I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

No it's not AI. YOU ARE RUNNING FUCKING SQL QUERIES AND CALLING IT AI!

No it's not AI. YOU ARE RUNNING SIMPLE DATA ANALYSIS MACROS AND FUNCTIONS IN EXCEL!

Stop labelling everything as AI, you attention and investment seeking morons! @&£$¢×xo##!

The joy of cleanup <3

Overheard some guy talking about robotics on the phone, turns out it was all about MS excel macros.

people need to stop abusing terms like big data, AI etc. to make them sound 'smart' 🙄

tl;dr read the whole thing you lazy goat-molesting arse.

People. It's unpopular opinion time!
Windows is brilliant.
There. I said it.

Why? Because it has the balance of user-friendliness and customisability that is great for most workloads. Its enormous user- and developer- base allow almost anything you want to be done on it.

For instance, a few years ago I hooked up a MIDI synth pad to my PC and found an obscure program to use MIDI events as macros. I did not have to write any code, compile anything or any crap like that. (If you're a developer then you'll have no problem with that kind of thing, but not everyone's an über-technical nerd like you. Deal with it.)

I don't like Windows. But it's still brilliant for most people. All you Linux fan- boys/girls/helicopters are right to advocate it, but it will never expand its market share to more than the percentage of people who are developers, (unless it turns into a corporate enterprise (which it probably won't)). It has its flaws, but most of them will never affect the average end user. OK? Thanks.

So day 2 of my python automations.

I have spent 6 hours and a lot of stack overflow “research” to saved myself 45 minutes a day with file downloads (web & ftp and outlook emails), excel spreadsheets and data manipulation macros, all stored in a nice tidy zip file at the end.

Now to find a way to send to a web server for digestion 😎

And all of this in a poor 90 lines 😧

God damn why didn’t I look into this earlier?

I hate when someone throws at me some task all of sudden with a tight deadline.

Wednesday was one of those days.

manager: we want to remove all the offices because of our tight budget this year (multimillionaire company, lol), everyone will use office 365;

me: ahn... ok, but everything was already tested? Some macros, routines, old documents can be a big problem, as far I know (I don't use M$ at home, servers are Linux, so I really don't know about that). I can do some tests, only will need some real documents to make sure everything will do fine;

manager: yeah, yeah, everything will be fine, the high management already decided, don't worry, just remove the offices in the company, ok?;

me: alright...

*me deploys the remotion script in every f*cking machine*

48 hours later...

manager: well... everyone is complaining about the office 365, random complains, can you attend all the calls and reinstall if you can't solve the problem?

WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!

[RAGES INTERNALLY]

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Xcode.
You know why.

Hello, World! Get ready for tons of rants!

Who says Windows is useless....

Running a python script to swap wifi networks, auto connect to VPN servers, run SSH commands and SFTP files to servers, downloading numerous files, sifting through outlook for emails, running excel macros for data cleansing, cell merging and formulas all at the click of a button 😱

Oh yea.. this is all 1 task that I never have to do again😂

Windows is useless for development you say? 🤔

spent 8 months building and customizing a vtiger database for work. tons of fun got it to a point where I have saved a ton of time for all the people that use the program. boss wants to have reports out of it each morning, so I showed him how to run reports and adjust entries. he didn't like the formatting of the report. so I set up the report to export to excel and took another 2 hours building a macro that formats the way he likes and prints the report for him. he used to take a month filling out paper work to get a report, now all he has to do is open a favorite on his web browser, make 3 clicks Then open an excel and type ctrl+r and it's done. he tells me it seems too complicated and is considering going back to the paper method...so frustrating.

This week I got instructed to write a script that downloads an Excel sheet (which is used as a product database with >20000 products and lots of macros) from Dropbox, and parses it. In PHP. 🤦‍♂️

Customer: We need an app to replace the Excel ( bunch of forms with messy macros and script)

Also Customer: Can I export the form fill it in an excel and import again.

Me: Sure, Definitely
Inner me: Where's Thanos

Absolutely fucking hate it when someone sends a word document for me to fill it up, and it has the worst fucking structure ever. Everything is here and there, bunch of hacky macros and full of other bullshit.

What a lazy fucking piece of shit!

Teaching a relatives boyfriend VBA so he can edit macros in excel, he has an interview next week as a junior data analyst and this a requirement. This is his laptop keyboard. Pay close attention to the placement of ctrl, shift etc. and the lack of a backspace.

