Client: Where are we with the project, it's been a week and I see nothing.

Me: You asked me to do something that was not in the agreed scope of work, which has kept me from starting on the project.

Client: Do I need to plan out everything in advance on paper for you to get it done in a timely manner?

Me: Is that a serious question? Yes, you should. That's the whole point of creating a scope of work. It's to allow me to schedule out the time necessary to build out a product in a "timely manner".

Client: I don't appreciate your attitude. This is not how you should be doing business if you like making money.

Me: I don't appreciate your condescending, unreasonable, dickhead mentality that makes you think it's remotely okay to act like you're better than me. Money doesn't grant you the right to be a dickwad, and just because I'm being paid doesn't mean I have to put up with any level of arrogance or disrespect.

I am in this business to make money, but not at the cost of my dignity and self-respect. You will be receiving a full refund later today, not because I have to provide a refund, but because I never want to communicate with you ever again moving forward. Take your unacceptable bullshit somewhere else.

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

Should I Close-Source my project?

I have been working on a Desktop/hacking simulator game and up until now the project has been Open-Source. I'm at a point now where I haven't gone too far to turn back.

Last night I got to thinking about my game, and what I want to do in the future. The game will always remain Free, but I might sell it to another company later down the line, something I can't do if I stay Open. I want to makea good game. And I don't want to do it for money (because that has never worked out for me in the past) but I want to *be able* to make money if I wanted to. I mean, I have been told by several developers that my game will be "ground breaking/a worldwide phenomenon/a Minecraft competitor" while being Open is one of my main selling points, besides populatity, what do I have to gain? I said I don't want to develop for money (mainly because the pressure gets to me) but I'm so poor I'm almost literally starving. I make $3/mo from Patreon and survive from donation from relatives. I feel like I need this. But I also feel selfish. Information should be free, ya know?

Idk.. This started serious and turned into a ramble.. Guess that's what this app is all about.

Leave your opinions below.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

Oh boy.

I've been partially on-loan to another team that's relatively new at the company for a couple of weeks now, mostly to help them get some testing sorted out, and had scheduled a call with their lead the other day. The call basically started like this:

Lead: Hi
sudo-woodo: Hey
Lead: Okay, so let's talk about <subject>, but I guess you've been told the news
sudo-woodo: What news
Lead: I'm putting in my notice

I love listening to seniors because they always drop some wisdom, but this was some serious wisdom. Guy sounded exhausted at everything, talking mad shit about the company and certain people and I'm just here like 🍿. Seems understandable, a lot of butting heads with the higher-ups and not being able to do his job properly.

Unfortunately we all kinda needed him to do his job because his job involved juggling fifteen different things that the project (and like 90% of my backlog to be honest) depends on.

shit's fucked 🙃

Seriously for the life of me I don't know why anyone would choose spaces over tabs

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

@MissDirection today I learned what it truly means to be a "codeslut". I understand the decision you made to change your username due to the circumstances but I want you know that I'm now seriously considering prepending 'CodeSlut' to my username.

To be a code slut, in my definition, is to fuck with all things code.
I don't remember the idiot(s) that murked the name with shame, I remember being scornful towards them for their immaturity...But now I know whole the truth, and that what they were also unknowingly shaming was any engineer who has had an interest in anything related to code. Fuck them, in a sense they've fucked themselves, because I personally believe that as developers there's a little (code)slut in each and every one of you. Those who are willing to fuck with all of it and have a damn good time doing it. To dabble in a little bit of this and a little bit of that from time to time. Whether or not we stick with it is irrelevant, it's the experience we gain from it that makes us better people. To shame a code slut is to shame the pursuit of knowledge. And to shame the pursuit of knowledge is to shame my purpose in life. I stand by my pursuit to fuck with it all, no tech is sacred - I will fuck with it!

Please @MissDirection don't let my new username stop you from ever changing yours back to what it was or take this as some form of a personal insult/joke. I'm serious - I understand now. I'm not even sure if you realised it, but QueenCodeSlut held such beauty and truth to it that many(including myself) couldn't even begin to fathom. That is enlightenment of the utmost pulchritude, please accept this username change as a gesture of honor and respect towards you and any other fellow humans with their own endeavors of truth and knowledge.

