Reinventing the wheel can be very valuable. Even if you don't create a better wheel, you'll learn a lot about how it works, which can really help you out in the long term.

"Oh no this platform is serverless"

I hate this "serverless" term.

How does a cloud platform run serverless?

HOW?!

"yeah but like we don't have to run updates and manage the underlying stuff and can thus deploy stuff serverless"

NO.

THERE ARE ACTUAL SERVERS RUNNING IN ORDER TO RUN THIS PLATFORM.

YOU CANT RUN THIS FUCKING PLATFORM WITHOUT ACTUAL SERVERS.

HOW WOULD IT RUN THEN, ON FUCKING STARDUST?!

IT. IS. NOT. SERVERLESS. AS. LONG. AS. SERVERS. ARE. INVOLVED. AT. SOME. LEVEL.

Trashy Girl that literally did not talk to me in over five years and even back then only talked to me if she needed something texts me today:

Girl: Hi :) How are you?

Me: *oh fuck no* Hi! Good, how about you?

Girl: Great! You know how to program apps right?

Me: *Fuck you* Yeah, whatcha planning?

Girl: Sooo my boyfriends brother has an idea for an app, it’s basically like instagram and snapchat but it’s actually *insert location based snapchat ripoff idea*

Me: Well sure but that’s quite a long term project and App Development kinda isn’t cheap to outsource!

No answer.

I’m like what did you expect?

Same shit everyday. Sometimes I consider starting a new life in a country where noone knows I can code, work remote and answer with “pleas” when people ask me what I do.

True rant:

A student close to my place ask me to help him install some Software.

Me: Sure this does not take long.

Over to his laptop I noticed this weird popup on screen.

he said: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm clicking it away and opens up his browser typing in the address bar the search term for the software.

The Laptop quickly copy and paste my search term into a sketchy search website with not correct results..

Then another popup came again on screen.

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm already internally face palming. but continue my effort to get him his software.

tried different approach on the searching part en trying to click the install button for the software..

and again. my click is high jacketed and it downloads something completely different.

and guess what.. a popup showed up

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

Stop Molesting your laptop dude! Fix your Shit I'm out!

C'mon people! Spread the word! "The cloud" is not "just someone elses computer", it's a completely different way to compute!

I'm so tired of the oversimplifications done trying to explain the consept. The massive amount of work, sweat and tears put into the orchestration, automation and abstraction layers to deliver truly elastic, scalable and self healing infrastructure, applications and services deserves a fuckload more respect than "just someone elses computer"!

Hosting and time-sharing have been with us almost as long as we have had computers (mainframes etc), but dismissing the effort of thousands upon thousands of devs and ops people to make systems robust and automated enough to literally being able to throw a wrench in the engine any time during production and not have the systems suffer is fucking insane!

The whole reason the term "cloud" is so fitting is not just because it was coined from the cloud-shape used in technical and non-technical drawings and illustrations symbolising the internet, but also because of the illusion of magic it gives the end-user not being able to see "whats inside the music box".

My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.

A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”

Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.

Glad to finally get that off my chest.

++-ing a random rant from the feed is like a one night stand whereas subscribing to a user's rant is like a long term relationship!

If Corona Virus, were to make a CV, it would make an interesting read:

1. Responsible for Global Digital Transformation.
2. Reduction of Global CO2 emission and Greenhouse gasses.
3. Global Hygiene initiatives: Ensured 100% compliance on washing hands and body bath.
4. Made industry shift to WFH - saved exposure and costs.
5. Reduction in noise pollution by making everyone keep their mouth shut (masked).
6. Taught cooking, vegetable shopping, housekeeping to many,
7. Provided ample time to all egoistic and self centered people, to contemplate on their mortal nature.
8. Provided a big boost to the Pharma sector and brought back small utility stores back into the limelight.
9. Highlighted the importance of governance, adaptability and long term planning, by all sectors.

Corona’s CV seems superior to many 😉

Why computers are like men:

In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.
Why computers are like women:

No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

I broke off a long term relationship recently and today I deleted the text conversation with my ex. With 13000 messages being deleted at once I managed to crash my texting app for a whole 10 minutes.

So we have this long term contractor that EVERY FUCKING TIME says MySQL meaning SQL Server... Like wtf dude? Shut the fuck up...

There has got to be a vetting option for this shit. The number of green dots asking for easily googleable shit is getting far too annoying and y'all dumbasses answering them in an effort to get upvoted is fucking pathetic.

Google shit, most basic and long term producing ability of anyone in I.T

We are not here to give you pointers, solve homework or teach you shit.

This platform is for pro devs bitching about their workplace.

Tired of mfkers that learn how to hello world and get here

Fuck off.

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

I Quit,
Finally I quit.

This feels good after the countless red flags I raised to management and wishful thinking that this time things will be different. For the past year!

This time I lost the optimistic approach and got myself a couple of interviews, thinking, I'm in this for the long haul, could be 6 months could be a year, evantually I will succeed. and what do you know? It works, I can still pass those.

Then I set down with myself and thought, should I come to managment before signing the contract? Giving another chance for a real change? The answer was a resounding Hell No!

So, yea, if you are in a tough position. Don't give up, think long term, and who knows that "long term" might just be a month.

That would be the time when i got fired from my last job. Hosting company, it had lots of good stuff and bonusses, coworkers were great, i was doing really important stuff when suddenly, i got fired and replaced... 'You have a too strong personality, sometimes you're just too outspoken'... At hearing those words, i felt very sad. Took a few bottles of champagne from the fridge at work (they had those apparently a year already, nobody touched them)... I left the building, together with two coworkers who became friends, drank the two bottles of champagne... i was crying... Because i got smacked in the face due to my personality. Admitted i am an extravert, and i do dare to talk back when it's needed, always polite, but ensuring i was not agreeing. Still i did my job pretty well. I was practically the only one that was multi-lingual!

After that i became a freelancer. It was a good start, a lesser good intermission, but next month i am starting at a goverment department for long term, so future is looking good.

What if the long term goal of @trogus and @dfox is to create a developer army, hell bent on the destruction of project managers and clients everywhere (except the cool ones).

I mean I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Just wanted to... You know.... Raise some attention.

Ooof.

In a meeting with my client today, about issues with their staging and production environments.

They pull in the lead dev working on the project. He's a 🤡 who freelanced for my previous company where I was CTO.

I fired him for being plain bad.

Today he doesn't recognize me and proceeds to patronize me in server administration...

The same 🤡 that checks production secrets into git, builds projects directly in the production vm.

Buckle up... Deploys *both* staging and production to the *same* vm...

Doesn't even assign a static IP to the VM and is puzzled when its IP has changed after a relaunch...

Stores long term aws credentials instead of using instance roles.

Claims there are "memory leaks", in a js project. (There may be memory misuse by project or its dependencies, an actual memory leak in v8 that somehow only he finds...? Don't think so.)

Didn't even set up pm2 in systemd so his services didn't even relaunch after a reboot...

You know, I'm keeping my mouth shut and make the clown work all weekend to fix his own hubris.

'Be long-term lazy.'

As in:
Work hard.
DRY.
If it takes more than 20 minutes, then automate it.
Prevent repeated work by testing just enough.

Everything is a fucking priority.

According to the management, everything should be done yesterday already.

Gave me a single designer and developer while asking asking me to deliver long term and short term initiatives at the same time.

Morons.

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

Why computers are like men:

1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

Why computers are like women:

1. No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

I messed up. We have a senior executive that loves this phrase... "It's going to require all of us to make some sacrifices". 100% of the time he's talking about working 10, 12, or 14 hour days.

So after a few months of this I just chimed in with "this isn't church I don't give sacrifices to my employer. I get PAID for my work."

Honestly I can't say it slipped. I've been telling my wife the exact same phrase for a couple months now. Initially I wanted to discuss it with him directly. Maybe I could explain how making everyone work 14 hour days is not going to end well for us, short or long term. We already know the results short term. We got 50+ defects reported back in our first day of testing for a new project (I'm not on the project but we had a sort of "all hands on deck" meeting to talk about how we can "improve our process so that we don't make so many mistakes". I politely suggested move some people onto this project while we interview candidates. I volunteered to take some of the work items even. But that advice went ignored.

So that's why I asked to meet with the senior exec. He refused to even meet with me. Okay fine you're busy. I emailed him my concerns and suggested solutions. Never heard back. I knew he was going to pipe up with the sacrifice thing so I just blurted it out. It went ignored... So I guess we'll see if I have a job tomorrow or not.

Thank you for fucking me

Thank you for sucking me

Thank you for lying to me

Thank you for showing your true self

Thank you for teaching me what type of people to avoid

Thank you for sharpening my focus

Thank you for making me suffer

Thank you for improving my grind

Thank you for being a bitch

Thank you for being a whore

For now i have taken heavy damage and a heavy loss of time

For i shall take it as a reminder

A lesson to never forget

Short term gain

Damages

Long term fulfillment

And vice versa

Yin yang

The perfect balance

You will not be missed

I am done dealing with this fuckin bullshit

Goodbye

New job on the horizon after being unemployed for a couple of months. Moving away from full-stack a bit to focus in on front-end stuff. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Expect rage-filled rants in the near future 👌

Taking some time off was beneficial in all kinds of ways: got out of long term toxic relationship, got in betterer shape, learned stuff I'm actually interested in, mental health improved massively along with self-esteem, and I reconnected with friends and family. I'm actually enjoying life again. Don't get me wrong though, I had to claw my way out of a pretty dark hole... But I'm starting to think I fucking made it. This is a new start and I'm excited.

