!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

"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.

You don’t need to spend a dime in learning how to code 👨‍💻

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.

#Happy_Rant

Seeing BYJU's and WhiteHat Jr losing millions in valuation makes me happy, as it was something I had predicted (Im not flexing btw).

The whole business model is dumb, teaching CHILDREN coding and teaching them how to make `apps` via online learning.

Students study Comp Sci for literal years before they even begin coding something useful, and even then there are so many professional developers walking around who barely understand the code that they write.

It's just natural selection at this point.

!rant, TL;DR at the bottom

Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]

And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]

and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]

His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]

Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"

Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.

TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.

i was helping a friend who just started learning how to code and i realized that tutorials don't teach you how to read error messages and how to debug. that's stuff we learn from people, it's tacit knowledge. that's crazy to me, because those are such essential skills to a dev and i think just self learning is not enough. maybe coding is even more of a socially dependent skill than i ever thought. looking at it that way, stackoverflow is a good example of that, I can't really imagine being a dev without the dev community

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

Seriously, at what point did the good, kind, selfless souls who write tutorials and guides online turn into fucking food bloggers?

I've been an engineer about 15 years, so I still have to google most of the code I write as I write it, and this week I've been learning a new framework.

Ten years ago it'd be "here's how to..." then the thing you want to do.

Now it's "For the longest time, I didn't want to use Gradle..." followed by a summary of the last week in their life.

I really don't care about your Journey with Rust, I want to know how to define an optional parameter. I don't give a rat's fucking dick how much faster this is than that, my hands are tied by whoever started this mess - just tell me how to make it work.

I guess there's something to be said for remembering things between sessions.

I’m most proud of my first website. Just plain html and css. It was the first time I was introduced to GitHub too. I was taking a class at the library. The teacher was the best because she showed the students how to find resources for web development and told us to don’t bother looking at the out of date workbooks. The students were cool too. It was great to be in a small class and see people of different ages learning how to code.

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

So, I'm heading back down the rabbit hole. I did some web dev (backend) on the side years ago, but I've been out of the game since. I want to change up careers at this late date and I had forgotten how cathartic manipulating raw code could be. So now I'm relearning and learning all kinds of good stuff via the internets and was excited to find this community. Not much of a ranter but this should be fun.

The convo between my friend and me back then
He: dude I heard you can code can you help me with this coding challenge on codechef
Me: bro, I try to let's check the problem
After 15-30 min we solve the question together
Then after 3 days or so he again meets me
He: do you know about Kali Linux
Me: no man not heard of Linux but what is Kali seems interesting
He: trying to hack WiFi
Me: *getting excited* bro teach me
He: I'm learning too
That day he got to know he can't hack WiFi and I got to know that my friend doesn't know jack shit about Linux, also Linux is awesome
But that moment changed my whole engineering life, I got to learn about Linux and I'm getting good at it every single day since then.
It's been 3 year since I met that fucker.
Tagging my amigo @ashwini0529

"And in a stunning turn of events, he got it to work!"

But seriously... I've literally been throwing shit at a wall and seeing what would stick.
Fucking DTOs and getting shit out of a database. I need better resources on how to do this properly!

Anyways, I found that just using 'object' and letting the compiler deal with the rest of the bullshit actually allowed my code to work and run. I'm still a little in shock.

I'm over here trying to keep things in a nice one-to-one because that's what my PM recommended... and instead I just get slammed by Type casting nonsense and more errors than I can begin to understand. And unfortunately, Stackoverflow is of no help because everyone's issues are very nuanced and unrelated to my problem... Maybe I'm the problem? 🤷

But here it is working without all that bullshit. I don't know man... This code base is not the rager I was expecting. I'm getting my ass kicked with code that doesn't fall in line with the book I'm learning from.

You know how they say, "forget everything you've read and learned"? I'm feeling that really hard right now.

Constantly fighting the urge to rip everything down and do it based on what my book is recommending, but then the logical natured side of me is like "you ain't got that kind of time to be unfucking someone's work, only to get caught in more trouble. Your ego is not worth it"

Anyways, it's fucking late here and I'm glad enough to not have to think about this issue anymore. Bye.

I posted the kintsugi rant recently, about how I reached zen when it comes to software engineering, and let go of all frameworks, including React.
Yesterday I was getting started with Lisp (because simplicity), and posted the rant about how Lisp code was fixed with REPL on a spacecraft 100 million miles away from earth.
Today I was contemplating replacing everything I have on Heroku with a single NGINX VPS, as I don't need containers.
I was also reevaluating the way I deploy apps, replacing everything with simple bash scripts.
I'm learning NGINX now.

