I feel so sorry for all the people in the world who use their phone more than their PC/laptop.

All the pitiful souls who think they're gamers because they installed lootchest simulator on their little digital skinner box. All the sad beings who just view the internet as a collection of ad-infested apps.

Actually, I don't feel sorry, because these people make the world a worse place.

Suddenly we needed websites which could render on tiny screens and need bloated cross-platform app development frameworks. Many game studios became parasites exploiting addictive behavior in humans, instead of creating works of art.

Humans spent 10,000 years to perfect their caves with expensive kitchens, and all people want is for their WiFi to reach the grill at the end of the garden. Humans created central heating, comfortable couches, wall-mounted TVs and luxurious desks -- and all people can think of is whether their phone plan covers holiday roaming at their shitty resorts.

The rare times I do actually go into this apocalyptic wasteland people call "The Outside", all I see is subway cars full of hunched addicted drudges, bus stops with clusters of enslaved automatons.

Fuck all of them.

Fuck all of you imbeciles, who ventured out of the cave and now DARE to call me anti-social, just for preferring the warmth of my comfortable protective den.

It's fucking cozy here, within the walls of my shelter, I got booze and a fridge full of food and a bunch of LSD, I can masturbate under the shower, have sex on the couch, have all kinds of GIANT displays for entertainment, with full-sized qwerty-keyboards, high-DPI mouses, even some console controllers and big TVs if I feel lazy.

You can stick your responsive websites and social-network-integrated Android apps up your rectum, just sit your fucking fat ass down in front of a workstation and desperately refresh the stream of fake attention-seeking messages there, if you absolutely must.

Seriously, why does this guy from our marketing department call me on my private phone number. Why did HR PROVIDE him with my private phone number?

And WHY THE FUCK is he asking me, a DB admin: "Our website doesn't load properly on Safari on my iPhone 7, could you take a look at it"?

No, of course I won't fucking come to the office to take a look at your miserable shitty device with its cracked glass screen.

Fuck you and your outdoorsy habits.

Stay the fuck in your cave, you degenerate attention whore, otherwise please go choke on your airpods.

Dear Marketing Guy,

You had no right to manipulate the perfectly working "WordPress" site, but since you have done it by injecting a script you found on the internet in functions.php, It is now my unpaid job to fix this mess.

Yours truly,
Underpaid Developer

P.S. Fuck you

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).

Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.

I switched ISP package to a "business grade connection" (not just a marketing meme, actually meant for businesses), which is easily three times the default and yet still my fucking internet goes down every third day.

I hate it when marketing people decide they're technical - quote from a conference talk I regrettably sat through:

"The fourth industrial revolution is here, and you need to make sure you invest in every aspect of it - otherwise you'll be left in the dust by companies that are adopting big data, blockchain, quantum computing, nanotech, 3D printing and the internet of things."

Dahhhhhhhhhh

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

Why do marketers always tarnish the name of new concepts by turning them into buzzwords?

For example, "Cloud" is one of the most misused and overused words on the internet. If something has anything to do with the internet, it's likely to be plastered with the word "Cloud".

It's like "App" all over again. Anything remotely related to technology is called an "App" by it's marketing team and layman users.

It's been a while since I've heard a consensus of a moronic idea from the corner offices. I was invited to a department planning meeting (just to listen, not necessarily engage or add value) and discussion went to the development of a mobile app.

Mgr1: "The CEO has the net present value of the mobile project as $20 million. Where did he get that number?"
VP: "No idea."
Mgr2: "How will it be any different than our web site that is already mobile compliant?"
VP: "It is to gain market share"
Mgr3: "Market share from who? A mobile app is not going to increase our customer base. At best, it will only move some of our existing customers to mobile. No way it would scale to those numbers."
VP: "The primary benefit is so customers can browse offline."
Mgr2: "Offline browsing isn't listed in the milestones."
Mgr1: "We're not going to push and keep gigs of data up-to-date on someone's phone just for random times they don't have internet access."
VP: "I guess that's right. We can push our pdf catalog. That's only a few hundred meg."
Mgr2: "Pushing the catalog? That's not on the listed milestones"
VP: "Its all assumed."
Mgr3: "Who owns this project? Web team is already maxed to capacity."
Mgr2: "Marketing team only has 3 developers, we can't take on anything as complex as a mobile app and support the existing processes."
Mgr1: "What about the network infrastructure and PCI compliance? We're talking about a system for the web site and another for mobile, right?"
Mgr2: "Who is going to manage all the versions in the app stores and future changes to the mobile platform?"
Mgr4: "Not us"
Mgr2: "Nope"
Mgr1: "OK, good. Its very likely this project will be dead on arrival at the next company strategic meeting."
VP: "Mobile the only project on the strategic meeting agenda. Sorry guys, it's happening. We're not going to leave $20 million sitting on the table.
<awkward silence>
VP: "Next item of business ..."

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.