Fuck being in a toxic relationship.
Fuck working a job that is killing you.

If you're reading this and feel stuck: you deserve better. Listen to your gut, only you know what kind of life is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a good job by every possible standard if it's making you miserable! A relationship exists to help you grow, to give you energy, to cultivate love. Sure, you'll go through bad times but if it's pathologically bad it won't get better on it's own. Trust me, I waited years for things to get better.

Anyways, good luck with whatever is challenging you right now, big or small. 😘

I'm going to talk to my supervisor about redoing their code base.
It will take time, it will suck a bit but I think the long term investment in doing this right will be worth it.

Wish me luck in convincing him 😂🤞

During the last couple of days, I got to hear quite a horrible story...

So we start at the beginning, where I have a dev-related chat with some other strangers on the internet. One of them was working on a custom protocol implementation with an API to go with it, written in Python. There were plans to migrate the codebase to another language like Rust in the long term. So the project seemed to be going well.

Another guy and the main subject of this chimed in on various of our messages, and long story short - he uses Express.js for everything he does, and he doesn't know jack shit on what he's talking about. Yet he still does.

Later we got the delight to hear that he had beaten up his mother, and that she's now in the hospital because of it, with broken arms, hands, fingers and severe bleeding. Yet he has the audacity to complain about his sore throat, caused by all his shouting. He refuses to seek any help, or to take medicines he's been given. This has been going on for several days now.

As much as I hate to even think about it, these too are "developers". I too have skeletons in my closet, but goddamn.. that these people even exist. The very idea that you may be talking to them every day. It disgusts me.

Exercise devs, exercise, exercise and then exercise a little bit more

I've been coding for a long time and tbh programming is a very fiscally stale labour/hobby and even if your mind is rushing looking for answers, jumping from one place to another you are not moving that much, yes adjustable desks for programming while standing up are good and having breaks also helps but nothing like running, jumping, climbing or any sport.

During my lifetime I've seen the long and short term negative effects of sedentary jobs, back problems, liver problems, hormonal imbalance, overweight, depression, and anxiety.

I've been fiscally active for a long while but when I stopped, the first symptoms I had were weight gain, anxiety and depression, one night I even broke a tooth from stress teeth grinding.

Ive seen that people here might be having this issues and think it's normal, but try it out, start with a walk or jog sprinkled on your weekend.

We have a long time developer that was fired last week. The customer decided that they did not want to be part of the new Microsoft Azure pattern. They didn't like being tied to a vendor that they had little control over; they were stuck in Windows monoliths for the last 20 years. They requested that we switch over to some open source tech with scalable patterns.

He got on the phone and told them that they were wrong to do it. "You are buying into a more expensive maintenance pattern!" "Microsoft gives the best pattern for sustaining a product!" "You need to follow their roadmap for long term success!" What a fanboy.

Now all of his work including his legacy stuff is dumped on me. I get to furiously build a solution based on scalable node containers for Kubernetes and some parts live in AWS Lambda. The customer is super happy with it so far and it deepened their resolve to avoid anything in the "Microsoft shop" pattern. But wow I'm drowning in work.

Share knowledge, in the long term you won't get any advantage keeping it for yourself.

"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"

There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.

One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?

If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?

Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.

How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?

What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"

The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?

Most awkward recruiter interaction was probably when I had to tell a staffing agency that I didn't want to work for them because I had already worked for them and left.

I got into IT by working for a staffing agency and I was contracted out to a large company's IT call center. Doing the usual sort of level-one tech support stuff. After my contract term ran out (and upon reminding my boss that she wouldn't be my boss for much longer if she didn't hire me away from the staffing agency), I was hired on full-time.

Six months later I left the call center and moved on to a cloud server development job in the same company. Not long after that, I got a message on LinkedIn from the staffing agency, offering to hire me on as a contractor working for one of their largest partners in the area.

I responded asking for more details, just for fun. The company I'd be working for, etc. Then I had to inform them that I had in fact previously worked for their firm, and now worked at the company that they were offering to contract me out to, and earning a fair bit more money than they were offering.

They didn't even look at my employment information on LinkedIn before sending the InMail. Just glanced over my skills, saw the magic buzzword "devops," and sent me a message.

You know you've been staring at code for too long when you see a function called getInitial(), but it looks more like a NSFW term.

Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!

Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.

I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."

Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:

- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit

I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.

Tempted to root my phone purely to remove the long term Volume exposure warning (and the subsequent auto-lowering of it).

Fuck you, you don't know me. Maybe I want tinnitus.

Someone I know quite well just told me that they have a hard drive with a S.M.A.R.T warning and "the internet says" that he can fix the problem by running this amazing built in windows tool called "chkdsk" (he literally learned about this today, as a long-term windows user) or by reformatting the drive.
I've told him that neither of those methods will work, since it is a hardware fault that is being reported by S.M.A.R.T.
He said that there is hope that it'll work, since someone on the internet said so.

ಠ_ಠ

Due to working from home I decided a few months back to invest the money I save instead of keeping it all in my bank account.

About 10-20% of it goes to a long term investing account and the rest into the one I manage actively.

The nice thing about homeoffice is that I can have a lunch break an hour later when the market opens and review my shit, then again checking up on it in the late evening before the market closed here.

Have been playing around with trading for years but never did it with patience and discipline.

After 3 months I managed to reach over 16% profit.
My account is small so it’s not a lot of money but I’m focusing on the % rather than the $ at the moment. It’s a start..

Anyway, thought I’ll share my progress with you guys as some of you probably invest as well..

Im exclusively swing trading, so holding my positions between 1-14 days with no leverage.

😬

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

For everyone happy to see Facebook getting negative PR, just remember, unless people decide that they are willing to pay a monthly subscription for social media, nothing is going to change long term.

My CEO uncle: "anyone can program."

A quote from when we were discussing strategy for my sit down with the CEO of a company I was applying at (FYI, his advice was to research the company, be familiar with their long term strategies and such). I get that there's no need to prove my technical prowess to a business exec, but it isn't because "anyone can program."

I mean, sure, in a philosophical sense, anybody has the capacity to learn. But developers aren't a fungible asset. Treating them as such leads to ruin.

I just noticed that my desktop still has a DVD-RW in it that I never used.. which led me to think, I've got here like 5 DVD-RW's as well as 5 CD-RW's, but I never use them. Are there still any uses for them? Long-term backup storage for example? I've heard somewhere that data rot can happen over the course of a few years.. but would it really be a problem? I mean I've had these for over a year already and they look healthy to me. That said, they've never been used and just sat on the top of my desk in their enclosures all the time.

FWIW, I'm having 10TB of storage (as well as some other smaller stuff here and there.. maybe 500GB or so) in various hosts and 3 mirrors, so the need for backups is already fulfilled.. it's merely a curiosity of mine as in "ah, I still have these things huh".. so yeah.

I think that I've bought these DVD's for something like €6 for 5 pieces in a local store that doesn't specialize in this sort of thing, so I'm fairly certain that I could get them for cheaper elsewhere.. think the likes of AliExpress etc. Would they be a viable technology to maybe still invest in over hard drives for long-term storage purposes, considering that the cost of a hard drive these days is only €50 for 1TB? But I guess that tapes would be better for this purpose, no?

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

A while ago I found one of my old notes. It was from around two years ago. I had written down my programming long term goals and what I wanted to learn (more like a wishlist). While I was reading it, I realised that throughout these two years, without me being actually aware, I had learned all of it. It had been a slow progress but eventually not only had I reached it, but I had also surpassed it. It made me feel pretty good about myself. 😊

Recently in a project of mine people started to raise tons of issues and suggesting fixes "just slap this module on it", "just do this", "just do that". And no respect for the project whatsoever. Code contributions? Don't even think about it.

The users raising these do not know what language the project is written in, they do not know whether it supports modules at all (let alone that particular one), and they have no idea whatsoever what the code is like, or how this suggestion 99% of the time would not at all integrate with the overall structure of the project. And aside from all that, don't fucking tell me what to do with my project!

My question is, how do you deal with these people? All I can think of is "wontfix™️" or even "cantfix™️" in some cases. Given that this is an endless slew of users, anything long-term?

There is a possibility that I might maybe hopefully get a laptop if I help my dad with one of his own long-term projects.

If this actually happens, I don't have to run Linux of a SD card anymore :D

I’ve only just been able to catch up with the UK news and the government missed ~16,000 cases of COVID-19 over a 7 day period due to a “technical glitch”.

The “technical glitch” was the government using an excel spreadsheet that reached the data limit.

Who the fuck thought that was a good idea long term, that’s why databases exist!!!!

I might lose my job this week

I'm part of a team of 2 tech people
We were hired as programmers. But over these past 10 months we've done everything from helpdesk to fixing network infrastructure, i setup a backup server for the company, started properly managing the companies passwords,and a host of other things not in my contract.
But my boss is changing the deadline again and she refuses to listen to anyone's concerns, she doesn't understand the complexity of what she wants and since the best we've done so far can be considered at best a prototype in my opinion shes going to be disappointed

So at the next meeting me and my coworker are going to politely list our grivences point out all shes had us do at the same time and the impossible deadlines.