…and I just realized it all wasn't some kind of breakthrough that had a reason behind it.

It was my bipolar disorder all along. Having bipolar disorder implies you change your ways, and sometimes your entire world view, once a year. The change cannot be averted or postponed. It will happen.

Bipolar makes you suffer, but, on the flip side, keeps you from becoming stale and set in your ways. Also, bipolar is an undefeatable protection against manipulators and abusive relationships. Yes, you can be manipulated, but the manipulator's framework will last one year tops. Then it will be obliterated together with your world view, and you will start a new life.

This is so nice..💙😄

<Heading> 
Synopsis of Gita (religious book of Hindus)

<Stanza 1> 
Code is an illusion
Today you are coding
Tomorrow someone else would do it
Thereafter someone else

<Stanza 2>
What did you learn
That is helping you in this Project
What are you learning
That will help you in your next Project

<Stanza 3>
Bug is the truth of life
It is today, and will remain forever
You think you have debugged the Bug
You are wrong

<Stanza 4>
It is continuous
In various new forms
It pops up
Recognise it Parth (Son of Hindu God)

<Stanza 5>
That's why go on making Codes
Don't think about the Bug
They will come to you
On their own

When I was in high school, I was learning to code on my own. I showed my python code that I was really proud of to the girl I liked. she didn't understand what it is, she thinks its weird, she thinks I'm weird.

She has a point.

many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!

you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.

It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.

It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.

Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!

Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.

Reasons to NOT be a dev sounds rather negative so I'd like to propose 3 things that you need to BE a dev as to frame it in a positive light:

- When a problem peaks your interest you want to solve it, you may even be obsessed by it.
- You enjoy learning, not necessarily enjoy school, just enjoy learning new things (even better if it's by your own means)
- Failure may get you down, but you learn and don't give up until you have exhausted all paths to success.

You may need other skills like math, logic and reasoning abilities, being able to handle deadlines, attention to detail, and cope with stress. I've seen people being crap at all of those and if they have the former 3 they, in time, will hone the others enough to make them a productive dev.

No need to be a 9-9-6 code monkey willing to be squeezed by Big Corp for massive profits and a low salary or a 1337 purist coder that only focuses on the crafting side of developing software. That may make you a great coder but not a well rounded developer or individual. Remember, you program machines but you are NOT one.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Situation: I have a love hate relationship with python due to the lack of types as I have in more established languages such as C#, Java and shit even TypeScript

Situation (cont): A rather large codebase that i have developed for multiple processes at work run on Python.

I don't hate it, I just don't absolutely love it, there is a lot of things to like about Python, but man I do have some conflicts with it, I have been facing out to use other solutions that feel scripty, such as the newer versions of C# with .net, but I would say that about 80% of our codebase runs on Python, the rest is PHP.

I am somewhat traditional in the way my programs run, I started with C++ and Java, then for whatever reason (I blame codecademy at the time) switched over to Ruby and Javascript, mostly Javascript. I do not remember how I found Python, I do remember learning it with an online tutorial, shit was easy to get started with.

My codebase running on Python is huge, and they do a lot from automation scripts, to data gathering and database management, never had I been bitten with the "oh noes is so slow" bug since my code is not Google level big, for everything else Python seems rather fast imho

I dunno, big time love hate relationship

I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.

Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.

And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.

And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.

And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:

So I see posts about an interview question/challenge of inverting a binary tree. I don't use trees very often (mainly file related or parsing server nodes), but I thought I would learn how to do this.

I saw a page that started talking about different ways to invert enough to understand that one type of inversion is swapping left and right nodes. So I stopped before they showed how.

Then I created a test program that has a tree structure and also can display a tree before and after modification. This was kind of fun.

So then I wrote the inversion function. It was less than 10 lines of code. Wtf? I thought it would be harder than this.

Then I started wondering where trees were used. So today I have been learning how they are used and why I might need one to solve a problem. One use I intuited was parsing regex or a language. Apparently it is useful there.

What I am learning is that a lot of these interview questions are really test to see if you can comprehend instructions when stressed. Or you will ask questions to clarify the task. It doesn't necessarily test your ability to solve hard problems.

One thing that perplexes me. If inverting a tree is swapping nodes left<->right, then why not leave data in place and just swap roles in the functions. Maybe I completely misunderstood what inversion means or why it would be done. I guess if this is not inverting I have the structure to try other methods now.

*phases of learning to program*

Phase 1:
Yeah its so easy i love programming i'm gonna be a top programmer.

Phase 2:
Uuuhg.. programming sucks,i think i'm not meant for it,should i give up do something else maybe...

