I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Hello devRant, i think this is my first story here, but i want share my happiness with you.
After working 1 year as C# dev and no reaction of my current company to my claims:
I get a job with 25% more pay, christmas and vacation bonus und 5 more holidays!
Holy fuck that`s so cool.
Hope you guys have a good week!
Please excuse my english skills ;-)

Me (experienced java dev) in an interview..

C: „what’s the difference between equals and equals equals and equals equals equals in js?“
Me: *i explained it perfectly*
C: „what’s the difference in Java between equals and equals equals and dot equals?“?
Me: „sorry, I don’t know. I’ve never ever seen .=„..

About 15 min after the interview, I was like: „holy moly fucking shit, please shoot me.. he meant .equals.. not .=....

For the devs: I‘M FUCKING STUPID!!!!

For the beginners: THATS the importance of „context“!

Tried javascript coming from Java and C++, i know not a lot of people agree with me but holy fucking shit i hate non-typed variables they introduce so much ambiguity it drives me insane!!!

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

Someone mentioned Holy C in another thread and I automatically knew they were referencing the language, based on C, and developed by Terry A Davis from Temple OS and Schizophrenic fame.

I legit felt sad for the man, he was obviously a very talented and smart programmer. You removed all the racial slurs, crazy dialogues and biblical stuff that was caused by his mental illness and you were left with a very brilliant and dedicated programmer.

While Hurd (kernel meant to replace Linux) will fucking never see the light of day after years in the making, Terry was able to generate: his own compiler for his own programming language, kernel, drivers, desktop environment, filesystem TODO by himself. I mean, fuck me dude, he even included games of his own design into the damned thing, using very advanced concepts that were present in flight simulators or doom like fps.

It just bothers me so much, the dude would have probably done amazing non-religious things if it were not for his illness.

If you like reading about this sort of thing, check him out, there are a couple of youtube videos by him. Don't be put off by the shit that he spews in some videos, remember, he was saying shit like that out of a very real mental illness.

Oh, and fuck Hurd

I'm astonished again. Linux isn't designed as GUI OS - where Windows has dynamic thread priorities for freshly woken up threads as to increase GUI snappiness.

Now, my CPU has four physical and eight logical cores for SMT. I'm running eight worker threads of some parallel testing stuff, and I'm glad that I chose the AMD 3400G over the 3200G. The CPU load is 100%. On top of that, MP3 audio, the browser, and I'm dd'ing an external USB3 HDD.

Holy shit, the browser is just as smooth as if the CPU were idle. No perceivable lag. I hadn't expected desktop Linux to be that great.

I'm also surprised that the CPU temperature doesn't exceed 44°C despite full load at 21°C ambient, and the cooling is inaudible. Sure, my cooler is massively over-dimensioned to achieve exactly that, but it's still amazing.

It's what I would have wanted ten years ago and only could approach somewhat, but now the tech is actually there.

The new holy war in C#:

Point p = new Point(5, 3);

vs.
var p = new Point(5, 3);

vs. (new)
Point p = new (5, 3);

and... FIGHT!!

Using an array of function pointers to replace large switch statements... holy shit.. I feel like Thanos getting the time stone.
Just when you think you can’t get your code to run any faster, nor did I think I could get the code any smaller... BOOM.. C never ceases to impress.

Next I’ll be turning this into “object” oriented ... but since it’s C ... it will just be Struct oriented .. SOP ..

Holy shit. I just watched a video on Rust and I think I am in love.

Tracked mutability, reference counting, guaranteed thread safety, all in a compiled type-safe language with the performance of C++? 😍

Why did I not check this out sooner??

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

Started freelancing on PeoplePerHour and I'm already doing damned well after a fortnight. C# was the right language to learn.

I literally just had this conversation.

H: Me
C: Colleague

C: "Hey Hindsight, I'm having issues with our web print driver, it's not opening the browser after printing"
H: "Have you checked Interactive Mode in the installer so it opens the browser?"
C: "Yes"
H: "Are you sure you have the right domain name in your configuration file? It should be <thing.example.com>"
C: "Ah, it's just example.com. Should I just change it in the config?"
H: "No you need to regenerate the config from our server tool, because the server data needs to match your client config data"
C: "Ok, my config says <example.com>"
H: "Yes, just regenerate the config with <thing.example.com> instead for the domain"
C: "Ok I'll do that. What was the correct domain again?"
H: thinking "Holy shit can you really be that dumb!" but saying "<thing.example.com>"

When I was around 13 I started programming html and designing websites on and off over the years. Later during my first year of college I picked up C++ and loved it. I always had this idea that web design was very elementary programming until recently.