I've seen herpitch a fit for less so I'm fully prepared to be fired in rage in which case I'll compile the documentation and information on what we've done to email her.

But I'm pretty sure she won't find anything long term for the 40k salary shes expecting. Especially with how slow she is to do work herself. I was supposed to be on company health insurance since October 2020

In a way I'm kinda relieved at the potential of being fired.

My god the wall looks really punchable right now. Let me tell you why.

So I’m working on a data mining project, and I’m trying to get data from google trends. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of roadblocks for what should have been an easy task.

First it won’t give a raw search volume, only relative “interest”.
Fortunately it lets me compare search terms, which would work for my needs however it will only let me compare a few at a time. I need to compare 300.

So my solution is simple: compare all the terms relative to one term. Simple enough, but it would be time consuming so I figured I’d write a program to get the data.

But then I learned that they don’t have an official api. There’s a node module for this very thing based on a python module that reverse engineers the api endpoints. I thought as long as it works I’d use it.

It does work... But then I discovered that google heavily rate limits the endpoints.

So... I figured I’d build a system to route the requests through different tor nodes to get around the rate limit. Good solution right? Well like a slap to the face, after spending way to much time getting requests through tor working, I discovered that THEY FUCKING BLOCKED TOR IPS.

So I gave up, and resigned to wait 5 hours for my program to get the data... 1 comparison at a time... 60s interval between requests. They, of course, don’t tell you the rate limit threshold, so this is more or less a guess (I verified that 30s interval was too short and another person using the module suggested 60s).

Remember when I said the discovery that the blocked tor came like a slap to the face? This came as a sledge hammer to the face: for some reason my program didn’t dump the data at the end. I waited 5 fucking hours to get nothing.

I am so mad right now. I am so fucking mad.

on the long term you are just a minion getting paid enough to live comfortably but no where near enough to live as lavishly as your employer. In most cases, It wont pay enough to allow you to think of retiring early

Often you will feel you have no time to pursue hobbies because keeping up with technology is more important to stay employable.

the fact you can work anytime and anywhere will make many people expect you to work all the time everywhere.

I've assembled enough computing power from the trash. Now I can start to build my own personal 'cloud'. Fuck I hate that word.
But I have a bunch of i7s, and i5s on hand, in towers. Next is just to network them, and setup some software to receive commands.

So far I've looked at Ray, and Dispy for distributed computation. If theres others that any of you are aware of, let me know. If you're familiar with any of these and know which one is the easier approach to get started with, I'd appreciate your input.

The goal is to get all these machines up and running, a cloud thats as dirt cheap as possible, and then train it on sequence prediction of the hidden variables derived from semiprimes. Right now the set is unretrievable, but theres a lot of heavily correlated known variables and so I'm hoping the network can derive better and more accurate insights than I can in a pinch.
Because any given semiprime has numerous (hundreds of known) identities which immediately yield both of its factors if say a certain constant or quotient is known (it isn't), knowing any *one* of them and the correct input, is equivalent to knowing the factors of p.

So I can set each machine to train and attempt to predict the unknown sequence for each particular identity.

Once the machines are setup and I've figured out which distributed library to use, the next step is to setup Keras, andtrain the model using say, all the semiprimes under one to ten million.

I'm also working on a new way of measuring information: autoregressive entropy. The idea is that the prevalence of small numbers when searching for patterns in sequences is largely ephemeral (theres no long term pattern) and AE allows us to put a number on the density of these patterns in a partial sequence, but its only an idea at the moment and I'm not sure what use it has.

Heres hoping the sequence prediction approach works.

That was the first time an image didn't contain the searched for term, so I never read the text "press skip [...]" and really tired me, tried to find a bridge for too long

Recently (last 6 month) I am getting a feeling like I don't know what to do in my life. I don't have any short and long term plan for my life. No ambition and no will power to do anything. procrastinating all task and doing them when there is no time.

Recently I was offered equity in my company and I don't know if I want that. I don't have any answer to any question in my life.

Does anyone know what to do?

I've been creating a game in Unity and I made sure to tell all my friends, but now every other day when I see them they ask me if they can play it. It gets a bit old, I try to explain this is a very long-term project and there's nothing to play until it's almost complete. Only a few of them get the memo.

I have adhd and anxiety which means I cant smoke, drink coffee or drink alcohol because that fucks up my sleep and short term and long term memory badly for few days in a row. ADD symptoms become unmanageable. Fuck my life. I guess I will have to cut all stimulants if I want to be abe to function as a decent dev. I will have to cut most of my social circle because they wont understand me not going out for drinks... Fuck my life....

Being away from my PC for a long time makes me think of stupid but concerning questions that others seems to care less about.

"Is the term 'spicy' really a flavor? or a sensation?" Some would argue that it's a form of allergic reaction tolerance.

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

Is there a relation with bad long term memory and programmers?
Most really good programmers I know don't have great memeory

So, I am a couple of more months in working in my new role. Learning the trade and boy do people have a lot of fucking things to say! It’s incredible the AMOUNT OF BULLSHIT these people get away with…

Background, I’ve been a software consultant for a number of companies working in different sectors in different development roles for +16 years. I built everything from RS232, iOS to BI. Shifted to permanent developer for large global corporation where I got promoted to clown.

Anyway, anyhow.

FUCK, these FUCKING people!!!

Meeting after meeting after endless pointless discussions and even more pointless fucking powerpoint presentation which if you stack them on top of each other will reach the FUCKING top floor where there are even more morons. FUCK!

There is absolutely NO cohesion, there is NO plan, short-term or long-term, no vision that can be practically implemented. There are different organizations of equal power and the result is a FUCKING MAZE.

But people travel the FUCKING GLOBE. You know, THE FUCKING PLANET EARTH, for pointless workshops and alignments (plural). FUCK!

And it’s getting worse. We’ve got consultants hiring consultants now whose job is to hire consultants. True story! And it’s not that high up the org chart either!

It’s a beast! A retarded beast.

We are NOT helping.

I got to get out of this fucking corporation. So, I am starting to design my exit strategy. The master plan.

Oh, well. Work on bad projects with bad clients/managers, for the sake of the money, it's a life sucker. At first I thought it was not a big deal. I was collaborating to someone's elses business and doing the best work I could.

I was tired, depressed, sleepless, having allergic rhitinis every two weeks, frustrated without any opportunity to grow intellectually, fearing clients calls and emails, and... in denial.

Since last year, I decided to stop working on some kind of project and for some kind of people. As the remaining contracts and projects were being wrapped up, I started to feel relieved, despite of all anxienty of let go long term clients and see income lowering.

Then I started to use my free time and savings to futher my education, send cvs and work on side projects. It's not an easy transition. I'll still need to keep working on not-so-good projects to pay the bills, however, I've been selecting more.

Slowly I'm recovering my life, health and enthusiasm for cs again.
I'm learning to not give a fuck and it really helps.

You may always feel behind. You aren’t alone. Find something you enjoy within coding. Don’t be a hero and pick all the tickets. Pick what you can achieve. Pick a long-term ticket that you can call yours and own it and learn from it.

BE KIND YO YOURSELF.

This is a public service announcement with a threat at the end of it:

"Do not, I repeat, do NOT attempt to write web applications, or any particular sort of application that works with a relational database (damn near more than half of applications) without a PROPER grasp and knowledge of SQL.
I do not want to see you reaching out for an ORM either, no, you need to learn to properly design a database or to properly interact with them AT most before you even attempt using an ORM OR designing an application from the beginning, shit will only hurt you in the long term I promise, learning SQL can go a looooong fucking way and most DBA's I know make way tf more than people think they make, it might even be an interesting career choice"

If you do not follow the above advise, and I see your ass reaching for building a web application without the above knowledge I will be under your bed at night, putting oil in my hairy body before I jump into bed to you and leave you confused for the rest of your life.

Build to learn, YES, but for the love of Chamberlain and Boyce PLEASE do not neglect SQL. I have seen such neglect REACH production and I am currently wishing I had these mfkers close to me.

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

2020 seems to be the year of the "dev who has never seen scale."

TypeA -> "Here's a reasoned explanation for a change I think we should make. Here is the current deficiency analysis, here is the desired resolution, here is the course of action and all calculations leading to the resolution + data. This will have x,y,z beneficial result according to our operational metrics."

TypeD -> "Those were words. Why do you need that? Change is bad, learning is worse. This will just slow me down, development speed is all that matters; there is no chance that a poorly considered/factored/checked design could ever require a ground up rewrite or fuck us utterly in the long term. Why do you make my life harder? We could x -> y -> zBUTI haven't done the math and I really don't see the benefit in x, so z is pointless. What even is scale?"

The consequences of the war caused by the ever-widening gap between engineers and developers is low key terrifying.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

Does anyone hear in their company about risk assessment towards American tech companies and their services?

It came to my ear that many European big companies are asking analysis\risk-assessment companies about the reliance on American services and commodities because of how the big American corporations reacted at the Huawei ban.
It's like if America did this to such big Chinese company, they have proven that they cannot be reliable in the long term because of political turmoil.