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Serious question:
How do you prevent your (paid) programs from being downloaded for free?

I really want to earn money from softwares but I'm so scared... (I'm 16 only)

I feel like a piece of shit because I don't want to help my "friend" who has been faking being a web developer for years. He now has a real project he must develop that actually requires writing code (It's a serious project that requires real Javascript skills) and he's basically fucked.

He usually would hop on the web and download a template, edit it and get paid. But then again I don't want to help him because he always comes to me and I do all the work and save his ass while he does nothing.

I'm in a rock and a hard place right now because I'm also a dev and I actually have a lot of work to do, unlike his lazy ass.

If you think learning a language / working with a language you don't like is offensive to you and your morals .. Then don't do it.

Money is important to you ? Then you're just prostituting yourself to some higher authority. So DONT COMPLAIN!

You have the right to hate stuff while being paid for it. Understandable.

But don't shit on the shit you think is shit just cause you put yourself in the situation of not having an option !!

You're a worthless. Money hungry whore.

Yes, you hate Java/ x language but have to work on it ?

You're either a whore or have serious problems with standing up for yourself, but on the internet you become this amazing troll saying the language has problems.

Half the people who hate languages hate them cause it's common to hate them. Like being racist in the early American ages cause it was "normal".

Brain deficient motherfucking whores. Manipulated cocksuckers.

Sidenote : if you've honestly gotten shit on by a new version of the language you were using .It's understandable and I'm on your side. Using it without thorough research on the other hand is your mistake. Languages aren't ideal. Just Like most women don't like your dick cause, well it doesn't fit their use case. Deal with it not, troll about it.

I'm not like you. I experiment with whatever I like before using it. I work on my own stuff. I suck my own fucking dick and I get paid.

If you honestly disagree with me, put a couple points down on the language you hate and why you hate it ( considering the fact that you have actually used it and are not just trying to disagree with me )

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!

Is 'Ranting' considered as a skill?

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

So here's a rant I never thought I'd write.

I'm pretty happy with my current job. I'm working for a small non-tech business where I'm making a complete solution by myself. It's pretty chill just coding away all day and being my own project owner and manager.

The iffiest aspect is that my boss(es) don't know what (or if) I'm working on when I'm implementing a vital logging system, fixing bugs that cropped up due to implementing necessary, baseline security, and so on. They see a login page and figure the entire project is shippable, and when the login breaks because I'm configuring the wsgi for https the reaction is "it worked, why mess with it; just put it how it was". But I digress.

Today I got a job offer with a pay increase that made me exclaim "are you fucking serious" irl, in a business with a more professional environment consisting of senior devs, and with benefits I had never heard of.

I can't not accept, but that means just legacying the entire project I'm working on here. They'd basically be left with nothing after shelling out wages for me for these few months. Keep in mind this is a fairly small business who debated if they could afford this to begin with.

Disregarding whether they are willing/able to make it hard for me to leave, it stabs me in my scrubby dev soul to up and leave on a personal level.

They had a 3d printer at the other place though.

I study both mathematics and computer science at Delft university. There's a difference between the approaches these two studies have.
Mathematics is usually about going to lectures, learning complicated stuff there and then using the obtained knowledge in a exam at the end of the course.
The CS courses are kore about engineering. They have practicals way more often than the math courses and the exams usually are of les importance.

It feels as if the "academic level" of the CS courses is lower. In math, we learn the real deep, abstract matter, while CS is more about "tinker up something nice in the practicals and you'll be fine."

I'm not sure if either approach is better, but I'm sure I like the maths version more. The CS approach is more HBO-like (HBO being the lower-level universities)
It is even that, generally speaking, the people who study maths seem more serious about studying than the cs people.
Not all of them, and no offense meant, just an observation.

Well, that was not really a rant. If you read up to here, I'm curious what you think about this.

