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.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

Dear Indian Companies,

Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!

6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...

A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"

I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...

Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.

So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!

Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?

And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!

When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...

And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.

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.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

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.

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

So today I bought the firsts lego boxes for my eldest son and gave him his first long-term addiction...
Feels SO FUCKING GREAT!!!!!!

++-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!

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

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.

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 😉

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

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.

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

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. 😘

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.

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.

"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?

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 😂🤞

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 😊

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.

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

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 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?

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.

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

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?

In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.

This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.

Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.

The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.

The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.

Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?

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'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.

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.)

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.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

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.

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.

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

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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?

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.

so... not really a rant because i'm happy to be in the long-term zenlike state where i don't really give a fuck about anything anymore, but...

so today's my birthday (thanks in advance for all the semi-mandatory "cheers" reactions and such)

the agency i do temp jobs through sends money weekly (for the one week back) (which is the main and only reason i use them). they arrive at friday 12:25, so that's when i know to go "check" by withdrawing it, and it's also awesome because it's the best time to provide funds to reward myself (by booze/weed) at the end of the week.

last week, nothing came in. i called them and learned it was due to the contact person in the company i did job in being too late on sending the agency list of people who showed up at the work, i was told it's gonna arrive one week later together with the proper payment for the week-1,so effectively i was one week without any money (literally), but on the next week double was going to arrive, which is nice.

that next week of double was now. i found out that no double arrived, only single-value payment. i called them to ask why.
i was told that what arrived was the late payment, and the dude in company was again late with sending the presence list, so the other payment, for the proper week's work, will be a week late again.

so... that kinda ruined my financial planning tor tge week that's going to happen.

i guess my point (if i have any) is... funny how when someone fucks up, there's nobody for me to be angry at and hold responsible in any way, but when i have delays in my work due to delays upstream, nobody gives a shit about my excuses and it's my fault and i should have compensated, it was my responsibility and duty, and me not doing it (to my own detriment, for someone else) is me failing.

funny how the subjective dynamics of the world always somehow works out in a way where everyone else fucks up and i either have to suck it up and be okay with it otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole, or suck it up and extinguish their fire for them, otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole XD

anyone else noticed this in their life?
how does it work? what is the factor that decides whether you're in the "suck it up" class or the "fuck it, someone else will suck it up" class?

doesn't seem to (just) be the money(flow), i've seen this thing happen even in situations where the money/client dynamics were flowing the opposite way to what would be natural for the shit fall direction.

Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps

Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long

My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...

TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.

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.

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.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

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.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

@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 😄

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.

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!

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

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.

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?

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!

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.

!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...

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.

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.

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

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

...?

I'm just FUCKING DONE. Everyone around me looks at me like a fucking paycheck they either don't want to pay me or like one they want from me but that I can't make enough of. Every time I open my stupid cakehole something stupid flies out of it that offends someone or makes me look incompetent or sets me back somehow. I'm not suicidal but I don't want to be on this planet anymore. I'm stranded here with nobody who wants to hire me and people around me who are tapping their feet waiting for people to hire me. I have nothing in my bank accounts to cover enormous and increasing monthly expenses coming up on the horizon and no way to pay for them. I have a stupid president who just keeps making it worse and worse with every stupid thing that comes out of his geriatric mouth or that he signs with his shaking dementia-ridden hand. He just keeps taxing me and taxing me and now has an army the size of the FUCKING NATIONAL GUARD of IRS agents ready to FUCK ME UP THE ASS if I have just one business expense out of order. I have all of this responsibility for my family and none of the power to do anything for them. And now that most of my kids are adults, none of them can afford to move out for the long-term future and also they're not able to get much money to help out so it's still incumbent on me to carry them until they're like FUCKING 35 YEARS OLD OR SOMETHING! The wife is pretty much sick of me and my shitty attitude about it all and she says she thinks that I think it's all her fault. We don't have any kind of romantic relationship anymore (well, I have all the interest and she has all the avoidance).

Also, I'm a man, and white, and straight, and "privileged" (oh, so privileged) so I'm the _worst person on the planet_.

I was born on this earth to be a FUCKING WARNING, not the lesson. When that meteor comes, let it take me out first.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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!

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. :-)

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

Is the CS field creating terms for the sake of creating terms?

Someone mentioned a "closure" in another post. I instinctively knew what they meant by that based upon the code I saw. I had heard the term thrown around before, but it had not yet connected in my mind. I wondered why I had not been exposed enough to care.

So I thought: What does C++ have as far as closures?

I found that C++ has lambdas. Those are definitions for function objects. They do not exist at runtime. But a closure does. The analog is you have classes. They are definitions and do not exist at runtime. But instances of classes do. So at runtime the instance is what you are working with. This is the same as lambdas vs closures in C++. The closure is the runtime counterpart. Why a separate term for what essentially is an instance? Is it because it captures data and code? As far as I know the closure is all data that gets passed around that calls a function. So it is essentially an instance of a lambda.

Another term: memoization. I have yet to see this added to any dictionary in online tools like a browser. Is the term so specific that nobody cares to add it? I mean these are tools programmers use all the time.

My guess is these terms originated a long time ago and I have just not been exposed to the contexts for these terms enough. It just seems like I feel like I have been in the field a long time. But a lot of terms seem alien to me. I also have never seen these terms used at work. Many of the devs I work with actively avoid CS specific terms to not confuse our electrical coworkers. My background started in electrical. So maybe I just didn't do enough CS in college.

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?

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?

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

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?

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.

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.

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...