Let me present you a new term: Boomersoftware

Definition: As long as it has an exorbitant licensing cost it is good software. Whether its used at home or by IT in the office does not matter. Specifically when a foss alternative exists.

Examples:
Microsoft Windows (Especially server or embedded)
Most types of antivirus software
Software
VM-Ware/Hyper-V
Allen-Bradley Studio 5000
Most WYSIWYG document editors

@linuxxx’s recent post inspired me to try out linux again and see if I want to use it as my primary OS. My past experience with linux has always been endless fiddling with settings or drivers or whatnot, so I was wondering if you’ve got advice on what level of complexity is appropriate in solutions. E.g. if using the terminal and changing a bunch of config files is normal, or if that is generally unsustainable on the long term.

Thanks, I can’t wait to see how this experiment goes 😄

I've only been here for 1 month for my new position in Ops, and I already miss software development!

All I do everyday is just typing commands on the terminal.
If I am feeling fancy, I may create a script or two (that's the closest thing I have to writing code).

I hope I can get more interesting thing to do in the future. If not I can't see myself doing this in long term. It's OK for occasional tasks or added responsibility but I don't want to do it as my main job.

when you are looking for php devs to join you on your startup and they don't understand the meaning of being a founder and expect a salary from the start 😭 you join early to get the long term benefits. a startup job isn't an immediate payday. ugh.

Well thus far is a bunch of rails small jobs. Funny enough this week I managed to get a bunch of php contracts "with the possibility to extend for larger contracts"

I am not really interested in long term contracts, but being that most developers that I see hired for small php jobs are not used to the patterns of development used for modern php and that i bring in a lot of my own stuff for it I know that I will be maintaining them for the long run.

So good stuff. Lets see how the week pans out. Getting really excited. Even tho I see more horrors in php than even on JS or ASP.NET or Java I still really love all languages that I have used. And normally I work like a mechanic. In which I bill by the hour(i am an expensice hooker...I mean developer) and finish everything as fast as possible to let me lazy around the house. So for example, if something takes 10 hours I will do it i 5 or less and charge all 10 hours, or I would charge per build(custom login and registration that kind of deal) and yeah. Pretty basic.

Good shit man!

If Google hadn't kill Google Play Music, I don't think a single soul would voluntarily switch to it's YouTube Crap Music.
If you remember prior to 2011 the initial plan of Google was to take market away from Apple's iTunes. They initially shipped Amazon music with branded Android OS before the development of Play music.

As a long term user of Play music I'd say "killing the product" was a "bitch move"!
Because Play music is doing really great and you could tell from its reviews and moreover the destination product is quarterly-baked not even a viable replacement in the least sense.
There are more than a million and one problem with YouTube music, currently you would notice your playlist history gets clogged up with your videos when you visit the video web. It's more like the actual YouTube app hiding behind a curtain to mimick a music player. Which is so so stupid and annoying!
As a user all I want from a music player is to fucking listen to music not to watch fucking videos... which makes the app unnecessarily filled with stupid options you never really need.
I understand that monetisation is necessary but please show some fucking courtesy by doing shit with wisdom!

I think companies are not going more and more woke but they are appeasing to the crybabies so their profits won’t diminish in the long term.

So they are doing something worse, knowing the demands of these highly offended crowd are bullshit but they prefer to look like they agree with them, so some retard do not start a twitter thread about how github supports slavery by naming default branch master.

In the meantime, this appeasement emboldens and make those children bolder demands, like a baby wailing inside a mall to force parents to buy a candy.

I just don't get the WordPress hate or CMS hate in general. Using these is not perfect, but neither is _anyone's_ code. Get over that and be more productive for your client. Unless you're the best coder the world has ever seen, and you're _always_ available to push content for an organization of 90 or 900 or 9,000 people, nobody CARES about your "coding purity". They want a website that they can still operate if your ass gets hit by a bus. Don't like WP? Find a CMS that ticks most of the boxes for your client's needs. If you have the time, budget, and long-term inclination to provide bug fixes for it, write your own Awesomesauce Custom CMS(TM) and release it to the open source community so we can finally replace WordPress with the next best thing.

Otherwise, launch site, get check. Repeat until you can retire.

Here in Spain instead of calling it CS we use the term "Informática", which is closer to the broader IT. Which means that hyped me enrolled in all the "Informática" courses since high school, only to be shot in the face by yet another "Let's learn PowerPoint" course. I honestly hate that.

I've been giving small courses (one week long) to kids at age 12-16 about real programming, starting from scratch to real-world arduino or Java, because that is what I hoped I would have found at their age.

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.

Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.

I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).

I'm not shy so I'll go first:

MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).

GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).

STACKS / SKILLSETS

I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache

I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract

MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).

SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85

*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.

I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.

!dev, depressing topic warning

-----PADDING START-------
Thanks for the update and for me to get a new one and it was the same as the one I have is a trial run to the store and get some rest and feel better soon and that is why I am asking for a friend to talk to you about your day and I don't know yet if I can get it to me by the end of the day I was in the shower and then I will be able to make it
--------
Do you ever feel there's like no real point to life, like you could die tomorrow, you wouldn't really care?

I feel life is ok, I've got it a lot better then others in my situation at least financially. But in terms of relationships probably not and I don't have much interest in developing any.

And looking at the future, I just don't see it going anywhere or getting any better? I could be easily replaced, forgotten, not doing anything meaningful.... And the only other people that would notice and remember are my parents.

I enjoy doing things but in the long run they make no difference. I can have short term goals like maybe for the next few weeks, months but if someone asks where do I what to be a year from now, what do I want to accomplish, there answer is "I don't know and I don't care"...

And I guess that's the point, each day sorta just feels like whatever...

I just finished reading the last chapter of the DevOps Handbook, its an eye opener, but not an easy read. And still recommended.

I've been reading this book for the past year and a half, little by little. It was hard since I started understanding why my work was so frustrating (I'm in System-Cloud-Ops position). The book made sense, while the work did not, it got harder since the book provides solutions, but whenever I dicussed any solutions with management they dismissed everything.
I started to initiate improvements by myself:
Prioritizing tasks I thought were more important to improve the way of work - do now and ask questions later... I got yelled at, I got my managers angry, but afterwards more often then not they admitted I was right.
To make it possible I worked overtime and on weekends, trying to prove a better way is possible, by implementing a long term solutions to solve problems instead of workarounds, automating a lot of stuff, creating labs, preparing presentations and documentation.
Time and time again I tried to pitch more ideas related to DevOps but the managers didn't care...
I know now my burnout started 8 months ago slowly, my hairline started receding, I started clenching my teeth (the doctor said stress was the cause) which was very fainful.
I continued to work but I noticed I was also more cynical, frustrated, and tired.

In the process I neglected myself.
So finally after 2 years and a half I quit my job, to focus on myself, at least for a little while.
I hope in my next job will be better.

Guys need your opinion. How bad of a thing is it if I change my job in just a year. Stuck in a toxic team. I’m a Class of 2020 undergrad, joined my current firm for the’brand’ but my experience and expectations have been polar opposites. I’m not able to put myself 100% behind to look for other jobs as I keep worrying that switching this early would hurt my profile long term.

Just wanted to hear what yall think.

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

What do you consider the best method for long-term cold data storage? And why?

I was looking at some magnetic tapes, but the degradation of magnetic charge is worrying me. Lose a single bit and you're fucked.

Dvds - not sure, some of my old ones are no longer readable. Not sure why tho, they had been enclosed in a dark, room-temp place all the time

hdds -- still magnetic.

Ssds? Idk

...?

Not writing tests for your code is like leaving it unguided in the hands of future Devs who gonna just change something and break the core logic and there won't be any regression test to run and check the integrity.

DAMNIT. I love Netflix, I do, but if you want to really stop the illegal downloading in the long term then don't remove series or movies I'm watching.
I get it, it's these big companies pulling their content but it's just so backwards.

Happy new year!

Anyone have experience taking SSRIs? What's the first week or so like, did it help long term, and any withdrawal issues?

Hello, does anyone know of a way to prevent constant long-term brain fatigue?

How do you guys keep motivation in a long term project? Cause I could be completely motivated in the first like half but then just lose interest even though I love the project itself.

I think I might need to own my own business and foot the bills. That way I can learn why it's a good idea to only focus on the short term costs and ignore the long term ones

I got a question at an interview today asking what type of developer do you want to be and what's your long term technical goal. Right now I'm a senior software engineer at a pretty well known solid mid sized tech company. I work across the stack but I really don't know what type of developer I want to be.

Which way technically are you directing your engineering career? How and why did you decide this is the type of work you want to do?

Today, I got some crap on my desk with possible bug reports from the field. They have been lingering somewhere for fucking MONTHS, and suddenly, an immediate answer was due. I was the unlucky one who was the least clueless about the product involved. SHIT.

OK, sifted through the reports. Some of them were duplicate, others obviously not our problem. No idea where to even start for the rest. FUCK, it's Friday!

But here comes "senior dev secret knowledge"(tm). Instead of saying WTF-IDK, I proposed an "action plan"(tm) (that BS term alone...) detailing the steps that we would need to take, and since I had no idea how long we would need, I just added enough steps in the "action plan"(tm) to make two weeks of investigation believable.

