During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

After a decade of working in the web development industry, I have given up all hope, it's the same fucking stupid ideas, the same retarded problems in every damned company . Monkeys discovering and reinventing the same fucking wheel over and over and over again. From a 5 man company to the unicorn scaleup (and everything between) I have had to implement access control systems, and various REST API's following the design made by mongrels who do it the first time . I have become to hate the work I once was so passionate about. Just fuck this shit , if anybody had told me when I was in my early 20's that this is what I end up doing I'd go and learn to be a carpenter instead.

So I've got my first sort of proper gig. I'm tasked with writing...

A goddamn minecraft plugin in java.
Well, it's actually rather fun strangely enough. My ideas of payment were not declined but rather accepted, the other devs are nice and everything is going well for now.

Also: Do expect a mental breakdown post next week or so

First code review ever, and it's for my job.

Guy was really nice and polite.
Even correctly guessed I don't have much experience with professional coding outside my associates degree and prior job where I was the only programmer most of the time I was there.

Said that since it works functionally and is such a small program there's nothing wrong with it if it meets our purposes ( low priority project )

Then he politely in his words 'nitpicks' 3 points and gives me ideas on how to make it more reliable and less likely to need replaced or completely refactoring in the future.

I think my first time getting code reviewed went well. And one of the things he mentioned was something I didn't know how to do and only took 20 some minutes to implement so I also learned something new from this

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

I'm a perfectionist and like things done the right way, but had to learn to let go and remind myself it's the clients site and their choice. No amount of logic and reasoning is going to stop a hellbent client from wanting the dumb things they want, even when it's bad for design, performance, usability and/or SEO.

I was skimming a FedEx page to track a shipment when out of the corner of my eye I see “Watch list” and almost had a merry little panic attack because I apparently did not get the requisite amount of sleep for rational thought.

FedEx, our ideas of watch list are very different.

Stories from Gary #000

Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.

So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.

Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.

Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.

I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.

-.-

So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.

"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.

To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.

tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.

Had anyone experienced with an impatient boss who require you to complete the project in the month you just recently got hired?

Here's the story, I recently got hired by a company, joined on 1st April 2022, the boss expect me to complete the app for Android and iOS by the end of this month. (An e-commerce applications exactly like shopee.com) Without providing me the Backend ApI , that they mentioned. They just gave me a and expect me to know what's happening at the backend.

He require me to give him a specific date that I can launch the app to play store and Apple store. (From my experience, it take days, weeks or months). He need a milestone of what I need , did , and will do (which predictably that they will reject any new ideas proposed) .

I even considering to quit, but I need opinions. Am I just too sensitive or there's something wrong?

Embedded app design resources?

We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.

Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?

I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.

1.
Never programmed something useful because i have no ideas...

2.
Never used comments in my projects

probably every time I see my tests failing.

Each time I am writing tests I'm convincing myself "it's an investment", "spend 2 hours now to save 2 days later", "unit-tests are good".

And each time I'm chasing away ideas like "perhaps they are right, perhaps writing unit tests is a waste of time..", "this code is simple, it should ever break - why test it??", "In the 2 hours I'll spend writing those UT I could build another feature"

Yes, it is terribly annoying to write tests, especially after writing the production code (code-first approach). Why test code that you know works, right?

But after a few weeks, months or years, when the time comes to change your feature: enhance it, refactor it, build an integration with/from it, etc, I feel like a child who found a forgotten favourite candy in his pocket when I see my tests failing.

It means I did a very good job writing them
It means it was not a waste of time
it means these tests will now save me hours or days of trial-and-error change→compile→deploy→test cycles.

So yeah, whenever I see my tests fail, I feel warm and fussy inside :)

My dream project is to continue and improve my gaming website. It's a blog & community that's supportive of (but not limited to) female gamers. It's a positive place for gamers of any type to go, judgement free.

I have so many big ideas for the site, a forum, possibly user profiles, gaming quizzes and trivia, lots more ways to interact. I would love to do like a "find the right game for you" type of thing and have more time to blog..but I just simply don't have the time right now. :(

Baby steps for now. 🎮

!rant

Sooo not so long ago, i was saying something about my recent first interview. I passed it and it felt so good and that kind of made me proud. But now it is even better! I just got my first peanuts as a developer and i must say "boy, it felt good" !