I recently got forced into learning C# and ASP.NET Core MVC by my internship. Holy shit was I wrong. Web design is so insanely complex and interesting!

C#, ASP.NET Core MVC, HTML, CSS, JS, Entity Framework Core, and the list goes on.....all to create a single website/web application.

I apologize for my ignorance to the website development community.

I’m so excited to learn all of this! =D

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

C might be a pain to write, but holy cow does it run circles around python from a performance perspective. Easy to forget in fields like data science, where python is the default

Arcane C++ error messages can suck my dick

!rant (all ranters should read)

Today I was at university, doing some C low-level stuff. Then I looked my Professor.

Holy fucking shit, this man (and obviously the others) learned programming without google, stackoverflow, youtube and online doc/forum/examples/explanation.
I also believe that some of them could not compile and run at home their software.

MASSIVE RESPECT FOR YOU ALL !

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

Holy fuck EA (yea I went there)

So here I am playing NFS Heat, and my laptop is hot enough to cook eggs on the keyboard, no joke, yet spec wise I should have 0 issues running this game.

I switch on the turbo cool (basically spin the internal fans at full speed... It's an MSI) and this usually covers any heating issues, nope... not this time.

this fucker of a fan can't keep up , so I've turned down the settings from ULTRA, that's depressing, to Medium... it feels like 2006 showed back up, but here's this laptop still burning a whole in my fingers.

My GPU (GTX1060 6GB) is running at 95'c on Medium graphics, and LOW looks like I fell into a 8bit world with slow ass rendering.

Guess I'm going to need to get some cooling assistance for this thing.

Thank you EA for turning my 2.5k laptop into a stove top, I appreciate it.

I guess the name checks out, "heat"

When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.

A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.

This is the same feeling I get from C

Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);

and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck

there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT

Visual studio shouldn't be allowed to fucking exist in its current form, it takes FOREVER TO FUCKING LOAD unresponsive lagging piece of fucking shit. I'd expect such loading times for a modern AAA game but not a fucking so called functional application, holy fucking shit...

Why must everything be so fucking hard using this thing? I need to change default intellisense settings as not to get in my fucking way while learning, after getting more stressed trying to find out how to edit the settings which are listed under TOOLS, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? It should be under edit not fucking tools, editing settings is not a fucking tool you fucking dense cunts. I spend the next 10 minutes looking for intellisense settings only to find you have options for enabled, disabled and default how the fuck does that help anyone?

Firstly it should have its own fucking section since its such a massive bloaty intrusive feature. I should not have to first click C# and then be presented with limited controls.

FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, ALT + F4 UNINSTALLED THAT PIECE OF FUCKING SHITE , MILTI BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY WANTS FUCKING MONEY FOR THIS PILE OF SHIT.

Go fuck yourselves.

Holy shit sometimes I hate my job. Current assignment: translate a C++ COM class to C#. Requirement: interface should not change. I ask the other team using this interface to ask me any questions so I can address their concerns. First FUCKING thing they ask for: a diagram explaining how to access the interface. For. Fuck. Sake. The goddamn thing is not changing. At all. I have said that to every stakeholder every time. It's a changed reference and a tweak to some calls to make them .Net calls. Why am I redocumenting something that was documented years ago?

Rant portion:

Fuck me, there's not a ton of great resources for Lua. I have the book, and it's actually fucking incredible, but as soon as I have a question which I would usually Google, either it's a SO question that almost hits the mark (but absolutely does not answer my initial question) or a mailing list that DOES answer my question but holy FUCK it's difficult to read!

I 100% recommend the Lua book, though. It's remarkably helpful and covers just about every little detail of the language and it's corresponding c API, and even some of how Lua works behind the scenes.

Non-rant portion:

Finished up the first version of my library and now I'm binding it to Lua and this time around I'm using all the best practices including setting and checking metatables so that Lua can't segfault. It's going great, I properly learned about the Lua stack, and I feel good. Cross-platform double-buffered command line via a scripting language... What a way to enter 2020. Everything went so smooth that I got to 3am before I realized what even happened.

Holy shiiittttt I finally got 64bit NASM working on windows with cmake. Cmake documentation is fkn bad man.