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Finally got my first dev job. I am looking at the code base for my company. And it’s like I know how to code in this language. But I don’t know half of the advanced shit they’re doing. I understand they have more experience than me. But I’m just not sure how to catch up to them. Or be even on the same level as them? I guess just more out of office learning?

I can read what they’re putting in the code and understand how it works. But like how they came up with it I have no clue. I guess I’ll learn over time and have to put in some extra man hours.

I've been working as a developer for 10 years now... I got my first software development job when I was still learning for my masters.

After all this time I have switched programming languages and product types a few times from web development to mobile apps to desktop software (C++, CEF, QT,).

And I have come to the conclusion that I want early retirement... like right now retirement... I'm done dealing with management that doesn't understand shit... dealing with people we have outsourced part of the shit to... needing to fix stuff that is broken after some other person refactored the code and didn't fully test it and it somehow got approved... dealing with people that think that "know better" and implemented things like that 5 years ago because they thought like "THAT" and will not accept my merge request because of that.

Like don't get me wrong I love to make and develop software, but since this is the 3rd job in the row with a toxic environment like this I feel like I need to move to the country side and open up a farm or something :|

Continuing to learn k8s ecosystem and to achieve acceptable level
With trying eventually Helm, Argo CD and even trying to use not managed setup for k8s.

Going though books to find out theory about being SRE.
And about data intensive apps.

Learning and trying Kafka

Learning and trying FastAPI and diving in generally to async python ecosystem

Learning Go.

Learning few more books to increase code quality and its compositioning.

Getting more practice in monitoring and logging systems with applicating them to k8s.

Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing

1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then

2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year

Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects

Hey all, just wondering what it was like for you when starting out your career.

I'm a newish dev, been full time for about a year hired right after my internship. My role has a bunch of hats ranging from DevOps/sys admin to software engineering, sort of a weird mashup of skills so it's not pure software engineering. I mainly work with python, Ansible, and some terraform.

However I still just want to say I'm sorely disappointed in my undergrad classes.

I have a "concentration" in software engineering. I did struggle in classes as I was working full time to pay for classes without taking out loans, but I don't really remember learning a whole lot that was useful in industry.

Overall I just feel like just paid money for a degree that didn't teach me very much useful stuff. Maybe I'm just lacking experience? Maybe what I learned I just don't notice myself applying because it's subconscious?
My coworkers have taught me so much, and I'm very thankful they invested that time into me. I still get ripped to shreds during code reviews lmao (definitely not as much compared to when I first started but I'm also still learning and will always be)
Plus our company docs are pretty good so I can always read through them or search our codebase for examples on how to utilize in house tools etc.

I definitely hit the jackpot with this job, just feeling like I should have been prepared more.

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

>= rant
While its really hard to get code wrong in Rust, it is also really hard to get code right in Rust. It took me a considerably long time to write a code which returns the first word in the sentence

I felt the borrow checker introduces a steep learning curve into Rust which is otherwise a beautiful language according to me. C++, my current favorite language, also suffers the same problem with respect to certain language features.

everything is going as planned! :)
Learned Rust Lang. i loved it (that doesn't mean i am done learning na? No! never stop)
new language i could do game memory hacking in without worrying about C++ memory leaks or issues. it also compiles to assembly! another of my favorite languages!
(i use rust for game development and other stuff)

i am not leaving C / C++ though that would be harsh!,

i abandoned javascript for react and typescript.
to be honest the developer just made javascript and left us with a [object Object]

finished learning the android java api so im basically set anything i want to make i can just go on my pc, listen to music and write it out in a couple of days.

well phazor what are you going to do now?!
i will code till i am old.
i will leave my mark like a shid that made its skid in the bowl :)

I finished a coding bootcamp, but I still feel like a total beginner. I was hand held throughout the whole god damn thing! Sure, it's my fault for not studying the way I was supposed to, BUT GOD DAMN!!! I mean it's so hard not to copy code if it's right in front of you.. Oh well, a learning experience nonetheless.. Going for the Odin Project now with a different approach! Fingers crossed

Already starting to regret trying to learn c++ AND test driven development at the same time. Do you think i can even get the boost-test headers located anywhere from a binary package installation.
3 days on no learning code cause i cant even get the testing suite up and verified.

Working as a Dev for a while now, I tell new people not to bother with it. There is never any job satisfaction as people in charge never understand the basics.

