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My boss is technically restricted shall we say.
As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.
Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.
It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.
Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.
He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.
4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.
He insists.
I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.
He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.
I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.
He insists.
I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.
He then says he wants the air.
I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.
He insists.
That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.
WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.
Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection
To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.23 -
5 Types Of Programmers
1.The duct tape programmer
The code may not be pretty, but damnit, it works!
This guy is the foundation of your company. When something goes wrong he will fix it fast and in a way that won’t break again. Of course he doesn’t care about how it looks, ease of use, or any of those other trivial concerns, but he will make it happen, without a bunch of talk or time-wasting nonsense. The best way to use this person is to point at a problem and walk away.
2.The OCD perfectionist programmer
You want to do what to my code?
This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. When you do finally receive the finished product you will have no option but submit to the stunning glory and radiant beauty of perfectly formatted, no, perfectly beautiful code, that is so efficient that anything you would want to do to it would do nothing but defame a masterpiece. He is the only one qualified to work on his code.
3.The anti-programming programmer
I’m a programmer, damnit. I don’t write code.
His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. If you have to write something then you’re doing it wrong. Someone else has already done the work so just use their code. He will tell you how much faster this development practice is, even though he takes as long or longer than the other programmers. But when you get the project it will only be 20 lines of actual code and will be very easy to read. It may not be very fast, efficient, or forward-compatible, but it will be done with the least effort required.
4.The half-assed programmer
What do you want? It works doesn’t it?
The guy who couldn’t care less about quality, that’s someone elses job. He accomplishes the tasks that he’s asked to do, quickly. You may not like his work, the other programmers hate it, but management and the clients love it. As much pain as he will cause you in the future, he is single-handedly keeping your deadlines so you can’t scoff at it (no matter how much you want to).
5.The theoretical programmer
Well, that’s a possibility, but in practice this might be a better alternative.
This guy is more interested the options than what should be done. He will spend 80% of his time staring blankly at his computer thinking up ways to accomplish a task, 15% of his time complaining about unreasonable deadlines, 4% of his time refining the options, and 1% of his time writing code. When you receive the final work it will always be accompanied by the phrase “if I had more time I could have done this the right way”.
What type of programmer are you?
Source: www.stevebenner.com16 -
This morning:
SLACK HAS A DARK THEME! ALL GLORY TO THE AMAZING SLACK TEAM! SLACK FOR PRESIDENT!
This afternoon:
OH GOD THIS THEME MAKES ME WANT TO SCOOP THE EYES OUT OF MY SOCKETS THE FONT LOOKS UGLIER THAN THE PILE OF SKINFAT I SCRAPED OFF MY MOUSE ITS AWFUL I NEED HUGS SEND HELP
Thanks, companies, for trying, I guess.
I love dark themes, but the ones provided are often even worse than the light themes.
They go overboard with extreme black/white contrasts, pick a super weird hue of puke-gray, or certain elements are unreadable.
So, please, instead of wasting the time of your designers on something that's clearly too difficult for them.... how about just making it easy to create community themes for your app?
Especially if it's an electron app, how hard is it to add a config option to import a CSS file, and provide one template as an example?7 -
Help.
I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.
I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.
Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?
I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).
I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.
So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).
And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.10 -
New spin on the Manager / Dev format!
Recuiter: WE NEED AN ABSOLUTE NODE EXPERT, NODE NODE NODE, WE LOVE NODE! WHAT IS YOUR NODE EXPERIENCE?!?!
Dev: Well I've had exposure to it since it was nearly new, all the way back in 2012, and since my professional career started about 7 years ago I've used it fairly often on a per-project basis.
Recruiter: WELL HAVE YOU BEEN USING IT DAILY FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS!?!
Dev: Well no, as I said I've used it for specific projects... anyway, there are these things called weekends...
Recruiter: WELL WE ONLY WANT NODE ZOMBIES SO SORRY.
Dev: Thanks for reaching out and wasting my time.
Recruiter: ...
Dev: ...
God recruiters are like robots, don't they understand senior-level engineers are language agnostic?6 -
Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time, I've been programming for the last 6 years, day and night, I know more than all the teachers I've had for the last years (including university), during programming classes at university I'm just there to help my friends and try to avoid they get bad habits (our professor didn't have this luxury apparently), but I don't feel the emotions I used to feel when I started, for the last month or so the only code I've written was two days ago to help the girl I like, when I'm home I try to force myself to code but I can't find the inspiration, I stare at the screen for 30 minutes, I reboot my pc, start windows and play videogames 'till night...
Then I go to youtube, and see artists and musicians, I feel like I can't do anything that cool...
Have anyone of you ever felt the same? What did you do to recover? I still love programming, but I can't find any reason to do it, I still don't have an original and interesting concept for a game, I have many side projects in the "maybe I'll continue it" stash, is there something wrong with me or is it normal?10 -
Not quite a rant... more of a question.
So, I'm almost 40 years old. I have a lot of work experience in varying fields, much of it in low-level management.
Truth is I've ALWAYS wanted to be a programmer.
I recently got into a somewhat competitive training program
where I'm learning to write Java, and will subsequently learn Android development. It's fairly in-depth, so it will take 10 moths to complete. My ultimate goal it's to work as a mobile dev at a great company, making products people love. Ambitious, I know.
My question is: Am I a fool for attempting to get into this field at this age? I'm starting to panic a little. I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time, or if 40 is too old to be the "newbie".
Thoughts?13 -
Man, contributing to open source projects seems very intimidating to me.
