TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

Whats the state of mobile development skills demand atm?

Thinking of getting into crossplattform development with flutter or kotlin or enhance my dev skills in native android development (10years exp.) and create me a base project with jetpack compose.

Advice appreciated.

It's been like a decade since I first heard of Kotlin. So wanted to ask:

Kotlin, Yay or Nay?

Why the fuck is gradle so horrible.

I literally have no idea why anyone would ever use this thing (other than being forced too because somehow the rest of the world is using it).

Every plugin has an arbitrary DSL that you have to magically know by piecing together enough snippets. At that point, no one is actually intuiting anything based on the beauty of the DSL, every build is a frankenstein of different snippets that were pasted from different versions of gradle blog posts or SO posts.

And if you do get it o work then the DSL changes, or it isn't compatible with another plugin.

I just want to write a fucking integration test in Kotlin. Can I just add an `integrationTest` task in `tasks` right next to `tasks.test`? No, obviously it goes in the `kotlin jvm() compilations` section, DUH.

The first thing anyone in the universe should have asked is "how is this better than literally hand writing a makefile"? At least then I would be able to see the commands that it ran.

Now I'm googling how to make the new jvm-test-suite plugin work when you're using the Kotlin plugin but every single result on Google for `jvm-test-suite kotlin` just returns the docs for jvm-test-suite (whose snippets obviously didn't work in my project) because those doc pages have "Kotlin" written above each of the gradle snippets.

Please just end this.

Oh and dev rant sucks too. It thinks anything separated by dots in a url.

any tips on how to get to liking web dev? I feel disgusted by it every time I try to learn it.

So, So much fragmentation. Everything's acceptable and the browser doesn't give any hoots about it. A particular page can have all the metadata, favicons, flintstones, metrics, bullshit with 90 attributes properly added into it by some hard-working dev and it would be acceptable by the browser.
Another page will have no shit defined, and that would also be acceptable!

CSS is holy fuck powerful. HTML has 50,000 pages of specification documents written behind it. javascript is so large, it can create both of these. the working of the browser is a different realm, the working of backend +cloud is a different dimension, the working of 3d graphics and game resumes via some crazy js package is a different reality!

It's a vast, fucking, overwhelming universe!!

I am 23, trying to make sense of this stuff for the last 8 years. To make decent little pages and tools that I can use, or the world can use, but fuck me if I even know the types and attributes of <link> element.

I have gone from being a school student to a college student to an employed profession in android dev, yet I don't understand web much

Every time i try learning it, instead of reaching my goal to create something useful, I am stuck in the stupid tutorial hell.

I can make a decent-looking resume or file-based server using various auto completions and helps from web storm, plugins, and medium articles, but I don't want to sound dumb if someone questioned me anything about this stuff, which I would sound, because i have no clue!

I love creating android apps, i don't know why. I know that some jerk is going to see my app and say "HEY STUPID. YOU DIDN'T USE PROTOBUFS OR COMPOSE, YOUR APP SUCKS", but I won't give a damn about them. because after making apps for 5 years, I don't care for newer stuff if it isn't better. I would rather spend my time making the use case work properly on user devices than caring for new shit.

It's also not like I completely ignore my knowledge growth by rejecting everything new. I transitioned from java to kotlin, from linear layouts to constraint layouts, using jetpack libraries, etc as my main tools. I know the time to transition and i also know the time when i have to learn various stuffs, in android dev

I change tools like I change my pen. Once its refill is over, but if its body is intact, I would just buy a refill and reuse it. but if its cap is lost and body is broken, i ain't getting glue and refill to fix those. i will buy a new, better pen

But on the topic of web dev, I am not like that. I can't figure out a limited set of knowledge from where I would grow on my own, i can't figure out how much to learn and where to go from that , i can't figure out anything :/

I am stuck mann

I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe

I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up

As much as i love kotlin, i hate that you dont have static functions like in java. You have to put them in a companion object or write them in extension functions outside of the class.
Also when working with generics (lets say T) you cant call T::class.java unless you are in an inlined function and mark T as refeied. This is not the case in java i think. I havent checked.

My list of programming languages that started out promising but turned out to be bad:

* Scala
* Kotlin
* Rust
* Haxe
* Swift

now... Im just tired and bored of what i do. i had a very hectic year rewriting a core functionality in my company, it was full of optimizations, logic improvements and learning new things.

I took 10 days off hoping id come hating my job less. I learned kotlin and worked on a personal server side project with it during the vacation and honestly i loved it. I missed learning new languages and concepts.

so i thought, well if i enjoyed coding during the vacation then my burnout is cured right ? well once i went back to work today I felt like shit and couldn't do a thing. disgusted of the idea coding for my employer. Too tired to continue my personal project after 8 hours of my job

I guess im back to square one

Worked as android dev for 2.5 year and then worked as java gameserver dev for 2 years.

Now I wanna go back to android dev so I spent the last month grinding kotlin/android basics and already have 2 interviews lined up this week. Applying for junior dev role because of my gap and because my confidence in my android ability currently is really low. Having ADD doesnt help because I suck in memorizing implementations, syntax and I suck at live coding under pressure.