PM was very happy and just took that as direct customer reply. Now it's weekend anyway. :-)

Is there a scientific term for *that* window of time where you feel totally unproductive before or after a call/standup? How long is it for you?

Key to long term career survival as a developer: learn to ABI (Always Be Interviewing).

Languages as women in your life

1) Python's the Girl Friend
2) Java is the Wife/Long term Partner
3) JS is just on Acid. I don't fuck with her..

C++ is for Wifey for the ones with OCDs

P.S : I know how OCDs get. My heart goes out to these people. This is just some frivolous fun

I have a long term job and I love it of course!

Had Arduino for months, couldn't get MPU6050 working, because of a lack of time and other stuff. (Need it for long term college project, data logging blah blah)
Gave it to project teammate to figure it out, who hates even touching hardware, BTW.

He figures it out in an hour (adjusting baud rate for supply voltage)
I feel like a complete idiot.
🙁

Title: The problem with "good enough" code

Body:

I'm a software developer, and I've seen my fair share of "good enough" code. You know the kind of code I'm talking about: it works, but it's not pretty, and it's not very maintainable.

The problem with "good enough" code is that it's a slippery slope. Once you start writing "good enough" code, it's easy to fall into the trap of always taking the easy way out.

Before you know it, your code is a mess of hacks and workarounds. It's hard to understand, it's hard to maintain, and it's a nightmare to debug.

I've seen projects go down in flames because of "good enough" code. The code was so bad that it was impossible to fix, and the project had to be scrapped.

I'm not saying that you should never write "good enough" code. Sometimes, you just need to get something working, and you don't have the time or resources to do it perfectly.

But if you're going to write "good enough" code, you need to be aware of the risks. And you need to make sure that you're only writing "good enough" code for a short period of time.

Once you have a working prototype, you need to start refactoring your code and making it better. You need to make it more readable, more maintainable, and more testable.

If you don't, you'll eventually regret it. Your code will become a liability, and it will hold you back.

So next time you're tempted to write "good enough" code, think twice. It might save you some time in the short term, but it will cost you in the long run.

Woke up in the middle of the night thinking about work and how the team seems to be always a few steps away from the next production issue and well always busy with urgent work too so that the crap that produces more and more tech debt never get cleaned or fixed...

And now it's grown so big... The bad habits are just sparking more bad habits and well the only person (boss) able to correct course still hasn't realized for the last 4 years... Constantly thinking things will get better after the next sprint. Hell we don't even use proper sprint planning... even I can't keep up anymore and can never get any long term high value/low immediate return work done...

So I guess I'm having a work overload, nervous breakdown before even going back to work...

I have an urge to tell all this to his boss and have him give him a wake-up slap or maybe bring in a more experienced/veteran manager to set the ship right but my boss personally is a very nice guy so don't want to rat him out...

So not really sure now what to do other than maybe just stay in my lane and put up the blinders? And let the whole forest around be burn down... Though I still gotta bear the heat till it all dies down by itself...

Can't say when that is though...

It takes courage to use npm as a product. The inability of its leader, Isaac Schlueter, to communicate the reasoning behind decisions pose a risk as a choice for long term toolchain.

My company will move to yarn for now and jump ship to Deno as soon as it reaches all of my check marks.

I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION.

i need advice.

is it better that i study during the day for college until 12pm (midnight) and then work on my own project from 12pm till 4-5am, go to sleep and wake up around 9-10am so thats 4-7h of sleep each day. the only exception would be tuesday bc i gotta wake up for college at 6am.

so i would be working on my project 6 days for about 4-5h per week.

i plan to do this for 2 months.

so: day shift - college study
night shift - my work

please help me organize my time.

now, im thinking about long term effects on this. its going to be pain. but i am in pain each day so i no longer feel pain. i will be exhausted as fuck. i am fully conscious of what is awaiting for me if i decide to do this.

here is my question. am i going to get a burnout from this? am i going to look physically different in 2 months (in a bad way)? am i going to be mentally worse? am i going to get really skinny? this would basically be a work of 19-20h for 6 days per week for 2 months. that is approximately 114-120h work week minus tuesday.

i have to be mentally equipped for this so i plan to do home workouts in night shift session in order to prevent burnouts. I'll do walks/jogs too in day shift for mental cooldowns. the most important thing for me is NOT TO GET A BURNOUT AT ALL COSTS DURING THIS PERIOD OF TIME NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

i need serious advice on how to do this right AND AVOID BURNOUTS AT ALL COST.

i MUST stay operational mentally for the next 2 months.

please list the things i should DO and NOT do so this can be achievable.

Broke up with my girlfriend due to ongoing stress to commit to the relationship, to perform at my current job, graduating early next March, looking for a full time job/studying for interviews, and going to school.

We never really planned long term and we were just in the relationship to have fun, but man do breakups suck.

I want to be able to focus on myself so I can set myself up for greatness in the future. Unfortunately that means sacrifices have to be made so I don’t lose my mind. Oof

you know, i've got 5K+ in cash savings before i would even need to dip into "long term" retirement funds

and other than the food and the drink, i don't spend anything (can scrape by on 1-2K per month)

so fuck it, i'm going to enjoy the amazing weather that is everywhere in europe right now

if companies are going to be assholes, i am too

because in the long run i know my skills and vast competances are valuable

companies can hire the cheap clueless scrub in the shortrun

but i know i'll win in the long run when they realize who they are trying to hire does not exist

what's even one year of being unemployed against a lifetime of opportunity and projects? nothing.

One unfortunate thing I have realized about being a human is that socialization is necessary in order to excel in the long term

I realized that I'm spending about 2 hours in the taxi so I told myself that I I gotta make use of this time and started reading books about pentest and such.
After a while I noticed that this is not working as expected. Because the stuff I was trying to learn by just reading books were mostly practical and I had to see how they really work (like running the codes and so on)
So I reviewed my long term plans and oh! All the topics are practical !

So I'm asking you:
What are the useful topics that I can learn by just reading or what are the other ways I can make use of this time?

[internet, real life, !dev]

I'm sitting 11h on the bus again.

You guys/girls/etc opinion on long term relationships?

I am a programming teacher in Colombia and the week's topic is very useful for me, thanks to all for writing your ideas, but in the other hand I think that some points have not been understood, for example in my college we use in the beginning of the course notepad so that the students learn the sintaxis and good practices and they no dependent of a especific tool or Ide (an advantage of this practice is that the student learn to use command tools easily). We want that que student learn programming and not a language or software . This because in our experience the students learn to use a tool but not to resolve a problem and this is bad in a long term.

so for the past yr i have been unofficially a lead on a project, i wasnt officially a lead but i was the one in control of everything in it and got to do decisions.

the project itself was horrible, and i was the only one who delved into it and understood it thats why everyone relied on me i guess.

recently PMs took charge of it after i told them i want to do something else. now they are bossing the hell out of me to finish their new stuff in that project. Now i hate every second of my job.

i regret telling them i am unhappy with the project because at least i was the only one responsible for it. maybe long term that would have been a good reason to be promoted. but now they took charge so im afraid i wont get promoted anytime soon.

fuck my life if that case i might as well start anew in another company

Is 'long term thinking' a forbidden thing??

I: if we use Chef to deploy our project to the different servers, we can save a lot of time and hassle (also for the server people)
They: Do we need it now, because it takes a lot of time..

Yes, it takes some more time initially but it pays back in the long run especially because now we have a terrible mess of server environments..

My boss telling me not to worry and be more confident, after pointing out that not updating bad ad hoc code is not a long term solution, just inspired the confidence in me to tell him to go fuck himself if shit brakes during the weekend and evenings.

For fuck's sake, what are the creators of tailwind thinking? So, I made the mistake of upgrading to tailwind v4 and now my site is broken. Who in the fuck thought removing half the features is an "improvement"?.

wE've mAde ConFiGUraTion EaSier with CSS.

Sure, let's see. It sounds neat on paper, a "CSS-first" approach. But when you've got existing projects with a meticulously crafted tailwind.config.ts file, it's not simplified at all, it's a migration nightmare. Suddenly, my custom colors and breakpoints are all gone or behaving unpredictably because the new system decides to interpret them differently.

Do these people actually work on any project that is long-term or is everything they work on just green-field?

Because when you have hundreds of pages and custom built rules, and now eveything is broken for no goddamn reason, it's not fun, is it?

I've now wasted days on this shit when I should have shipped so many features.

I simply can't wait to switch my career to something else. Like, this stuff is just so bad man. Come on.

The lack of one (no thinking about long term design and issues) leading to poorly designed systems that crumble when it needs to be scaled and has massive bus factor and code duplication.

Short term: Become familiar and independent enough to choose my own machine and software to work with. Right now it's "Here's your MBP, we've already installed the stuff that the rest of us use". If I try and switch to something else and I run into a problem, I'm on my own.

Mid term: Like a lot of you it seems, I'd love to have my own setup. Either have my own company or partner with some friends/family. Whatever lets me do the work I want, build the things I want, and gives me a bit more freedom outside of work. Perhaps a little side-hustle to help with finances.