I’ve got a c++ file that calls a procedure in an assembly file that calls win32 APIs to show dialogs and other cool shit. Compiling was working fine, linking turned out to be a bit of a pain in the ass, but figuring out how to enable NASM in cmake was a nightmare. Why is the cmake docs so horrific 🥺

Was driving home last night when I noticed that my car was slowly drifting side to side. It felt weird like when a tire is low/flat. So I gradually slowed down from 50mph to 40mph. Note, I did this carefully and slowly. My antilock brakes kicked in. Like holy hell how slick does a road have to be for a small deceleration like that to kick in antilocks?

So it made me think of a math question:
If a typically sized sedan (weighing 2 tons) decelerates from 50mph to 40mph and the antilock brakes kick in, what it the frictional coefficient of the surface of the road? Also assuming typical non-bald all season tires.
Multiple choice:
a) slick
b) really slick
c) REALLY FUCKING SLICK!

My company ex-IT Maintainer, left a long automation script in c++, bit of python 2, and bash for our server which developed long before i went to junior high school. and now, the system is outdated, and have a compability problems. so i got task to give it a fix.

when i opened the source code up. i was like; holy shit who the hell write a code especially c++ all aligned to the left, Yes All of it, not a single line are indented. but in the other side the code seems maintainable, and after autoformat, autoindent and couple of fix later, it was readable. I am just wondering who the hell in the world write a code with a style like that ???? i knew he was aware of code style and indentation since he wrote couple of python scripts. Unbelievable.

sadly i cannot show you the pict cuz of company things.

So first of all I want to say I am not a Fanboy of any specific language.

But holy fucking shit is ASP.net Core shitty, not only is it practically impossible to fucking start using it considering all documentation and tutorials are for the shitty outdated ASP.net but it's also fucking redundant with the amount of bullshit you need to do to achieve a task that should be a few lines of code.

Never in my life have I hated anything as hard as I hate that complete shit. On top of all that bullshit you have Fanboys always yelling "Oh but big corporations use it" like what big corporations? Microsoft and Microshit?

Like seriously larger corporations use fucking Node.js and even just C++ more than the shitty ASP.net and ASP.net Core. Don't get me wrong .net in general is pretty good but ASP.net is just a complete fuck up and should not exist.

Fuuuuuuuuucking hell. I have a program that parses and generates information from shit I have in a database into a csv file. Shit was simple enough to be done in Python.

Trying to present that shit into fucking pdf files? without drawing shit on x,y coordinates like a retard or without downloading a fucking obscure number of bs shit into the computer? on a fucking WINDOWS machine? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Ok no problem. Do it in Node. WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK more bullshit with drawing shit line by line. fuck this.

Lol not even going to touch java or c# for this, this is quick.

mmmh perl? nah, php? nah

Well shit I just need to generate data from a csv into a html template and send it away as a docume....go? ok lets....ah....done

Go wins again in my book ladies and gentlemen

It even has fewer lines of code than the php experiments

HOLY FUCK! Why is JS world so fucking confusing? I haven't even started learning it and its already giving me a headache. I feel like there are a billion different things i have to learn that aren't just "vanilla js". All i want to do is learn some web dev, take on freelance work, become a digital nomad. Im a simple C++ and ios/android developer things are so straight forward. JS seems like a clusterfuck of just stuff 😧 Id like to say this isnt a my language is > than yours rant. This is a "like what the fuck" rant. My brain was like Html, Css, JS cool thats all i have to learn... boy was i wrong. Can someone give me a word of wisdom as i go down this apparent rabbit hole?

Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.

Ok, so I'm a student and in my free time, I mostly write a bit of python, C++ and a bit Haskell for fun...

I wanted to try out Android development now...

HOLY FUCKETY FUCK, THIS SHIT TAKES TIME!

most of the time, I get an idea, open vscode and start typing (maybe install some modules for like 10 minutes), not with this: Android studio took hours to download with all the needed SDKs and libraries, then I created a new empty(!) Activity, then fucking Gradle needs hours to get it fucking ready... On a fucking XPS 13 9370!

How do you guys cope with that waiting, does it scale that way to bigger projects?
I would call myself rather patient, but if I have an idea, I don't want to set up the most basic environment for 3 hours...

Man that shit is bulky...

