking half of the feature and my only solution to make this work out as intented are quite ugly.

10/10 would do so again. Programming like a retard is the way hobby projects are meant to be. Best learning experience you could hope for.

Also, bless git for giving me a second chance in case I've gone full retard mode.

Tomorrow I will work in a company for first time in my life. I've always programmed for hobby, and I know how to obtain results, but any of my projects has never gone in production, and I'm sure that it will not be the same. I don't know if I will be able. Some advice?

i have adopted rust in my hobby projects. very happy, i feel like i can correctly make things happen.

What are some good android developer communities? Looking for somewhere to learn and ask questions that might not be code related, so can't be on stack overflow. What do you use? I use android for hobby projects only.

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

I've seen a lot of stuff mentioned here from little hobby projects to Matrix. This might seem unreachable because it's just too utopic, but I'd really love to at least see the world using one single platform for software that would "just work™".

Like, here you have - simple glue lang, SDK with billion _useful_ libraries that also just work™ and no need to change the code too much or select an alternative function for each different platform e.g. via macros and one last wish - it'll work on every machine that's capable of running any code.

Maybe one day...

I've been editing sound effects, animations, image assets, creating things from scratch if I don't have what I need, all while I am hired as a software engineer.

We are supposedly an interactive contents company, while we have only two designers (none of which specializes in software design) for half a dozen projects, no sound engineer, and no animator.

I've been using Krita and Audacity as much as VS Code these days - my hobby skills I never thought would use in a professional environment. I wonder how did my predecessors work, surely not every software engineer also happens to be a hobbyist artist.

I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.

Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.

This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.

But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!

Get crucified and put on a shooting range!

I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

Sometimes I think to keep development as a hobby for my side projects and not as a full time job.
Hate how development/programming has to compromised for businesses.
Hoping some of you will get what I'm trying to say.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

First go through any getting started guides or introductory tutorials. Then depending on comfort level and available time, either start exploring further on your own or search for more advanced tutorials.

Try to make use of what you learned, either at work or in hobby projects or small proof of concept programs, as the case may be.

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

I got awesome friends to share a hobby with! Now we're doing projects together.

They know it has something to do with creating and modifying software. That is enough for them and so I am seldom bothered with requests for detailed information.

Also, most often, me working on hobby projects, or just viewing tutorial videos at home is looked upon as "Wasting time playing games".

Then there is also the perception of me being the family's in-house tech support guy.

How many keywords are appropriate to put in a "skills" section on a resume?

Technically I've played with a lot of tech and stacks, and done tiny one offs, tutorials and independent projects but nothing that wasnt more than a day on any one of them.

Basically im fast at picking up a language and api and just rolling with it and getting something done, even without tutorials or tons of googling. Though I find myself constantly relying on manuals and reading apis.

Is this normal or should entry level be familiar with the api of something from the get go?

I see a lot of people say to game the system just to get your foot in the front door past the automated keyword filters and on to an interviews where the real requirements are listed.

But I'd rather not list under the skill section something I only used for all of ten hours in one or two sittings.

Also is it acceptable to list a "learning", "would like to learn/know more of", or "planned skill additions" section?

Also what do I add for extras? "Achievements"? "Volunteer work"? "Hobby projects?", "past times?"
Is any of this seen as necessary or well rounded?

If it is really just about the numbers I'll just go scrape junior and entry level positions and take their keywords and automatically fill out template resumes to automate applying.

Could even use SQLite to store the results and track progress lol.

I've never worked as a professional programmer, but it's the only thing I ever enjoyed doing for 12 hours a day.

My fellow devs, appreciate what you have right now, even if it doesn't seem that great. I've recently switched majors from Bioinformatics to Medicine and I wouldn't say I regret it, but I do certainly doubt this decision sometimes. While studying Bioinformatics, I was always really interested in the biological part, often wanting to learn more about medical topics and such, thinking if I did switch, I could always keep programming as a hobby. Now I did switch and I miss being in a professional CS field so much. Medicine is great, but the people who study are mentally completely different from people that code. I still code small projects on the side, but don't really have anyone to talk to about them and I'm even starting to regret not paying more attention in linear algebra. I miss linear algebra, think about how ridiculous that is haha. Anyways, if you are looking forward to a major change in your life, it might not be all that you think it will be. So look at your current situation, it might be what you wanted all along.
Thanks for listening.
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Also it is incredible, how technologically incompetent most medical students are lol

Hey ya'll, I was wondering if you could give me a career advice. I'm a front end dev with about 3 yrs of experience, and would like to do more cloud architecture/devops. How would I go about it, considering that I've only used aws, gcp, and azure for my hobby/side projects? Should i get certified? Who would hire me?

I'd really appreciate any advice/tip!