Thank you all, members of the devRant community for always giving me not only courage to try, ideas to research and reasons to laugh, but the most importantly: some insights of how things are out there. For a introvert like me it is really great to not simply step into the darkness, blindfolded 😁

Cheers to you all! 😘

I'm a hobby programmer and i don't hav any programming ideas! How do you all get programming ideas?

I was wondering how many years will I get for killing muggles who approach me with ideas about the "Next Facebook Idea" after hearing I am a programmer?!

Would be possible to be freed of all charges?

Maybe as a student my burn outs does not count so much, but i must say, i had some.

Worst part is that each kind of landed just before the ending of the semester. You know, that nightmarish part when everbody throws homeworks, tests, projects and presentations at us, while we barely have time to prepare for the incoming exams. Such a wonderful life indeed.

But this time was waaaay worst. And that only because i wanted to do so much this year, i started always early to do my assignments and so on but in the end i was so stuck on their bullshits that i barely had time to work on my things.. i haven't touch any programming project on my own since march!

And i quite have a lot of them planned. I had over the semester and i have now over the summer. But I AM SICK OF THIS. And i figured out that would be for the best to take a break from this things gor a few weeks over the summer. I like this world, the world of programming but i fear that sometimes i might not be good enough to swallow others bullshit for my living, i hope i will be able to keep myself afloat with my own projects and ideas.

Anyways, i hope you all guys have it better than me and those of you who doesn't.. well, i am here for ya!

Cheers 🍻

So I'm apparently not allowed to work with what I've learned in my work in my free time.

My boss gave me the job to create modifications for an already existing tool. I always wanted to do that and I started to collect ideas a long time ago what I want to have. So I kindly shared my ideas with my boss and started working on it. Since I'm leaving the company I now longer work on these things and now I started continue working on MY ideas in my free time.

And for protocol: I didn't take any of my code I wrote in my working time and I didn't apply anything else that clearly belongs to the company.

Now I have a problem with my boss. I shared him my ideas so now they belong to the company. And I learned how to create modifications for this tool in my working time so now I'm not allowed to use this knowledge for anything else. I had an argument with my boss but he persists on the idea that since he gave me this little feedback that my ideas are great, they now belong to his company and he wants to put me into big trouble now...

I don't understand why people are so preoccupied with new languages and scared to try them out. At least half of the language features are a rehash of the same ideas and the other half are 2-3 ideas. Seriously. I find it distasteful that people in my co are so scared of learning new shit. NEED To GTFO.

My dev super power would be to read client's minds before a design call and eradicate their stupid ideas for a website that make absolutely no sense. Save us all a headache.

What would you suggest to a 2nd year student in computer engineering to do with his free time?

Q: What do you get when you create a homebrew query language that uses both the stream oriented principles of Unix data pipes and the relational ideas underlying an RDBMS and use incomplete documentation to support it?

A: A frustrated borderline homicidal engineer.

Business idea: publish content about business ideas.

I just set up pi-hole for my network, yay

I have another (older) raspberry pi laying around, any ideas what I could do with it?

I have a system design question I was hoping u guys could help me with.

So I want to make a display that shows an animated wallpaper. I want to have a camera in the display that will recognize finger gestures and will change the wallpaper accordingly (shuffle to a new one, etc.)
EX: when the current wallpaper is displaying, when the user shows the camera the peace sign, it will switch the current wallpaper to a random wallpaper.

I used tensorflow and the mediapipe hands library to get the finger gesture recognition to work. I used tensorflow, python, and openCV.

Now that the finger gesture recognition is finished, I moved to the animated wallpapers and I made a couple with p5js.

How could I best combine the two? Should I switch from tensorflow in python to tensorflow.js? Or should I find a way to re-do my animated wallpapers in python?

My original plan was having the foundation of the whole system be python. This is so I can have the finger gesture recognition run on the main thread, and have another thread deal with the wallpapers.

Let me know if u guys have any ideas or if I’m not clear. Thanks!!!

stop thinking big and trying to fix, predict and solve every problem and accept the fact that I lost the battle so I can focus on small things instead of big ideas that would never happen

cause maybe just maybe bunch of small things can at some point shape big idea

I’m gonna stop working on my website.
Been working on it for two weeks, probably because of bipolar and I was full of ideas.
I feel so tired now.

I am never in my best form when I'm fully conscious and logical.