Around a year ago I launched my first site in rails.

Even though the site didn't took off, I learned from it, and it was an enjoyable experience.
Well, at least some of it.

As a web developer, I enjoyed doing the web development.

Then came hosting and deployment. Pretty stressful since I'm no sysadmin/devops person, but you could say it's still in the realm of software. So I managed.

But the one part I couldn't stomach is marketing.

Partly because I have zero experience and interest in the subject, and also because I don't to be an annoying marketing whore asking people to check my site.

I have never seen a bigger cesspool than the google results of the query "how to get people to know my site".

I have seen the shadiest shit, I have read of people saying you should befriend subreddits mods/admins and then ask them the favour to let you post your stuff.

I know that contacts are important, but taking advantage to get traffic on your product? No thanks, I'll rather have a dead site.

This was pretty much the experience when googling about marketing, unethical shit everywhere.

In fact, even calling it marketing makes me feel kinda sick, but it's a thing and it's pretty much necessary to get people to know your site.

Anyhow, in a company, everyone does their role, but this is just a one man thing.

So the ideal thing would be if a marketing person (hopefully an ethical one) took care of that. How does one find one though?

I guess you either partner with one or you hire on.

The problem with partnering is that I don't know someone like that. Do people partner up with "strangers" on the internet?

I could hire too, but I'm not as affluent as being able to employ a single person for 50k a year. And I don't know how feasible it is to hire someone when your site has no revenue anyways.

Maybe there's some company that offers such servicwe? I dunno...

What are your thoughts on this?
I'll be thankful of any feedback.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

WHITEPAPERS.

Not exactly a programming problem, but one of my many task (as i am apparently a multi headed hydra) is it to find Software for tasks. I made the experience, as more marketing experts are on it, and as more SEO is poured in as more information about a topic degrade.

Two examples:
i wanted to find out if there is anything that speaks AGAINST "the cloud" as a concept for Data Procesessing and Storage. (Beside that the company internet connection is crap). There are tons of documents that in a semi "scientific" way show that having a data centre with a constant staff of experts is superios to everything. And it goes on, every company has a different version of basically the same document, and they all subtley show that THIS company is the best.

Example 2:
ERP Software, the most infested pool of filth i have entered yet, be it just a tiny CRM System or a full blown SAP clone, they all have those "Whitepapers" that first look somewhat scientific or informative. Like "the top8 common pitfalls when introducing an ERP system". 7 of them read logically and were what i expected, the 8th was "dont get your IT involved".
Yeah sure, IT doesnt understand economical processes, fair enough, but not getting it involved at all sounds like selfdefense. A further look showed me that this particular vendor has a web-based solution but doesnt provide any further informations (srsly, the website is starved of actual hard informations). The screenshots let the software look a bit oldschool but what really threw red flags for me was the sentence "we are ready for Win10, we did significant adjustment to perform excellent with Windows 10"
So, either they have some system interwoven stuff (so why bother with Webbase then?) or its just another marketing bullshit sentence.

Either way, i found it to be really hard to get ANY reliable information about this particular topic which adds to the overall world experience of missinformations and the all-being "fakenews". But for many things one can usually filter through a lot of different informations that can be pieced together, with this..its all outright propaganda camouflaged as "useful information", some even try to let it look scientific. In the end its all biased..

ultimativly, this rant is about all the people that write those missleading whitepapers, fill the world with biased informations and make the whole planet a worse place.

I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?

Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).

Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)

I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.

I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?

I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?

I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼

Guys, I just need to know if I'm the one who's crazy.
I work at a fairly large bank. This bank has an Online Banking platform. Now, for reasons that deserve a rant of their own, I work on a self service account opening platform (in branch).
Now, my team is being tasked with adding features that will force customers to enroll in Online Banking and 2FA when opening accounts if they have not already done so.
The reason? There's low usage of the Online Banking solution.
My problem? I think this is a pointless waste of time.
Hear me out: All existing customers already have the ability to enroll with online banking, they can do it from there homes, in their underwear if they want, and they aren't doing it. Can anyone explain to me why we expect that customers who showed no interest in online banking before are going to be interested in using the application now?
You come in to branch to open an account, we stop the process to force you to enroll with internet banking(if you want to finish opening your account through the app), and then hope you'll use it now (despite the fact you could have enrolled at home all along)
We're duplicating the feature of an existing project and slowing down an unrelated process so we can hope you change your mind? Is this not a marketing problem? Do we not just need to sell the shit better? What am I not seeing? It's insane, we even took time to look at signing customers up for email addresses (in branch, while opening an account) if they didn't have one(because you need an email address for online banking). What really gets me is that everyone on my team is eating this shit up like it makes perfect sense. Like nobody else seems to think this is fucking stupid. I'm now resigned to implementing this bullshit. Am I the crazy one here? I realize I must be. Whatever I get paid anyway I guess. I raised my concerns repeatedly and I just kept getting the same stupid response. My job is done

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