I have never contributed to one of those repos on Github with a shit-ton of stars and a load of watchers. Made up my mind to start sometime around the start of September. Looked up a repo that I was very excited to contribute to. Went through their really large codebase, tried to understand as much as I could (They have a fair amount of documentation, but I just can't understand a lot of design decisions that were taken). Looked up one of the open issues marked for newbies, went through the relevant code to understand where and how I would have to make my changes in the code, and was about to start... when a seasoned contributor submitted a pull request.
This same occurrence has repeated itself 3 times now. If you mark an issue for beginners, maybe let the beginners handle them? Also, if you plan to contribute to an issue, why not announce your intention to do so? Get the issue assigned to you, so no one else ends up wasting their time coming up with a solution.
I would love to recommend this to the contributing team, but I am just way too scared to initiate a conversation with these guys. I mean, they are way more experienced and knowledgeable than me (some of them are even famous!).
I am definitely out of my depth with this project, and maybe should look for an easier one, but I really want to rise up to the challenge. Guess I'll stick around then, just waiting for my chance. :|3 -
Wasted all morning trying to work on my defense. Brain is not responding. Then sat for some data exploration cuz I got tired of wasting time and brain is like "woah! I love this! Let's do this!". 😐
My defense is gonna be a shitshow. FML. ☠️1 -
Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.
I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.
After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.
But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!
Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.
If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.
And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.
So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.11 -
TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(
I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?
And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.14 -
Im in the process of developing a tool for small comunity of gamers.
That tool will help people in mod making.
Currently you have to use notepad++ in order to modify .json files that contain unit properties.
I downloaded grep for win to check for patterns in those .json files to understand how they work
I ran a simple search and...
Avast decided to frezze my pc for 20min to check 300 files because winGrep accesed them...
WHY THE FUCK DID YOU DECIDE TO SATURATE MY HDD IO YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT? I HAVENT GOT ANY WIRUSES FOR 6 YEARS YOU ARE USELESS. I WILL UNINSTALL YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST WASTING MY RESORUCES AND MY TIME.
I cant even reboot my laptop because i would lose my code!
Fuck AV's
Fuck slow hdd's
Fuck inefficient programs
Fuck people who thought that instaling a bunch of crap on win 10 is a good idea
Fuck people who will try to convince me to swich to linux
Fuck apple
Fuck M$
I love my C hashtag
I might swich to win10 ltsb7 -
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
So, this is my first actual rant since I joined devRant and I am not saying I am perfect either. Here goes nothing...
1. I honestly hate it when people use spacebar instead of tabs
2. People who have a bad indentation or no indentation at all (even though almost all IDEs have auto-indentation). The bad thing is when a person asks me to have a look at their code I always end up wasting time fixing the indentation rather the actual problem.
I love a properly indented code and that's one of the major reason I usually recommend Python to most people.
3. Lastly, people who leave lots of unnecessary empty lines. E.g.,
public class HelloWorld{
public static void main(String[]args){
System.out.println("Hello world!");
}
}13 -
Webpacker works on branch master.
Webpacker doesn't work on the "back-end" branch.
I didn't touch anything javascript related between the branch's creation and now.
Why. Why why why why why.
4 -
So, have been working for this company for 4 years now as a warehouse associate, but over time they finally realized I can code. I was given the opportunity to work on different projects (even though the first project was a setup for failure but still prevail completing it).
Long story short, next year plan on finishing my bachelor's degree in Software Development. Once I get the degree (or during the process) should I strive to try to work at the:
Tech position (at the current job)
or
Data Analyst department (current job) ,
since I would be the only developer (for data analyst and impressed the team members at my current job,
or
should I try to find another job in software development for a new field when the opportunity come up for a fresh start in just programming and not warehouse associate work?
P. S. Close friends with the Tech department, have high recognition and have done some projects for them. They would love to see me join the team if it happens. When I am not working with the tech department during off season (needs to be approved by management to work on these projects during off season) I am literally cutting a box, wasting my skills and potential in auditing during the season.7 -
You know what I love?
Designers wasting my fucking time over letter kerning... that’s an hour I’ll never get back.3 -
I was about to implement a new feature (which I will call feature X), but I was not sure which branch feature X should be implemented on. Because of different products, there are a lot og branches around.
I was going to implement feature X on branch A, but that branch was currently not working, and someone was working on fixing it.
I was told by my boss to branch out from branch B as feature X would be merged in there later anyways.
And so I did.
After I am nearly finished with feature X I discover I need feature Y from branch A. Feature Y is not yet on branch B, but is scheduled to be merged in some time soon.
So I can't really finish feature X before that point, and I am told by colleague 1 I should have implemented feature X on branch C, because feature Y is there and branch C will be merged into branch B soon.
However, I found out that this has happened before.
First, colleague 1 was told to implement feature Y on branch A. This is the real implementation, the one I need. After he had spent a week implementing feature Y, he was told by colleague 2 that the feature should be implemented on branch C, which is branched off from branch B (I think). So he had to spend a day or two to move feature Y to branch C, but he still kept feature Y on branch A, because all branches will eventually be merged into branch A.
After a week or so, colleague 3 asks about feature Y and is told that the feature is on branch C. But colleague 3 need the feature on branch D, which is branched off branch B for some weeks ago.
I don't know all the details here, but colleague 3 ends up implementing a version of feature Y on branch D and he is happy.
I don't know how much time was wasted because of wrong information from management, but I have no intentions of wasting more time. I'll wait for the merge of branch C into branch B.
If this rant makes no sense, that's just my reflection of management some times.
I love management.4
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