I have to be semi conscious for good ideas to come out.

from what I've experienced so far.

I hate group project so much.

I yet again successfully stirred up a big drama in my project group. For project, I proposed a CDN cache system for a post only database server. Super simple. I wanted to see what ideas other people come up with. So I said I am not good at the content and the idea is dumb. Oh man, what a horrible mistake. One group member wants to build a chat app with distributed storage. We implemented get/put for a terribly designed key value store and now they want to build a freaking chat app on top of a more stupid kV store using golang standard lib. I don't think any of those fools understand the challenges that comes with the distributed storage.

I sent a video explaining part of crdt. "That's way too complicated. Why are you making everything complicated."

Those fools leave too much details for course stuff's interpretation and says

"course stuff will only grade the project according to the proposal. It's in the project description".

I asked why don't they just take baby steps and just go with their underlying terribly designed kV store.

"Messaging app is more interesting and designing kV store with generic API is just as difficult"

😂 Fucking egos

Then I successfully pissed off all group members with relatively respectful words then pissed off myself and joined another group.

Can someone give me any ideas on sites that have a lot of textual data worth scraping in mass quantities? I'm trying to scratch a few itches.

My current ideas are scraping Amazon, Indeed, and Twitter. But I'd like to scrape more and maybe not so much FAANG related companies.

I need suggestions

I’m thinking about making a blog called but how do I, this will include tutorials that covers things not taught in school, but you wished you knew how to do.

So right now I have ideas like:

How to write zsh plugins
How to scrape the web(scrape html or sending request)
How to write chrome plugins
How to center a div in different ways
How to write backend codes in js
How to setup an interactive website on a server with domain

But I need more, I need suggestions.

So it me again and loviing my life at this tech startup..... i feel like I'm actually achieving something thogh at a slow pace
I know i can give out more to this startup.....but there is this 1 manager in our technical department......FUCK the old man thinks he knows everything and so damn arrogant.... at one time he made a fucking simple error which was fucking obvius but the man you cant tell him anything

if anything goes wrong or if anything isnt working the FUCKING old man is quick to throw the blame on people which i feel isnt supposed to be a mind set of some1 in the technical department..... I get it yes sometimes it will be the person making errors but even when you do it right and its not coming out as its supposed to be the damn OLD FUCKING MAN says you are doing it wrong.....then he steps in and bang....it fels and he'll be like "WHAT? HOW WHATS GOING ON...."

and me silently will be like MAKE IT WORK FUCKING OLD GENIUS
I cant even bring in new ideas and systems into the company......hell be like WE ALREADY HAVE SYSTEMS IN PLACE.... guess what..... no fucking system is being used

I want to build background process app in flutter. The app is also do the work after killed or closed. Give me some ideas.

I’m very complicated financially and I got a project where the client feels like a geek and influences the project a lot, plus we started a tremendous bureaucracy by mail that made me desperate, not to mention that the designer has these artistic ideas that work on paper but not on the web. Neither of us allowed opinions so I decided to say no before starting.

I recently moved to a house where my gf and me each have our separate office space. However, i’m sitting with my back to the door so whenever i’m in the zone with noise cancelling on and my gf walks in i don’t hear her. Resulting in me having a couple of almost heart attacks lately.

I have ideas about mirrors or sensors but since i’m working of three screens i din’t think it will do. The second option is ofcourse to move the desk to the other side of the room so that i’m facing the door more. But there are no power plugs.

My gf basically locks her door by sitting in front of it. Also she doesnt have a noise cancelling head set.

I keep having these ideas of a steam like interface for transfering money and buying virtual items, but I can't for the life of me figure out how i would go about it other then a basic flask mongo db set up which would be ripe for malicious attacks

FX [ Tries to pay online bill using PayPal.. ]

"Payment failed" said their website. ( When I say, said, I mean, flashed on the screen for 1/50th of a second.. )

Only "PayPal" had other ideas and gave them money anyhow..

No problem, I'll just message the customer service folk and get it sorted in a jiffy..

4 weeks later..

First they said Payments take up to 7 working days to action..

Yet previously when I've paid not via Paypal, it took half an hour to show up in my account, not 7 days..

Anyhow, we wait 7 days..

Still nothing, so another message ( They don't appear to have an email address, so you have to use an online form, which limits how much you can type into its little box.. )

During these exchanges I include all the data on my PayPal payment, and each time they seem to ignore that..