Who the fuck thought that carieer grade NAT would be a great solution instead of just switching over to IPv6 and have functioning internet?

I don't want to share my IP with some bastard who fails every reCaptcha so that pictures take 5 fucking seconds for me to fade out and in again.

Neither Chrome nor Firefox have a reliable way of forcing IPv6 if possible so Google still thinks I'm an evil bot.
I'm waiting for my PayPal to be frozen because of "suspicious actions from 'my' internet connection".
I don't want to share my IP. I want to be responsible myself for everything that happens to it.

Please replace that old switches that are too slow to manage serious traffic anyway and are just wasting their power for being turned on so that I can have an IP address to myself

The worst is not being taken seriously when working on serious tasks...
Sure as an intern I don't get paid a lot, but that system I'm building has to work either way, you better fucking take that seriously....

How much zucchini is too much zucchini?

I know I have WAY too much...

I knew at least when 1st considering D20 zucchini breads.

then when i began to wonder if the remaining batter would work with my death star waffle iron...ill know tomorrow!

....ran out of typical pans, incl foil ones(normal and mini for easy gifting)

- gave 1 away (similar sized as in pic)

- approx. 2 lg zucchini bread loaves in fridge (gave away 2, ate a ½)

- cut up\froze enough onions\peppers\pak choi to a min. acceptable zucchini : everything else stir fry ratio... x20 servings

- similarly, green onions, pak choi, marinated sesame fried tofu bits, zucchini and miso (quick miso soup) x16

- thinly sliced enough to layer it into ~20 lg servings of lasagna.

... zucchini in pic is slightly larger than the one that made the many aforementioned and pictured loaves of zucchini bread

apparently, in a week tops, I'm gonna have at least another 3 more THAT size needing to be picked

anyone in the continental US want some zucchini bread? or, if in michigan, zucchinis?

i didnt even plant much... actually only about ½ of other years.

i am also having some serious overflows coming of (at least) grapes and watermelons.

grapes...
when i bought this place, this odd, square, surrounded by cement walkways, area, with an increasingly problematic tree (risking cable\electric lines, foundation, etc) and so dense with weeds that I learned, dandelions have a giant, bush-like form, with heights beyond 8ft tall.

i grew up hanging out in the nearby woods, noticing that weeds lost the fight vs raspberry\blackberry plants. being handicapped\lazy\experimental, w\ev, i figured id just kill it all then fill it with random berries... knew nothing about grapes so just got 4+ random types... apparently they are all fancy\expensive grapes... and reeeeeaally produce. i already had to pick ~10lbs.

watermelons-
idr if i planted normal ones and little ones or just little ones... idk how to tell without cutting them open or maybe just watching a long time to see if they stopped growing?
anyone with advice (or seeking watermelons) is welcome.

assuming (hoping) they are mini ones there's at least 2dz that are at least ping pong ball size.... and around 100 little yellow flowers still.

i totally get that my frustrating problem with produce here would be beyond welcomed by most people... but seriously... wtf do i do with a few dozen to over a hundred (hopefully mini) watermelons, so many zucchini that, despite personal daily consumption and at least a half dozen friends that love zucchini bread and\or my secretly healthy lasagna(my friends tend to be guys), but have their limits capping out, plus mine, at less than ½ whats rapidly being produced and, apparently, thousands of dollars worth of hundreds of pounds of fancy grapes???

there's an interesting old lady across the street who'll take at least what her and husband can possibly consume,.. even makes grape jam, but thats still only a few dz lbs tops.

it seems wrong to kill the plants (or even to remove a large amount of blossoms and feed them all to JSON (lil tortoise)... pretty sure he's already getting tired of them just from the few that fell off in the wind or something.

i wish i knew some farmers that do farmers market things... but that kinda seems super suspicious... 'hey mr farmer... want a large supply of expensive grapes, watermelon and zucchini, for free? you can sell them to random people, or just give them away. i dont want money or anything...' idk... seems like the beginning of one of those movies that either has evil alien plants assimilating all land mammals, or where there's some crazed medical researcher convinced that there's a massive, underrated threat without enough attention for vaccination production funds-- so they are gonna release some deadly virus supposedly to save the world.

ive been cooking too long.

ideas pl0x?