Fuck it I will set their expectations low, will get lower salary and hopefully will impress the hell out of them during first few months. Wel see what happens...

Any tips/advices?

Begin to hate Java, moving to kotlin soon . For android development at least with Jetpack compose. Java is deprecated in almost every API.

Has anyone else ever been stuck in a 'doSomething()' limbo where your dev section has no tickets so you have to create your own tickets so that you still seem productive?

Im an android /java native coder
And a swift/xcode native coder
But I also expert in angular ...
Sooooooo ???
Shall I go android/kotlin+ios/swiftUI
Or ionic angular capacitor ?

I tried Kotlin for a week. And I literally gave up. Hey, fellow Kotlin devs, what fun do you get in writing this short f**king syntactically unmatched java code!

anybody, please let me know if kotlin supports JDK-16?

hey guys . i want to learn and make spring based backend that would provide endpoints for db and also serve some webpages . any good /modern resources that could build upon my current knowledge and explain me in a sequential manner?

I make android apps in java/kotlin which uses gradle for compiling dependencies, so i kinda understand some basic java software architecture.

i would prefer gradle/kotlin based tutorials but maven+ java tutorials are also not a problem. my main problem is to get an idea of the various "built in stuff" :

- how the app works?

- how the security works? what are those configs? how can i provide role based access, google authentications, associate security with user based db, etc... (i also don't have much idea about any general backend stuff so theoretical knowledge will also help greatly)
how do beans work? can we avoid their xmls and/or customize them from java code

- how do application.properties work?

-...

i have a lot of questions but every article i read starts with "add this dependency in your project" , "override this class" . like am i just supposed to enable some flags and features automatically get added to my project? doesn't this limit the customisation options?and if they are limited then how much are those customisation options ? i wanna understand them all and then choose the ones that are essential

the october of 2020 was the year when i started my first job. 9 months before that, i was under a severe depression and burnout (i guess?) and had made up a decision to quit android dev, an area for which i was passionate and had proven excellence before.

(just having a few good thoughts and going into a little nostalgia in this rant)

DR has been my goto place for every good/bad/shitty thought, so the rants on those days reflected my mental pain ( am gonna go check those after this rant) and confusions.i was so so much confused:

- "College is about to get over, i have to go earn bread for my family, what am gonna do"?

- "My jan Android internship had so shitty people, it was so much fast paced, they exploied me, mistreated me so much. am never gonna do android dev. should i take this shitty TCS offer of INR 300,000? i bet those guys will be nice atleast, they are a freaking mnc"

- "I don't seem to like anything these tcs people have offered me in their video classes. how am gonna survive my daily job life if i don't like these stuff?"

"FUCKING COVID IS THERE!! MY DAD's SHOP HAS CLOSED DOWN, WE ARE ON OUR LAST SAVINGS !! I SHOULD FUCKING DO SOMETHING, BUT A JUST A 22 YEAR OLD NOBODY!!"

this above, was my fight. to me these were the end of the world thoughts.

however the last day of college came, then the next day came, then another , then a week came and went, then months came and went , then years came and went and today after 2 years, i am just amazed at how things handled themselves. all the above points are now totally invalid in my eyes

i was shit scared to even open android studio after that jan internship. however, every thing i learned in between feb to sept ( and that includes my college stuff, some web dev, php, etc) i would find myself comparing it with java and android. and after spending some off screen time with friends nd family getting some relax, i started applying for jobs at startups. I only ever had confidence in java and kotlin , so 50% of the jobs i applied for were that of android dev.
and it was to no one's surprise that one android startup offered to interview me. i remember being terrible at ds algo, programming, java and even android at that time, yet somehow they saw some potential in me and offered me a role. the role they offered me was for an android dev with a salary of almost double the TCS's offer. this was even more terrifying for me because i was already burnt with a startup offerring money and exploiting me.

But my god how things changed .
This small startup company was everything opposite of that exploitive startup.

- From day 1 to my last day in that company, I had seniors who would give me time to understand stuff, ask questions that they would clarify, understand my knowledge and level and give me tasks accordingly, trust me of my time and my words and appreciate me. no one ever called after 6 pm or on weekends and no one ever counted my leaves or asked question about it.

- I was myself very scared at first, that someday they are gonna blame me, find me as some fraud , some masquerader unfit for the role, but these fears slowly went away. i just found myself diving deeper and deeper into code with full passion love and quest for writing bug free stuff.

- slowly and slowly they even stayed putting me as sole devs in management meetings, making me the front spokesperson for android tech in those meetings, the position that gave me so much confidence since, the people taking the top decisions will change their decisions based on my calls. I also felt a pull for exploring stuff outside my domain, sitting in calls of backend devs , react guys and designers, asking them questions and learning their stuff too.

today i laugh at the problems that life had put in front of me at that time. today my opinion on choosing mnc vs startup is not about who pays how much or where the job is most secure, but its about where i find myself motivated and excited to work.

money is not even a factor anymore. everyone (mncs included) is willing to give tons of money to the worthy candidate, so i won't be ever settling for a low paying job. the topmost priority is which company has the culture to let me grow and keep me on heals at the same time.

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