Long term: I'd love to return to my studies. I don't think I'll ever stop coding, it scratches an itch, a need to make something out of nothing, but I'd love to pursue a career in physics.

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

Does anyone else find it strange that the stupidest people in the company are making all the decisions.

In order to be able to engineer software you have to understand everything that the product owner knows, the business analyst knows, the product manager knows + how to actually make the system both work in a reasonable time frame and be maintainable long-term.

But we're not the one making the decisions. The irony of it is something that I can't get beyond.

And when I do go out on a limb to point out a logical inconsistency to UX or product... They don't thank me for it they hate me for it and then 3 days later figure out that they should be doing it and quietly follow my suggestions.

Seriously is the goal here to create good software or to avoid stepping on everyone else's toes in the company who is overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

I think companies based on a hierarchy of non-technical people controlling technical people, in the creation of software products are a dying breed.

When it comes to creating software products everyone in the hierarchy should be technically minded.

I've seriously been trying to come up with an alternative perspective here.

The executives of the company are completely out of touch and the only thing which looks like progress to them in a sprint review is something visual on the front end.

The technical architect, the product owner and the product manager all seem to be engaged in keeping the executives happy and managing their expectations. By means of obscuring the truth.

Imagine how much more cost-effective building a software product would be if the executives were engineers themselves.

I'm keen to do an experiment and build a company comprised of engineers only.

Obviously they need to have insight into the other roles. But none of these other roles are as complex as implementation itself.

So why exactly are we the slaves of these well-meaning under thinkers?

Anyone recalls my raspberry's hotfix for overheating problem?

Frankly I am considering it as a long-term solution. I currently have a proper rpi fan applied but it's just too freaking noisy! I thought my work lappy is noisy when at 90C. But this tiny rpi fan is just.. Painfully loud! Especially when rpi is suppised to be tiny and invisible.

Soo.. Yeah.. 3"" fan for an rpi it is!

I've switched from pycharm to sublime to vsocde in a month, now vim is catching my eye, my mentor will kill me if i started using vim now but it's freaking interesting, will be learning a little bit of vim, will stick to vscode for long term i guess.

Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.

More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.

Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.

It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.

Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.

C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.

To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.

Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.

It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion.

Nearing the end of the year, and all I'm thinking is that I'm just making bad decisions left and right. And these are like long term decisions, that don't show results until much later.
It's making me really depressed and it's not good.
There are a bunch of should haves all littered throughout the past 3 months and it's really fucking with me.

Can I list this experience? Will it look bad?

I am an entry level programmer in a software shop, or whatever they are called. I was given no mentorship on the task I have done. Not even proper documentation and it seems management is passing me around. What I mean by that is that the task I work on no one has ideas about since it seems the last guy who was responsible left. He was a senior though and it seems that I might have been too eager to find a job. Now I am being tasked for things a senior would do but I have the entry pay and knowledge and skill set. 2 months experience...

I am going to design a whole system from scratch and they have not read anything on it. From networking to applications to fees to compliance requirements. Oh the great part is they want it soon, no pressure, but we have to start certification within a tight deadline. This is a great opportunity and maybe a dumpster fire waiting to start. I will gain so much real experience but they are taking a great risk. It seems that is throughout their code and infrastructure though.

I plan to leave after the project. I also will document and hopefully they start reviewing my stuff to catch my incompetence. Not on purpose but from pressure and inexperience, which I hate cause I was excited at first.

I plan to stick the year or until Covid strips work-from-home, cause they are bit “old school”. I will begin my job search as well. I just know I will burn out long term and the money and package is shit.

Do I list them if I leave earlier but finish the project?

I ended my Medium Subscription today.

Reason:
Non Technical =>
Repetitive posts, often by the same author saying pretty much the same thing.
Multiple copied of the same post being suggested all the time.
Click baity titles which have no real content.
Amazing amount of self promotion rather than any actual value in the article.

Technical=>
Very slow loading of media on the pages, videos don't even load.
Provided solutions in tech based articles often unconventional, super harmful in long term if you have them in your code.

I do agree that they definitely have some good content, but I don't feel it's enough to make me stay given all these issues.
I'd rather just use it on my pc without logging in.

Installed Ubunut 20 on my laptop (Thinkpad). It cannot open the App Store (with A letter on it). Imagine building a system, marking it as stable (long-term-support) and shipping it in such state that it is unable to launch the default (pre-installed!) app-store. This is Linux for you.

Updated the system; still cannot start the freaking appstore.

How do you feel about ieee and other paid research websites?

Every time i search something complex, an ieee research paper would pop up and i couldn't read it, coz i don't have the membership. Even if i did, i had to pay Rs. 1000 (~=$12) . For every paper i want to see

I am not saying its bad to demand a price for your work. But i wish ieee was more like github or medium, where people could also optionally publish their content for free viewing. The cost is making a lot of students miss deep knowledge of research papers.

The main thing that currently frustrates me as a student is the fact that University subject syllabus are made by sulky old phd teachers who have been long term members of ieee and other paid research orgs, and thus have designed the syllabus with topics which are covered nowhere but in research papers.

I also know that some of you sre thinking "dude , just google search anything and you will find tons of videos and content on anything", but from what i have observed, free internet takes time to grow for a perticular topic . If i search a relatively complex topic i may find some surface info and basic videos, but to go deep, i have to rely on paid/pirated books and papers.

These organisation has gathered a lot of content and renowned people. Maybe they can give away a few knowledge to the open source.

Please, give me tips to write maintainable source code

(Long term)

How has weed affected your ability to code short term and long term? And is there anyone who codes while high? What about CBD?

My career plans? I'm going to a psychiatrist in two weeks and I hope I will get a long term sick leave due to mental health.

Seriously, I got given a project that someone else was working on, it's beind and they're on long term sick. I did the project as discussed. My manager has decided he wants it done differently, wasting about a week of work. This is the same manager that complained about my rate of closing tickets. 2 weeks ago.

Malicious compliance time, I'm closing the current ticket and creating a new one for the new work.

Sooo cobol eeeh...?
Old legacy system still running ehh?
Eyes closed and hope for the best from management eh?
And now everybody needs them all, while simple ppl dont get their money managers just say sorry ?

Twas a timebomb and it will still be. Its hugely pathetic of those responsible to disregard their old systems and dont test them for the worst case.

Why am i trying here to deliver proper working systems with long term update schedules when ppl in charge suck with their responsibilities?

What password manager/ generators do you suggest?

Also would anyone please clear my possibly misconceptions on the password manager/generators?

I’m that type of guy that only uses few password combinations at different websites.

tl;dr: my account out leaked, I didn’t want to use any password manager because I don’t want to give password to the company. Some do generate complex password for me but if they become defunct I’ll be locked out from those accounts.

A while ago, aptoide got attacked and my password(same as google account) was leaked. I’ll have to thank google for this, google blocking a stranger accessing account using a “less secure app” So now I’ll doing a emergency password changing process to all of my accounts with the password.

I like the whole aspect of the password manager, but I always thought that I shouldn’t give my password to other companies. And I got to use some website long term, if the password management company ever just become defunct, I might lose access to my account forever.

Walking past a conversation with people and over hearing the term CNN, thinking its about Convolution Neural Networking. Long story short. Im standing here between people discussing news resources. Fml

Any Spacemacs users here? I'm debating a switcheroo from sublime. I know my way around vim, so general usage shouldn't be a problem.

I'm more interested in the long term use. I guess since its just some kind of emacs layer, it should be pretty fucking stable for the foreseeable future, but how is the plugin support?

I'm currently doing React at work, and a couple of other Node side projects. Syntax highlight should be sorted out for me. I would like to tailor it somewhat for productivity, like a good file explorer, integrated terminal and other auto tidbits like auto brackets, auto close tags and whatever else. Any good tips on plugins for me?

Also, looking for a nice color theme.

So I’m panicking a lil bit.

I applied to a bunch of summer co ops from like feb 20-25. I haven’t heard anything from any of them yet - not all of the postings have been closed but my first choice posting closed feb 22...

I know it hasn’t been all that long but I’m pretty used to getting responses (non dev jobs) within like a week and I’m scared that I won’t get ANY responses.

Most people started applying for co ops in December, and I know I procrastinated a lot, it’s just unlike regular jobs where u keep applying till u get something, it seems like co op applications shut down by now, 3 months before the summer term.

Did I screw myself over? Is it too late? I’ve never applied to co ops before and I just REALLY don’t want to spend another summer bagging groceries...

I have 3 goals this year.

Move out

Maintain at least 1 new long term friendship

Be more responsible

I have way more smaller things I want to do but these are the end goals. Each entail their own struggles but I know I can do it.

Keep me responsible fam

Spend weeks porting everything to Docker and automating deployments so we can be cloud provider agnostic...

Hosting providers all want long term contracts.

Question: How do you guys charge your clients? I have had an hourly rate for quite sometime now, but never have I been able to use it since I do not know how to calculate it.

What I usually do is charge a fixed fee and charge on top of a feature is requested,
or I charge a monthly fee for long term contacts and charge on top if any additional feature is requested.