I struggled with weather to post this but I feel like I have to. I didnt want to feed into the fear or give 'them' any more reason to argue against common sense but I guess it cant be helped.

The reason I was gone for a while was because I went and got my vaccination.

In less than half hour after getting the vaccine, I was in the ICU. The staff told me I had a stroke possibly from clotting and inflamation. I couldnt feel my arm or anything below my shoulders. Yes really.

Apparently I "died" for a little while and when they brought me back I was in a coma for almost a week.

I'm back home now and I still dont fully understand what happened. Still have numbness, and horrible headaches, and can barely think straight sometimes, but the doctors told me that I didnt suffer any permanent brain damage according to my scans.

Also they told me I had old damage to my left and right temporal lobe, which makes sense because I have always suffered problems with short term memory and other issues.

And I'm just at a loss how this could happen. I have no serious injuries. We were told this is safe.

And this is the exact reason I didnt want to post it, because now tards will come in and be "lololol serves you right vaxxer!"

If I knew the side effects were this bad maybe I would have changed my mind but no one told me! I mean I think I still would have got it because we have to protect vulnerable people, but still.

The hospital assured me it wasnt the vaccine and must have been an underlaying condition, but I'm not so sure. I just happen to have a pre-existing problem that I dont know about that causes a stroke and paralysis only half an hour after the shot?

And now I dont know if I'll ever be ok. And doctors warned me I may suffer more strokes and to avoid physically demanding tasks for a while. My primary job is construction (not by chooce). Now I face the prospect of not even being able to work my existing job or do the things I love, like hiking, anymore. So much of the world doesnt make any sense right now and I just dont know what to believe anymore.

Tards will probably be in shortly to suggest I check for microchips or test fucking magnets on myself.

No, just stop.

Been working for almost a year, really hard, on a serious attempt to make GUI development on Python fun, easy, flexible, with a full array of widgets and do it in a way that complete beginners can understand and the professionals will enjoy because it's so easy. My solution is called PySimpleGUI.
My 'rant' is the downvoting and slandering happening on places like Reddit is done by people that haven't tried to use it and most haven't installed it. Yet, they're experts in how sh*tty it is.... even though nothing stated as being a problem is truthful. When asked for more direct feedback on what's wrong, how it can be improved, the active rant threads go silent.
I've never been on devRant, so I hope I'm doing the right thing here! I'm just blowing off steam, not trying to start some holy war.

I've had my share of both good and bad coworkers.

My best memories are definitely from the late 90's, early 2k's. The team I was a part of back then really had the best attitude. I particularly remember one of them, who ended up being a PM. He was always joking around, nothing was ever too serious to make fun of. He was an old school punk, and it did show. Although he was always professional in meetings with customers and when it mattered. If I'm not totally mistaken, he started a punk band in his fifties, where noone knew how to play or sing. Great guy!

In my current job, all the good and nice people are either quitting or bullied out of the company. I miss them. Sigh.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Serious ask here: does anyone have links to any good articles about companies creating successful integrations with GPT4? Like how the integration works, what it does / value provided from a business perspective, etc.

I'm being amicable today, and want to see if there really have been any truly useful applications of GPT4 yet.

So far all I can find is a complete flood of idiot articles like "I aSkEd GPT tHeSe 5 ThInGs" and "hOw tO uSe cHAtgPT foR FreE"

That I'm responsible enough for people to just entrust shit to me and irresponsible enough to fuck up very important things for very stupid and easily avoidable reasons. Rarely enough to not happen a lot, but serious enough fuck-ups that it can't be considered inconsequential.

And when I tell people not to trust me with shit without supervision they refuse to believe me and think I'm just being self-deprecating. Bitch I'd accidentally let you die if that was a responsibility of mine, I have no brain, only butterflies.

