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Search - "losing motivation"
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Had an awesome day at work got so much coding done, made an awesome well documented class for a Countdowntimer class in Android.
Was looking forward to getting home and using my motivation to continue coding my game when I got home.
Then get to the bus stop and it's packed for the Adele concert, I saw a poster okay thats good only buses are packed (I then take a train, I live pretty far from work) I get to the train station and the shittiest system has been setup,
Where people pack on the train that goes to the last stop south for the Adele concert that isn't even near the last stop!
One of the platforms aren't even being used and the trains that got partway south are tiny as hell for the rest of the people that don't want to go to this concert.
For one thing who thought it was a good idea to setup such a shitty system? Why not have one train go straight to the damn concert area and continually use that one platform and for the rest of the people have the trains running as normal?
Nope let's make a shitty system that doesn't work well.
Top it off have concerts on a Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
Dumbasses.
Now I get to wait in town doing absolutely nothing and losing the little time I have to code on my game.6 -
System.out.print(“My life sucks so bad”);
*Started a new job in january - no motivation to study in school.
*Girlfriend dumped me after 5.5 years (she met an awesome co-worker to hang with) - i had to move out with all my shit and find a new place to live.
*Losing friends who i made when i was with her.
*No motivation to finish any of my projects.
*Had christmas and new years with her - shittiest of all years.12 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.4 -
Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?
I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.
I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...
Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.
I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.2 -
!Rant
How do you keep your motivation for your projects?
I've had the same project for 3 years now but I keep losing motivation and starting again.7 -
So a few months ago I created a css grid system. I ended up fucking my windows installation by playing around with shit I knew I shouldn't be playing with. And silly old me, not backing shit up obsessively, ended up losing the only copy of my grid system.
Luckily I remember how I made it.
But right now I am lacking motivation to do any serious work. So what did I do tonight?
Signed up for a hosting account
Registered a domain name (for my grid system) through my reseller account
Setup DokuWiki
And am now in the process of creating documentation for...
... A grid system that I have not [re]created.
That's some backwards ass logic right there lol -
I've been working at a consulting company (lone programmer) as a Web Dev for about 2 or 3 months and I'm now skeptical about quitting.
I have the liberty to use any technologies I want, unless we get something already using a certain stack. The atmosphere is great and I only work part-time. The problem is that they have me working like a hog on many different projects simotaneously and expect me to meet deadlines despite new projects coming in weekly. Again, I'm the only programmer here, nobody to help me out. I don't make a killing but the pay isn't too bad considering it's part-time.
I've also noticed that my programming activity has degraded since I started working. I feel like I'm slowly losing the motivation I once had to keep working on my personal side projects.
Any tips on what to do?1 -
A new Android app I made went from 100-ish users to 0 due to a mistake in ProGuard config causing crashes upon an incremental update... I'm losing motivation.. devRant, what should I do to gain it back? :(9
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Losing Motivation: https://youtu.be/RQg_Q4HYYpg
Fun Fun Function touches on the topic and I found it very helpful.2 -
I've been doing stuff on my free time after school for about 3 years now. And i cant keep working on projects without losing motivation or getting stuck without a solution and then giving up, i've also tried working with a lot of teams and friends but it seems like everything i do or i work on ends up cancelled or full of issues and roadblocks. any advice?4
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For me, at work, it's very important to have an inspiring figure with whom I can interact and in lucky cases, get to work with.
I recently changed companies and in my previous company, inspiring people were left, so left.
Now in my new company, I have met 5 6 people and not finding anyone inspiring enough, everyone is young, I am also only 27 but still I'm an old soul. My manager is young and he's chill person but I'm not at all inspired by him I don't think he tries to charm anyone anyway. All other developers too in the team are just meh. Product is good, so I'm looking for work but losing the motivation to do good and better each day as I don't have anyone I want to become like.
:(