I want to try out hourly charge but since most of my clients are online, I do not know how it will work since the client can believe that I am simply adding additional hours or delaying work causing the hours to increase. (Most online clients are new to my services, unlike clients I meet offline, online can be less trusting)

Learning to tech to speed up learning.
Using a new cooperative learning technique, AI Lab researchers cut by half the time it took a pair of robot agents to learn to maneuver to opposite sides of a virtual room.

A combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms are responsible for computers achieving dominance at challenging board games like chess and Go, a growing number of video games, including Ms. Pac-Man, and some card games, including poker. But for all the progress, computers still get stuck the closer a game resembles real life, with hidden information, multiple players, continuous play, and a mix of short and long-term rewards that make computing the optimal move hopelessly complex.

Image: Dong-ki Kim

Before I started working, I used to feel like I depended on documentation and the internet a little too much owing to ultra crappy long term memory. After spending some time at my internship going through code written by "professional developers" several years senior to me and trying to write unit tests for it (surprise: the code was in production without having underwent any sort of testing), I feel like the amount of time I spend online reading usage recommendations, alternates for optimisation, best practices for writing clean and descriptive code and all that is a lot more rewarding. Some bad things help you feel good about yourself.

Holy shit big companies are absolutely rubish. How on earth do they not think about the long term. I'm like "look what we are doing isn't right, we can't make new functionality that will no longer works in 6month. The other department webservices are changing and you're well aware of that" and they're like "we need to produce value, we don't have the resources, blabla". Why should I care? f#ck you it's not my company and don't come back crying that it's not working.

I am pursuing master in computer applications, So please give career advice for which language should i master for a long term perspective in this domain??

Hello Guys... Just wanted to have some opinions:

Considering long-term career stability, how does a Machine Learning engineer compare with a Software Developer ( C, C++, Java, Python, etc. ) & a Web Developer ( Java, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, Python ) ?

How did mid-2000s computer users get along with just 1 GB of RAM or less?

As of today, anything less than 8 GB of RAM seems impractical. A handful of tabs in a web browser and file manager can quickly fill that up.

Shortly after booting, 2 GB of RAM are already eaten up on today's operating systems.

When I occasionally used an older laptop computer with 6 GB of RAM (because it has more ports and better repairability than today's laptops; before upgrading the memory), most of the time over 5 GB were in use, and that did not even include disk caching.

It appears that today's web browsers are far more memory-intensive than 2000s web browsers, even if we do similar things people did in the 2000s: browsing text-based pages with some photos here and there, watching videos, messaging and mailing, forum posting, and perhaps gaming. Tabbed browsing already was a thing in the 2000s. Microsoft added tabs to their pre-installed browser in 2006, back when an average personal computer had 1 GB of RAM, and an average laptop 512 MB!

Perhaps a difference is that people today watch in 720p or 1080p whereas in the 2000s, people typically watched at 240p, 360p, or 480p, but that still does not explain this massive difference. (Also, I pick a low resolution anyway when mostly listening to a video in background.)

One could create a swap file to extend system memory, though that is not healthy for an SSD in the long term. On computers, RAM is king.

That moment after finishing a task, in my case an exam, and close all related tabs and move the folder from thr cloud to long term storage (where it won't ever be touched)

hey guys i need advise.
I currently got a job that i love with a lot of freedom. but the payment is not good and i am concerned that the company won't be there in the next 5 to 10 years.

I am a 25 years old, self taught programmer and my current employer is the only one I ever worked for. Recently I browsed xing and found a company which searches an employee with exactly my skillset (they need someone for a specific ERP system in which I am damn good at). The company is half an our away - my current job 20 minutes away. Also I think because the person they are looking for is rare because you need technical knowledge of windows and doors and you need to know how to administrate this erp system plus knowing some programming stuff.
There is also a very big company 10 minutes (walking) from home where I could apply. I think at this company i would start lower but could maybe study and working for them with higher expectations in long term (just google Hettich in germany here in the village this is big)

The problem I currently have is the following. If the company I work for is closing in lets say ten years, then I am 35 without a degree. I have a girlfriend - want to marry her and getting a child.

I have holiday now and i will apply for both companies. I feel very uncomfortable doing this because the company I work for is the company of my granddad. I don't have the balls to tell him that even if i get a raise that does not solve the 35 years issue.

Well, first of all I will just apply. Lets see how much value I have.

But I thought that asking you all may give me some other input to take into account. What are your thoughts on this?

PS: just a formal "sorry for my english" and thanks for reading

Looking for potential clients on Upwork is like finding a holy grail these days.

Cheap clients with laughable budgets and high expectations on the right.

"Devs" and "Designers" with questionable skills who will work for the lowest rate possible on the left.

And don't forget the ever growing service fees and absurd measures like turning your profile private if you don't make any income in 30 days. Suuure, that's totally going to help anyone who isn't willing to work with low rates.

I am getting done with Upwork. Back on Elance I managed to get a couple of really good clients for long term projects and good commissions. Here it's impossible, even with lower rates.

You're competing against people whose portfolio involves changing a few colors for a envato template or logos made of stock graphics, and they are still more likely to be hired over you because they are willing to work on a t-shirt design for $4!

Networking is where is at. Getting contacts, talking to people, force yourself to introduce to companies as a potential asset.

That's how you get the good projects, right?

... Right, folks?

How do I go about taking up a job that I might only want to do temporarily but the company X may have a long(er) term expectation? I can't wrap my head around it.

Also the other company Y in which I am much more interested, but still didn't reply to my email after 2 days. So I am stalling with X before taking it up...

I hate this timing tactics. I feel like I am playing a strategy game.

Guyz so I found this climbing gym with a sauna, it's all good and stuff but I wonder if i shouldnt supplement with a side of ashtanga what do u think? Long term i want to improve my surfing

I'm still doing my bachelors.
Anyone with a 9-5 job with 10+ years in the field not bored of everything in the universe and spending valuable time with family ?

Don't really know if this is an appropriate question to throw on here but what the heck.

So I'm thinking about trying to look into the dating scene again. I'm in my late 20's and about a year away from graduating college so I figured I have the time to try it again. The thing is the last time I was dating I was a freshmen and I had been in a long term thing but it flat-lined a year ago. My life is different now and meeting people has changed too.

How does someone who's a career focused developer find someone in the dating pool post-college? For an FYI I've done mainstream sites like eHarmony with a moderate amount of success but nothing that really lasted beyond 2 meetups. (Meeting people at random locations for the sake of it has never been my thing so bars are sort of a non starter).

We love getting feedback, so I'd appreciate any I get from you guys. :)

My coworker got fired due to budget & not enough work to do (his work is done, they didn't had long term tasks for him). But he is a junior dev (1y prof. experience in IT, 15y prof. experience in total) and he is now interviewing for nearly a month. Nearly all recruiters say that they are looking for someone with 3y prof experience in his field.

Does anyone has advice on how to get a job with as good as no experience?

Is quiting university because of obvious reasons to pursue a freelance web developer career a smart move?
I am just 21, sick of my teachers and environment and I feel that I would eventually fall into depression if I stay . I love to code, I dream code literally.
What are the long term consequences which I can't think of.
Devs please help me make a smart choice before I make biggest or smartest move of my life.
I am making just enough to sustain myself. Just Brought a MacBook air worth 1000k with little help from family.
Will not having a degree be an obstacle in my dev career.

I've having issues trying to form a proper branching strategy for my mean stack app deployment.

Heroku creates staging and prod branches for my web app so I'm a bit confused if I need my own staging branch?

Currently I have this: feature -> dev -> staging -> heroku staging (the staging branch seems useless)

Also, Heroku allows you to promote heroku staging to heroku prod, so there's no point in making master push to heroku prod.

I'm thinking of making my strategy to the following, but wasn't sure of any pitfalls or anything I'm overlooking long term.

feature -> dev -> master -> heroku staging -> manual promote to heroku prod.

Any suggestions?

The term "technical debt" is poorly used. I hear folks of all stripes and roles proudly proclaim that they've "reduced technical debt" in some way. It's used as a catch all to describe some kind of supposedly beneficial change. I think it's just more software process word salad. Mostly because there seems to be some assumption that "Yay, that stuff that was changed is no longer a problem" when odds are that it will be changed again before too long for more "technical debt reduction". Software changes over time because the requirements change over time. I don't see the need for the phrase at all, and I think using it gives some false sense of accomplishment when really the constant change of code is the normal state.

My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...

And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.

But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.

So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...

Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.

But what the fuck... What the fuck?

It annoys me immensely when I struggle with myself, criticizing my own lack of knowledge in certain areas and my colleagues say: "You'll learn by doing". No, I won't, that's a foolish dogma.

I won't and I have never learned by 'doing'. The best results I've obtained have been through understanding every last bit of what's under the hood of a particular functionality. I'm not going to understand the white box by constantly probing the black box, it's just unsatisfactory and insufficient information. It's even dangerous to base yourself on the black box results because you often might get false positives.

I got through university by massive multilateral sensory focus: kinesthetic (writing things down), auditory (listening to the professor), visual (observing graphs and models of the material taught), conscious (mentalizing it all and interlinking information so that later it's accessible from long-term memory). I can confirm this is necessary for the brain because a Neurologist once told me just that.