First they say they can't find such a payment.

Then they say they are looking more closely and their "PayPal" department will be looking into it.

They still can't find it..

Could I provide a screenshoot of my PayPal payment, sure, but since its hard to send them attachments, I had to stick it on a website and give them a URL instead. ( Hopefully that is not too technical for them.. )

Now waiting to see if they can find it..

If not, I guess one can ask PayPal to get the money back, right ?

I've not had to do that before..

How difficult is that going to be ! ?

Hi.

I wanted to ask this and didn't know where else to ask. How can programmers help the ukrainians, in other ways than donations? I'm specifically looking for programming projects to be implemented, that could in any way help these people.

I currently don't have the circumstances to help with monetary donations, but I want to help them somehow. Do you have any ideas?

Perhaps other people with extra time, like me, could also take some ideas from here and implement them.

when you gotta generate some product ideas and work for the first time at a new company when you've spent your career as a heads down code monkey

bruh i dont know any of the stats or data, or the product yet

What ideas for men's haircuts are relevant this year?

You know when I think back to the ideas I've had and the things I've worked on. I'm having difficulty, with the exception of certain far out projects that were like unattainable, in thinking of anything I've done or thought of that does not involve: data visualization, data gathering, encryption/obfuscation, inventory/storage and/or communication.

am I just unimaginative ?

I did have an idea for a code translator and how it would work and what interfaces you'd have to adopt and how you'd attack implementing things that don't translate well like c++ to js for example. or c++ to c# for that matter ! but I never got far into it. though that would have been attainable as long as you had easy ways of generating bindings.

i mean pathing and navigation were things I thought of too but... that would pretty much be implementing someone else's stuff

Is there a site for design/ui/ux inspiration and ideas, like an index for ways to do things, cards, tags, selectors, etc?

I’ve been thinking of making a magic Mirror lately as a side project. I know that they are traditionally made with TVs or computer monitors but I don’t have the space to make a mirror that big. I have a bunch of old Amazon kindles and android phones that I thought would be good to use instead (even though they all have cracked screens). I want the reflective aspect and the touch screen aspect. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get whatever device that is behind the glass to register touch events on the glass. Any ideas or recommendations? Anybody done anything similar?

I haven't written a line of code in over a month ever since I stopped working due to health issues...

And I have no desire or ideas to create any new apps...

Sorta feels like I'm throwing away 20+ years of work/experience/passion.

Maybe I should just solve algo problems for fun?

Or should I finally try doing some (Java) open source...

Where to find projects?

Hi everyone

I have a pretty old sansui tv in my room that I lost the remote for ages ago. I would like to remotely control the TV without having to buy the actual remote for the specific model (which is ~$28). Any ideas on how I can find the remote codes for the tv so I can program my own remote? Let me know if u guys have any ideas, thanks!!

Okay give me your next unicorn ideas.

I was approached by some guy on a project and I need your help figuring out how to go about this.

the project is basically a website where school owners who are not tech savvy can input necessary details about their school and it spins up a site from an existing website template built in react for them.

an extra complexity will be creating custom domain names for each site. will this also be possible ?

I've not done something like this before and I dont know the word for it so making a Google search has been quite hard

my stack is javascript MERN stack.

Way to go ruin a collaboration. I wanted to have fun some making a game with one of my friends, but turns out being friends doesn't correlate to making a good team. Some of you probably know this, but I've never had such an experience, not even to almost strangers

Some tips on how to kill off any motivation to work with you:
* Casually insult other peoples ideas
* Don't consider other people's point of view
* Try to talk people out of prototyping/experimenting with their OWN ideas on their OWN time
* Completely undermine their skill even though you have no basis to go on
* Never worked with this person before
* less experienced
* don't have to give estimates on a daily basis
* don't consider the fact that there are libraries that can be used to speed up things)
* Victimize yourself, because someone is "forcing you" to become the bad guy

I don't know if that person is on here and I don't care if they happen to read this. I tried to treat you with the most respect, but if you don't do the same then just fuck off.

Anyways, there goes the idea of a "no stress, no problems" game dev project, because I wanted to see if isometric view would work better than top down.

My idea to have another person to work on a project with, to keep the motivation up backfired a by lot.

Someone within european timezones up for some hobby game dev?