I remember when i was first deciding whether to do web programming or desktop applications, i chose java/C/C++ mainly because I already had experience. Back then when i was researching web stuff it was HTML + CSS + javascript and something called jquery, ok cool seems like I can pick it up in the future. Fastforward to 2018 and i was looking to get into it, BUT holy fucking shit what a confusing minefield and cesspool of javascript horror and frameworks and bloat, wtf happened??

C is one of those languages that I have no idea why I really even mess around with it. It's cool, and useful, and all that jazz. But holy hell messing up one little line of code is the death of everything.

One forgotten semi-colon, and you whole program is gone. It will mess up other lines of code, which will mess up other lines of code, so on and so forth. I've even had times where I have to almost rewrite little programs I'm playing around with because of how much little errors can mess it up.

Don't even get me started on compiling. I don't even want to get into it now.

I've lost count of the days at this point...

First things first, lets all praise musky for getting David Bowie stuck in my head for the next month or so, not a bad thing, his song choice was on point. Also the rants have become few and far between because apparently I have to be an "adult" and go to work, pay my bills, and other things that distract me from programming.

Okay, now to the actual dev stuff. I've started to think that maybe my scope of languages is limited somewhat to my comfort zone, which is only java at this point. So for my project (game development), I've decided to pick a language based on what will work best instead of what I'm comfortable with, my runners so far...

C++: The default go to for game development. I would chose this but if I did, my best C++ game would look like Frankenstein's monster and would be filled with terrible code. For that alone I have scratched C++ from my list, for lack of experience.

Java: My usual, my go to, my comfort zone. I don't want to be comfortable though, I want to learn things. That asides, java has tones of resources, frameworks, libraries, and tutorials available. In addition, it's also able to run on pretty much anything, huge ++. The cons are trying to find the best resources, frameworks, libraries, and tutorials to use for a particular situation and that can be hard and confusing. Java may still be my go to but I'll get to that with the next language.

C#: I have never touched C# in my life, and the only things I know about it are what I've heard or read. So far I've heard it is SIMILAR to java, based around C++, and has aged really well compared to other languages. I like that it is similar to java without it being the same language, it will force me to learn things over and you can never reinforce the basics enough. It also has the huge benefit of being Microsoft based while still running on iOS, linux, macOS, windows, and android. This gives me really easy access to implement a mobile version (in the future obviously), while being able to run well on windows, the default OS for most gamers.

Overall I will start writing in C# and see if I like it. If I don't it's no big deal, I still have a good option in java to fall back on. I'm open to hearing opinions on this topic, java vs. C# but please keep your bias nonexistent and you constructive conversation very high. If any actual game developers that have experience with both languages are out their, and reading this, please comment so I can pick your brain.

Some of you may ask about the android scholarship, I contacted google and told them android development wasn't for me so they sent someone a late invite and rescinded mine, hopefully someone else will put it to better use.

Holy god this is long. I'm sorry.

LOL XCode....I think they meant "X"tra useless, resembling such as a bag of dicks without handles!!!!

Also, being fucking buried because there's aren't any devs anywhere to be found near me makes me extra cranky!
Ive been hammering away at this Flutter, Java, Swift, Python, and Google maps for just about 36 hours on 3.5 hrs sleep. I just can't stop, I fuckin love this shit!!!
Considering the fact that I'm self taught and just started writing code for real about 7 months ago, I'd say I'm handling this alright for now. Every bit of tech is getting shot out of a cannon at this one- maps, real time tracking, state level auth/Id verification, custom components like ID scans/native desktop applications on custom linux machines, body cams, SIP trunking... all in 3 apps which are 100% multi-platform and scaled up to high end enterprise levels and being groomed for national release. I'm writing the code and doing the tech for ALL of it- even down to custom painted barcode scanners, a wallet system built from scratch, GPS integration, location/geofence based document querying... holy fuck guys I'm gonna fuckin die haha!!!
I went from barely getting websites made in late summer to this very moment, where I am pumping shit out in Flutter, Dart, Python, CPP, Js, Swift, Java, Kotlin, Obj-C, SQL/noSQL, and who knows what else.
I don't even know what the hell I just said haha I hope everyone has a great day!

Looking back at the VBA code I wrote for work about 10 months ago makes me realize how much reading the Clean Code book by Robert C. Martin did for me, because holy shit my old code is unreadable...

What developer does not belong to the list? Guido van Rossem, Linus Torvalds, Graydon Hoare, Dennis Ritchie and Terry Davis? Exactly, there's one guy in the list nobody has heard of. Let's keep it that way. I've seen enough. The Jordan Walke of programming languages.