At least for me, I had the most horrible grades (D's and F's) in freshman year with the 'learn by doing' method and the best grades (A, A+) with the multi-sensory method in later years as I matured my studying methods. In fact, with that method I've continuously outsmarted other people who had 10 years more experience than me ('experts', 'consultants',..) but they preferred to stay in the ignorant 'bro zone' rather than learning things properly. Even worse, the day they arrived on the scene, they completely broke the production environment and messed it up for the whole team. I felt like banging my head on my desk. It just makes me disappointed in the system.

If you follow popular method, you'll soon find yourself in the same problems that arise from doing what everyone else does. What happens at that point? That's right, they have to call in someone who actually bothered learning things.

So...I think I have a job now sort of...just signed my first big long-term gig as a consultant/dev for an US based startup, pay promises to be solid, the CEO seems to be shill and they'll pay me for hours worked with a relatively low minimum which is great because that freedom will allow me to continue my projects and dumb college assignments.

Let's hope neither of the two parties fuck it up.

I need advice:

I'm a developer, I have lots of experience with Java and Python (More on Java than Python). But I'm not a game-dev.

I've been thinking about dedicate serious time to develop a game, like a long term plan, using my free time.

Top down adventure / puzzle game; you know typical go here, get key there, put three gems here, unlock that and so on.

I have two options: Go with Java as I can move easily with it OR use an engine like Godot even though I've never used it before.

So game-devs, any advice on what should be the best approach here?

You can infer how long ago a developer started in the industry by whether or not the use the term “parm.”

Hello, fellow developers, i am having a question in mind that confusing me about my career choices.

At first i joined a company as a full stack developer with 6 months experience in MERN, MySql etc.

Now i have completed nearly 1 year in this company but they are always assigning me to full DevOps CI/ CD projects. And i agree i am learning a lot of new things and completed the given works too.

BUT , the question is , should i completely shift as devops engineer or software developer? What might be a better career in long term?

Ps: in CI/CD i did almost all works in Typescript using CDK and sometimes a little bit in python (not good in python but learning)

2019 Recap: Quit studentjob. Got engineering degree, worked as a devops consultant, got a child, bought a house, started at new company as mainframe developer.
2020 goals: less cobol, more java, get courses for a long term goal of becoming an it-architect.

Long term problem has been
What language and toolset to write desktop apps in if not win forms and c# because sure as. Fuck wont be wpf or std win32 with c

I'm writing a minor productivity app which consumes and modifies a vbscript file on a network drive which apparently gets included in other productivity tools to drive the business, as well as updates the relevant DNS entry the field is associated with, and because I care about making the world a better place now writes the data out to what I hope becomes the authoritative source for said data which eventually replaces these who-the-knows-why-they-are-there network drive files and snippets.

The tool removes the need for an ISP tech in the field to make TWO phone calls when they update network equipment. One for the vbscript tweak, one for the DNS update.

Oh, did I mention that some PHP app under a L1 helpdesk guy's desk that the company has made absolutely necessary for their business (and I subsequently moved to a god damn server) consumes the vbscript file and parses it into something PHP can understand?

You can't make this shit up.

The only saving grace is that I have my team rewriting all of this ridiculous shit in Haskell. Type safety and long term refatorability will keep us sane.

A long time ago I got an idea for an Internet concierge shopping service that would pair you up with a human to help you comparison shop anything. Obviously this was before AI or the kind of tech we’re used to now. The idea was that the help of a real live person to help you track down deals was better than some of the emerging product recommendation engines I was researching. I figured I’d at least make a short term business out of it until tech caught up. So I built the site, DB, and business logic and recruited my bargain-hunting wife to help people find good buys. It worked ok, but wasn’t easy to monetize because people wanted her help for free rather than pay any kind of fee. Their perception was they weren’t saving a substantial amount if they had to pay someone to help them. Of course, our pitch was that by paying someone to help them, they might avoid paying more by trying it on their own.

It was an interesting experiment anyways.

Is JavaScript the Tower of Babel? What will be the long term effects of the explosion of new frameworks. I liked it when you could use a backend server side language and had JavaScript as the special sauce that could do what the backend could not do. I am sure I will be sent to hell for blaspheming the hot, new js frameworks. Oh well better to burn out than fade away.

So a new project was assigned to me with Laravel. I don't know abcd of this But have to do within strict deadlines :(
Very much hectic weeks for me... waking up long nights,,,, working on weekends..
Hope so will soon grab on it and will complete task in less time.

Now am thinking does being developer is ok for long term. :( Sometime it really become very very hectic.. And How can I take less stress about the pending tasks.. I mean if something got stuck .. my mind will stay there until I finished/solved that off :(

Any advicess from those are in long run being dev

If this contract does not renew, I would be back in the market looking for a job.

I tried building a project with nextjs. I dont like it. Angular is still better. Nextjs might be more lightweight but i dont care. Theres way too much shit i need to write and theres no boilerplate code like there is in angular. Also in angular components can be grouped in 1 directory and from there you group its services interceptors guards scss typescript html etc. In nextjs all of that shit is thrown in /pages and /components while styles go to /styles. Reasonable, but what happens when the application is large as shit? Thats why angular will always win long term

"Mercury poisoning is a type of metal poisoning due to exposure to mercury. Long-term complications may include kidney problems and decreased intelligence."

decreased intelligence, huh... so how many thermometers do I have to eat to become jestdotty?

Have you ever needed to compromise the architecture for quick delivery?
So not to go into details but imagine this:
You start with a surface are that will fit a few items, but you need to stretch it to its limits.
When you start to populate it you realize the architecture is wrong, but delivery day is close so you make it work anyways.
When launching you need to prop it up with something, you find some 3PP that was not really meant to function this way but if scaled up it just might do.
For it to work long term you need a platform to put it all on, it may be slow as to tortoise but it will have to do.
Whenever this happens to me I think it has worked in the past (ex. Terry Pratchett) and I continue to help making the world a more magical place.
Where a one in a million chance will always work but that’s not a bug… it’s a feature.

I was given a project to fix and improve a legacy unity VR project I was told was for the oculus rift Now the problems started almost immediately partly stemming from the fact I’ve never used unity before this project was handed to me as my long term TA assignment
And partly from the fact there was no oculus integration in the game at all. it was built for GoogleVr and most of the code the last person wrote consisted of massive sections (25-50 lines) of commented out code and no explanation of what the hell the non-commented parts are supposed to be doing

So long story short. I’m now in a basic unity course, six feet deep in documentation trying to read resources that go way over my head in understanding, and am rebuilding the project from basically scratch (took the assets and saved the c# scripts for reference) and have finally figured out how to at least get the player character constantly moving forward and stream in the WRLD3D environment like the last guy did. Now to get the player character to turn and change direction when the player turns their head with the oculus headset

By the way. WRLD3D is a really cool api thing in my opinion

48 hours. But if we’re talking about long term stress, 9 months.

Today I got a long term contract at the company I have been working at for the past two years. We maintain and develop an open source java based framework, basically you write XML to configure components (pipes, receivers, senders) in Java to build a pipeline which usually functions as a backend service. We also do implementations of the framework for our customers.

Im in a position where I my main task is applying the framework which is writing XML or skyping people at the client office to chase them to fix their server settings, please create a database for us (each time different, sometimes we get a manager user sometimes the regular user can do everytbing), create NPA's, execute queries in ACC environment or ask them why 5/10 we get an error 407 pro,y authentication required ffs

My salary is increased aswell and they told me before that I am one of the five developers in the company (20~ devs) that they want to keep costing what it costs. Management also told me they are looking to bring out something like shares or certificates for those five dev's!

Sounds pretty good right? Actually im really happy about those things but I feel like management managed to keep me in the company whilst my dreams are saying to travel around the globe, do projects wherever I am and if I find a nice place to live ill stay there.

What would you guys do?
Would you try and find a way to chase your dreams and travel/live around the globe or invest your time and effort in growing the company?

I'm hesitating between Fedora and Linux Mint, i like them both but i need to pick one for long term daily usage I'm even thinking about Debian 12 as a desktop environment usage for samba, syncthing jellyfin, apache...

Home Remodeling Pros Lafayette, LA specializes in transforming homes through expert remodeling services that enhance both functionality and aesthetic appeal. Our kitchen and bathroom remodeling services focus on updating these vital areas with modern, efficient designs that improve your daily experience and increase your home’s value. These renovations are key investments that offer long-term benefits.

Our comprehensive home improvement and attic remodeling services further maximize your home’s potential by creating additional functional spaces. Whether you need extra storage or a new living area, converting your attic can address various needs. In Lafayette, LA, our team is committed to delivering high-quality results that meet your expectations and elevate your home’s overall comfort and utility.

Remodeling Pros Lafayette, LA
Phone: 337-222-3401
Lafayette, LA 70506

Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.

Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.

Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.

No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.

Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.

Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.

Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.

Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!

These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.

This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.

Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production.

Why do they demand 12-month goals when we use Agile Methodologies?
If we do it right, we don't know what we are working on next sprint, let alone 12 months.
Our goals are to work on the highest priority stories. We are not to work on stuff "in the background", so how can we have any long-term goals?
The only things we can plan are outside of our actual jobs (like conferences, training, pilot programs/hackathon projects, etc.) So the only things we can review at the end of the year are not the most important things we do.
Poor managers love numbers and checklists to hide behind.