Randomly one day, out of the blue:

Echelons: You now have Workspace, and it’s a requirement you use it. Make it successful because we paid and are paying a large dollar amount for it, and our competitors have reported success with it. We want email communications companywide eliminated by 50% within the first 60 days.

Management: Ok, excellent! We want to do XYZ.

Echelons: Nope, can’t do any of that.

Management: Ok, how about a, b, and c?

Echelons: Nope, nope, nope.

Management: Alright, let’s try 1,2, and 3.

Echelons: Nope, not possible.

Management: What can we do then? We need further direction at this point.

Echelons: One group for all departments, posts, and attachments only. PDF, .jpeg, .png files only. Everyone in the company must be registered within seven days and using the platform. Only mobile devices allowed.

Management: We have almost 10,000 employees, and the SSO aspect alone could take weeks and months.

Echelons: Insignificant as Facebook said it should be easy to deploy. Also, every post not created by admin will need to be manually approved and done so within 5-10 minutes after its submission 24/7, 365.

Management: Ok, solved. A little shaky, but it’s working. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators?

Echelons: Only 1700 employees have registered; the app has been up 14 days now? What’s wrong? Where’s the engagement? Effective immediately, all members of management must be creating and starting 4 to 7 posts daily, including weekends.

Management: Our registration process with the SSO client isn’t smooth and clean across all devices. We had to implement training to overcome this. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators? Can we make all members of management either administrators or at least moderator? Can we at least turn on live streaming and video formats?

Echelons: No! 10 admin and mods max. Yes to streaming and video.

Echelons: Progress update, please. Include ROI timeline and impactful usage data. This must to pay for itself in the first six months and continue to pay for itself long term, along with showing XYZ company-wide growth quarterly.

Echelons: Hello?

Echelons: Hello?

Having Workplace shoved down your throat has been an interesting experience. Anyone have any exciting ideas or examples to share on what they have utilized with Workplace and increased employee engagement?

[internet, real life, !dev]

I'm sitting 11h on the bus again.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.
🙁

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 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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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?

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

I cycle between games I play. I am now back to Minecraft. Playing FTB OceanBlock. It is progression lite. Less of a grind with short and long term rewards. It is like a skyblock, but you can start on an actual island. I am really enjoying the mods FTB developed just for this modpack. The modpack has plenty of tech in it to satisfy my need to build something purely for fun.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

Please, give me tips to write maintainable source code

(Long term)

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

So here's what I'm putting up with for the last 6 months, clients..

A client proposed to me a project he had in mind. Project is pretty solid, could have a bright future. Since they didn't have the money to spend, we agreed on a % of the income they will earn from the project. So, let's say I get 20% of the income in exchange for building the application. I didn't receive any down payment or payment of any kind.

Just for info, project is a Web application/portal and it is ~80% done at the moment. Client provided a logo and a wireframe/ideas/pictures how he sees the project. I built everything, from DB to Frontend. Also, project is completely custom made, no CMS or anything. Project will make profit by subscription base, every user of the project pays.

For various reasons, we did not yet sign a contract. So, what is my issue...

Client sent me his proposal of the contract, said it's solid stuff, just sign it. In the contract, it stated that he owns the application in full, can sell it, etc. and I get % of the price. There were also other sneaky parts about me having all the responsibility but owning nothing. I naturally declined and took a lawyer to construct a normal contract.

My proposal was/is, I own the application(source code) in full. They are obligated to pay the monthly percentage and can use the application normally and make profit. At any time, application can be bought by the client if they pay for the development. So, basically, they are getting the application to use "for free" with no initial payment/investment. And this is a long term deal, they can use is as this as long as they want. Also, if they go bankrupt at any time, no penalty or payment is needed, the risk is mine.

The client refused and what he claims is the following...

His share in the project is 80%, mine is 20%. If project is to be sold, I get 20% of the price. So, meaning, if we go to production tomorrow, if I want to buy his share, I have to buy 80% of the application I built entirely. Also he is convinced that by "telling me" what to built he's owning everything. In his words, he dictated me the notes and I'm just playing the violin.

I am having trouble explaining to him that he is getting the application to use and make profit basically for free and cannot and does not own the source code unless he buys it off. We are going in circles, I send him the contract to review, he changes it and returns it back. Also, he removes the parts where it is clearly states what he provided and what was done by me.

So, we kind off agreed on the authorship but in the case we break the contract he wants to be able to use the application for 3 more years.

Was anyone here in a similar situation? How do you handle this kind of situations?

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

Was hoping someone with experience can provide insight or advice on this. It's a long one, so thanks in advance to everyone who took time.

Received a great job offer a few weeks ago and was told I'd get a contract in January. They seemed pretty switched on about the kind of problems I might be facing and even raised my asking price, so I'm definitely not interested in looking elsewhere.

However, I started getting interview requests Thursday last week, one of which is for next Thursday.

Received and signed contract on Friday. Haven't received copy with employer's signature yet, but it's still early so np yet. However, I still haven't replied to the interview requests.

Should I turn down the requests or accept them and hope I get the contract back in time to cancel? I mentioned to the recruiter that I was receiving interest from other companies and I wanted to seal the deal with this company, but didn't receive response yet advising me whether it's cool to keep my options open.

I don't wanna look dodgy to the dudes I signed with in the unlikely event they find out I accepted interviews. I also don't wanna come across as combative or a pain to work with by pressuring them to sign soon.

However, I also don't wanna have a panic attack in the middle of revision season if I don't hear from these guys for a week (they get pretty busy at times). I feel like I could be sentencing myself to short-term anxiety (and I'm already anxious af in final year) if I start turning down offers before I have a signed contract.

Thoughts?

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.