Alright, it's been a while since I expressed my thoughts/feelings but here is what I'm dealing with.

Ever since I was a kid I've played games and even ended up enjoying the testing of new beta games more than actually playing games. The first games I played were atomic bomberman and worms. I was 4 at the time and lived in Denmark. By the age of 6 I moved to The Netherlands and have dealt with 8 years of being bullied for a reason I do not know. So as you can imagine I've dealt with a serious depression for a while and have always felt out of place.

Later after a few failed attempts of following an education I got into development. This was after I wasn't accepted into an education of game design. The course I follow now describes itself as application development but all we're doing there is building websites and not learning a proper way to keep code clean.

In the second year of the three year course we had to follow our first internship. This was the first positive thing I've had with school in my entire life. I ended up working for a company that had a game which tested your skill, the game was used by recruiters for bigger companies to pre select the right people for interviews. I had a look at the code of the game and it was a mess, after a couple of meetings further I managed to get them far enough that I could start working on a complete rewrite of their game.

So far it's been a rough road to becoming a game dev but I most certainly hope to own a studio one day. Now I only need to manage until I've got there

I'm a CS student, and I'm having serious doubts. I love programming and my job on campus has me making a .net site and such which I enjoy.
However, I'm doing really bad in calculus again, and if I fail it I may never get to retake it because it's my third try. I know I can get a job without a degree, but I'm unsure if I even want to program anything that would require knowledge of calculus anyway. I understand what it accomplishes, but I don't want spend the rest of my life applying calculus. Is it really that important in industry? Or is it just something college puts an undue pressure on?
My CS courses don't challenge me much, and I enjoy them a little, but is being great at calculus required?

- Am a junior dev in an awesome team & exciting project after my apprenticeship and while having just started my part time studies
- Have restructure in company so I land in an other value stream
- Get laid off by new value stream 6 months later (now) because they have a serious budget cut
- Take time to come to terms with situation. I could finally work more on my side projects or focus a bit more on my studies. Hey actually I will have 5 months time to look for something while being paid by the company and they help me brush up my CV. Pretty neat!
- Now my former boss wants me back because of my experience in the project, but only as a production support and not as dev (because budget and they're bleeding with tickets)

Not sure if I should take the offer as it feels safe to have an income and the team is cool. However, it feels a bit like a degradation as prod support sucks in that project and I'd like to code (which wouldn't be possible then).
And as this is still my first company I'm working in, it would make sense to look for something else...

Grrr need to sleep about it... Decision-making isn't exactly my strength.

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

Why do companies waste serious cash in office parties? I'm talking about those hundred-thousand-dollar extravaganzas that major tech companies seem to be addicted to.

Poll after poll finds that most employees would rather have the cash, so "kissing the collective asses of tech staff so that they won't leave" is not an explanation that holds up.

The "Roman Triumph" explanation also does not make any sense. If rich assholes want to flex their immeasurable riches, why would they invite mere mortals that do not put a lot of effort in being famous or pretty? Couldn't they invite the entire Victoria's Secret catalogue of models and the NE Patriots? Surely it would make for much more impressive photos of decadence.

The "Michael Scott" explanation also falls short. Companies spend serious cash on consultants and professional party planners, that are sure to know a lot of people. Money can and often does buy personality, so no rich asshole is ever a party dud.

Why else do they force most of their own staff into what they perceive as a "do not relax or you may get fired" loud and poorly lit meeting that takes hours to dress up for? What am I missing?

How I wish my job interviews would end like this:

HR: "So, we're looking for a developer with experience in Nuxt.js. Can you tell us about your experience with that framework?"

Developer: "Honestly, I'm not very familiar with Nuxt.js. But I have a lot of experience with Vue.js, which Nuxt.js is built on top of."

HR: "Oh, well that's just fantastic. So you're telling me that we're supposed to hire someone who doesn't know the most important part of our stack? How hilarious!"

Developer: "Look, I understand that Nuxt.js is important to your team. But I'm a quick learner, and I'm confident that I can pick it up quickly."