Suggest me projects for hobby on Ruby on Rails(intermediate level). ☺️
Anybody can join me too. Would just add it into our portfolios. :)

FOMO on technology is very frustrating.

i have a few freelance and hobby projects i maintain. mostly small laravel websites, go apis, etc ..

i used to get a 24$/ month droplet from digital ocean that has 4vCPUs and 8GB RAM

it was nore than enough for everything i did.

but from time to time i get a few potential clients that want huge infrastructure work on kubernetes with monitoring stacks etc...

and i dont feel capable because i am not using this on the daily, i haven't managed a full platform with monitoring and everything on k8s.

sure u can practice on minikube but u wont get to be exposed to the tiny details that come when deploying actual websites and trying to setup workflows and all that. from managing secrets to grafana and loki and Prometheus and all those.

so i ended up getting a k8s cluster on DO, and im paying 100$ a month for it and moving everything to it.

but what i hate is im paying out of pocket, and everything just requires so much resources!!!!

Doing hobby projects is a great way to improve new skills, helping people with their projects helps me to explain what I'm doing and reading stackoverflow posts!

I was doing android apps for a year and a half, but then during the pandemic my hobby gaming projects blew up and I had to quit my fulltime job and focus on them. Spent last year working for myself. I managed to save enough money and got a mortgage for my apartment. Now I feel accomplished what I wanted and Im tired of working alone on my own projects. Its sad doing all these mental gymnastics and not having anyone else to share the results with.

I'm considering getting back into part/full-time position. Main reason is the social aspect, as well as stability. I'm tired of stress, too much responsibility. I want a better work/life balance. Also I think I need a position where they would allow at least 2 days a week working from home.

How to recondition myself and first of all to motivate myself to get back into the rat race? I haven't done android app development in a year and a half, I'm rusty af. I'm a junior at best right now. Also in the past year I got fat and I'm too conscious about my beer belly lol. Thinking of loosing weight and sharpening my app dev skills first, only then applying.

Can anybody advice anything?

I want to build a program for my projects and generally to organize my different work/hobby related things.
I want to do this in a language I'd have to learn, so far I only know how to write in Bash, Python and JS(Node).
I do however, have some experience with the fundamentals of programming and are very comfortable with data structures.

So far, I've looked at using C or Rust, does anyone have some suggestions? (I've also looked at Electron but it seems too easy for this project)

The current overview of my thoughts for the application:

- Be secure
- Have a UI for visualizing projects
- Hopefully cross-platform (but I only need linux)
- Optimized for speed

How do you avoid burnout when working on personal/hobby projects?

I’m a full stack developer, working with React. Also before this I used to be an OK hobby artist (for sketching and painting, that is), but man I SUCK at designing websites!! I don’t have that designer’s mind at all. At work that’s not an issue because we have guidelines and such, but when I’m doing free time projects it always looks so ugly and amateurish.

How can I improve, should I take some graphic design course, or is there some specific buzz word for graphic design on the web that I should look out for? How can I learn standards of margins, buttons, text and such in a good way. Some people just seem to have it in them already!

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated!

There is no perfect library for you

Recently I tried to update a very old hobby project by adding new features, but sadly in my case these features depended big on an external library, and because of how this library handle their things I just can't make it work for my use case cuz again how the library works, at the end I removed the library and installed anther one that solved my case

Now I will make clear that I'm not blaming anyone here, not even me, devs that creates free libraries created the library for their use case in the first place and then thanks also to contributors (library users) that library became good for the common use cases, it just time that will tell if the library will keep with the updates and not breaking things

So we should be very thankful for the devs that creates free open source projects that tries to make the devs life easier

#Suphle Rant 1: Laravel closing the gap

This is the first of a series of long overdue rants regarding Suphle, because I have had so so much to grumble about over the last ~2 years building it. A bit of introduction: I compiled a list of all the challenges I faced in my time as a salaried PHP developer. I also gathered issues complained about by other developers in a laravel group I'm part of, and decided to solve them at the framework level since they're avoidable. I also borrowed impressive features encountered in my time working with other languages and invented a new one, as well. I quit my job last July, still haven't get a new one yet cuz office workload kept conflicting with Suphle development. I concluded all work and testing on it back in August/September but it's yet to be officially released since the docs is still in progress.

Anyway, yesterday, I stumbled upon what is IMO the most progressive /tangible update I've seen in all my time following Laravel updates. It's called [precognition](don't have enough rep to post the PR link but you can search on their repo), and contains features that are actually beneficial to both developer and end user. It also turns out to be functionality that was part of Suphle's bragging rights. Their DX is still tacky but I'm devastated cuz it's a matter of time before they work it out. Makes me wonder what the quality of all I've built would be in a year if it doesn't become big enough to attract frequent contribution. I guess there's only so much one can do against a community.

Later that evening, I found a developer from my country on twitter who claims to be making a decent living. A little snooping around his profile informed me he's building his own back end framework but in NodeJS. I know with every degree of certainty that what he'll eventually do can't hold a candle against Suphle in overall functionality or thoroughness. Not a dick measuring contest but when your motive isn't significant innovation, you'll neither plan properly nor even know what exactly to build. You'll just reinvent the wheel as an academic exercise

Yet, I can't help but have that sinking feeling he's winging it, while making a windfall with his dozens of freelance projects. It kind of feels like I shortchanged myself, and Suphle's shelf life will suffer the same fate as a hobby project for 10 stars (which I don't even have yet!!). I reached out to him to rub minds together but he ignored. More pain.

I'll get over this and return to work on the docs, but from the look of things, the end isn't an appealing or expected /deserved one