Instead of learning to write efficient code, figure out how to solve real business problems, work towards a maintainable flexible product to quickly deliver value on changing requirements, write automated tests to improve quality, maintainability and prevent live issues - basically do anything a good Dev strives for - you will just constantly end up working for people with no interest beyond the next couple days, on a shit code base that no one can understand, with people that don't want to learn anything about software design and just check boxes off.

Apart from pay this must be the worst career possible in a technical field.

Am I right? Is this micro management?

So, in my new team, I have another coworker is my buddy, we are same level and I doubt here coding techniques as I have seen very bad code written by her.

The thing is, whenever I need to pick up a new jira, she starts telling me what code I need to change, without me understanding the ticket or the code.
She forced a code change which was obviously a bad one.
She asked me what did I do yesterday and said that I could have worked on this jira.

Although this is a start but I don't want yo waste my time working with someone who is trying to micromanage when I clearly have the potential to be working without her micro-managemnt.

The problem I see is that her priority is not learning but I don't know what is that but she worked on the tasks which are clearly not our teams work, in the initial informal chat she was too concerned with people being young in the company like who is married who is not etc.
I don't see her as a good developer.

Should I move to other project? or am I overreacting?

Coding can be challenging and it's natural to feel motivated sometimes and demotivated other times. Here are a few things that might help you stay motivated while coding:

Focus on the benefits: Think about why you are learning to code and what you hope to achieve. Whether it's building your own projects, getting a new job, or solving problems, reminding yourself of the benefits can help keep you motivated.

Set achievable goals: Setting small, achievable goals can help you stay motivated because you can see progress and feel a sense of accomplishment as you complete each goal.

Take breaks: It's important to take breaks and give yourself time to rest and recharge. This can help you stay fresh and focused when you return to coding.

Get support: Surround yourself with supportive people who can encourage and motivate you. This could be friends, family, or online communities of other coders.

Keep learning: The field of computer science is constantly evolving, and there is always more to learn. This can be both exciting and motivating as you discover new technologies and approaches.

Remember, it's okay to have ups and downs when it comes to motivation. The important thing is to keep moving forward and stay committed to your goals.

~ Chat GPT

I am very confused nowadays, exist a great number technologies but i don't decide what technology or language of programming i want specialize me.

I love it the hacking but i have very little experience in programming and have a basic knowdledge in networks and database.

I love it the assembly language but only can code a pair of syntax in this language and know very little about components, architecture and the rest.

I love it the data mining, big data, IA, machine learning but i don't control the statistic.

Of every topics i have a basic knowdlege.

Actually i try to discover my practicality. I am learning Perl and regular expressions.

Need advice:

So I’m 20 years old. Got a decent job as software engineer with a really good pay and really want to break into machine learning.

Mastered NodeJS (my stack has always had node for the past 5-6 years) and I’m finding it difficult to switch to python for machine learning since things are so engraved in my head in javascript.

Aside from the syntax when I’m watching tutorials or reading books, I see data scientists and mathematicians make design mistakes in their code and it hurts my eyes and triggers my ocd.

I need tips on how to put my mindset in a moldable state so I can judge less and learn more and absorb data. Like you know that philosophy that when u get old your brain can’t learn things as fast anymore? I feel like that’s already happening to me rn at the age of 20.

I'm in love with F#, the tooling can be a little buggy if you're used to TypeScript or Java but before learning it I've never been able to solve a real life problem with less than 10 lines of code

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

Get to know the new company better (Changed job shortly before Christmas).
Learn some DPs, DDD, k8s, finish introduction to hacking course, start doing htb and thm machines, finish and defend my thesis, finish books clean code, thinking in java (reading it to fill in gaps on knowledge), a few books about pentesting.
Among non tech goals: pass drivers license exam for cars, another one for motorcycles, go back to learning russian.

Could there be a "greater" GPL which explicitly declares that the constraint extends to use of the code as statistical data, such as in machine learning models?

So I started Software Engineering university and we started learning java. Before uni I was a c# developer and after two months I decided to work on my own project again in unity. When I was writing the code for this small game I realised that I get a lot of errors. Turns out that I just initialized boolean instead of bool. Thanks java

Hello all, I am in the Second Year of my engineering and we have to submit the Project at the end of the semester, currently, we are learning java programming language and we have to submit the Project on the Java programming language. our Hod suggests we choose a project which solves real-world problems, as a new one to learn java we choose the Library Management System Project. can anyone please provide the source code of the LMS Project, that will help us with our Project?

Thank You

Best
- Started a blog, networking and public learning
- Got an Internship

Worst
- DSA and CP fcuked me hard and I started questioning my ability to write code
- Wasted first six months in academics and uni stuff
- Thought about quitting programming and start UI/UX at one point