HR: "Oh, I'm sure you are. I mean, it's not like Nuxt.js is a completely different framework or anything. You can just magically learn it overnight, right?"

Developer: "I never said it would be easy, but I'm willing to put in the work to learn it. My experience with Vue.js and JavaScript is still valuable, and I think I could make a positive contribution to your team."

HR: "Oh, I'm sure you could. I mean, it's not like there's a million other developers out there who already know Nuxt.js. We might as well just hire someone who doesn't know anything and hope for the best, right?"

Developer: "Okay, that's enough. I get it, you're not interested in my skills. But maybe you should consider the fact that your job description didn't even mention Nuxt.js as a requirement. If it was so important, you should have made that clear from the beginning."

HR: "Oh, don't get angry. We're just trying to find the best candidate for the job. And clearly, that's not you."

Developer: "Fine. I don't need this kind of attitude from someone who doesn't even know the difference between Vue.js and Nuxt.js. Good luck finding someone who meets your impossible standards."

HR: "Yeah, good luck to you too. I'm sure you'll find a job where you don't have to learn anything new or challenging."

Developer: "At least I'll be working with people who appreciate my skills and experience."

HR: "Sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear you over the sound of your arrogance."

Developer: "You know what? I don't need this. I'm out of here."

HR: "Wait, wait, wait. Don't be like that. We were just having a little bit of fun. You know, trying to lighten the mood."

Developer: "I don't think it's funny to belittle someone for not knowing everything. And I don't appreciate being treated like I'm not good enough just because I haven't used Nuxt.js before."

HR: "Okay, okay. You're right. We shouldn't have been so hard on you. But the truth is, we really do need someone who knows Nuxt.js. We can't afford to waste time on training someone who doesn't know the technology."

Developer: "I understand that, but I'm willing to learn. And I think my experience with Vue.js and JavaScript could still be valuable to your team."

HR: "You know what? You're right. We've been looking for someone with Nuxt.js experience for so long that we forgot to consider other skills and experience. We'd like to offer you the job."

Developer: "Really? Are you serious?"

HR: "Yes, really. We think you'd be a great fit for our team, and we're willing to provide you with the training you need to get up to speed on Nuxt.js. So, what do you say? Are you interested?"

Developer: "Yes, I'm definitely interested. Thank you for giving me a chance."

HR: "No problem. We're excited to have you on board. Welcome to the team!"

Generally speaking Microsoft's documentation has gotten extremely good.

Generally speaking.

I have projects that, at this point, would get considerable benefit from being able to write parts directly in IL. Sometimes this is for performance, sometimes this to be able to express things that are valid IL, but not expressable in C# or VB or F#. If you work a lot with language you probably know what I'm talking about.

Microsoft hasn't just not documented anything for doing serious IL development, they straight up haven't provided anything to make it easy. No IL projects. No IL syntax/intellisence in VS. Nada.

There is ILSupport, a third party extension which does offer this, even mixed language/IL projects which would be perfect for what I need.

Except Microsoft made a change in the newer SDK's which broke the extension. Where ildasm and ilasm use to be, isn't where it now is.

I'm working with the extension author to come up with a new solution but the lack of documentation and easy/reliable access to those tools is irritating.

I'm feeling guilty.
I've a lot of fun hearing the flautolence wich comes out from the mouth of my brain farters collegues in my university. I usually fake being a mediocre student who never worked nor programmed anything else except the stupid exercises related to the exams. Yesterday a collegue come out saying: WOAH, YOU'RE USING LINUX!
Good, nice deduction my dear Sherlock.
The best had to come.
The genius decided to mocks me up telling: YOU KNOW IF YOU TYPE sudo rm -rf / IN THE CMD YOU MAKE YOUR COMPUTER FASTER?
Before I processed that he's not serious i answered "no, rm just remov..." and I saw the beaten look in his eyes because the joke misersbly failed. So i proceeded: "hahaha, fun. Anyway i could rm -undo to fix the mess".
As soon i finished the sentence he ran on him laptop and boots up the VM to try...