So I'm doing some OpenGL stuff in C++, for debugging I've created a macro that basically injects my error check code after every OpenGL API call. Basically I don't want any of the code in release builds but I want it to be in debug. Also it needs to be usable inline and accept any GL function return type. From what I can tell I've satisfied all requirements by making the macro generate a generic lambda that returns the original function call result but also creates a stack object that uses the scope to force my error check after the return statement by using the destructor.

Basically I can do:
Log(gl(GetString(...));
gl(DeleteShader(...));
Etc where the GL call can be a function parameter or not.

So my question is, is the code shown in the picture the best way to achieve my goals while providing the behaviour im going for?

So I had this internship in highschool for some marketing company creating simple databases for them to help out with their business.

When I came back from college for I think winter break they had asked if I would come in to help with a task that was going to take all day so they wanted me to come early. I agree and show up the next morning.

They had an Excel spreadsheet with about 5000 records in it and one of the fields was the name of the customer. They told me that the records came in as lastName, firstName or as lastName,firstName.
They wanted the field to look like firstName lastName. For a minute or two they had someone show me how they have been doing this which was just by hand. I don't really work with Excel so im not too keen with the macros. But it took me about 1 Google and 30 seconds to find someone with a similar macro to achieve this, I altered it a bit and let it go through all the records.

It was an awesome feeling when I went to the boss to let them know I was done (it had only been 10 mins), they almost didnt believe me.

Funny how one line of code can turn a day's work into a matter of minutes.

Visual Basic at high-school, pascal and C and Java at University. VBA for macros on a job. html+css+js learnt o er a weekend to pass the screening for a new job, then ruby and php on that job to build internal tools. Now I am into python for data science. It has been fun.

I felt like being the cause for “that dreaded legacy code“ and wrote 250 lines of C preprocessor macros for generating bitfields in a large header file automatically, with the goal of simplifying and clarifying register access for all peripherals in the end. Then, I found out that SDCC's optimisation for bitfields is absolutely awful (if existent at all), and I don't really want to use these abstractions if they have a performance impact.

Did I deserve that?

Fun Story: My first official project was related to system files security. In first meeting project manager was talking about Macros and OLE i had no idea what the heck he was saying.just kept noding
Took us 2 months to complete the project now it has been deployed and working perfectly
Told my manager about this during final one on one meeting and he couldnt believe me,he still laughs about it everytime we meet

Holy shit seriously: Fuck MSOffice. Fuck it right in the eyehole.

As desktop software, it's just brutally terrible. On my work mac, it's just sweaty garbage. The latest insult is that on the most recent update, msword stole the default file association from preview.

Libre isn't terrific, but at least it's closed when you close it. For that reason alone, it's orgasmic by comparison.

Because there's justice in the world, my job is not a document-centered one, so I have no real use at all for an office app, let alone the specific macros and formulae that the msoffice versions of these apps provide, so I couldn't give less of a shit about losing functionality.

The headline and main thrust of this rant is "fuck msoffice so hard that it dies of eye-fucking."

Awful idea of the day - Have a programming language with no comments, but regex preprocessor macros. Use macros to define your own comment syntax and strip them before compiling.

#define /\/\/.*//

I like my log messages to indicate automatically where in the code something happened, so that I can easily identify where a message originated from while tracking down problems.

In C/C++ this is nice and easy - write a logging routine, wrap it in macros for the different log levels and have that automatically output __FILE__, __LINE__ etc.

I wanted to do something similar in NodeJS, as I'd found myself manually writing the file name in the log message and then splitting functionality out into new files and it became a mess.

The only way I found to be able to do this was to create an "Error" object and access the "stack" member of it. This is a string containing a stack backtrace, suitable for writing to console/file. I just wanted the filename/line/routine.

So I ended up splitting the string into lines, then for each of the lines, trimming the surrounding spaces (or tabs?), and parsing them to see if the stack entry is inside my logger module. The first entry outside of that module must therefore be the thing that called it, so I then parse out the routine or object and method, filename and line number.

It's a lot of clumsy work but the output is pretty neat. I just wish it were simpler!

Happened to me a while ago:

co-worker: don't use (C++) templates so your colleagues who aren't as smart as you don't have such a hard time understanding your code.
me: said the guy who uses macros all over the place.
co-worker: macros have been around for years and you can expect one to understand those.
me: *tempted to start a discussion about C++ with one who started programming with C like 20 years ago and who doesn't give a fuck about learning new things*... You're right!

I was asked to update the whole confidential, financial database by exporting it as excel, and using Macros to edit its content. Much akin to adding one extra attribute per row.

The truth is, the table originally had 6.3k records. After updating and putting the data back to NoSQL database again, I realized I ended up creating 7k rows of data. Yet it works just perfect !

*HAILS TO ALMIGHTY FOR THE MIRACLE*

Sometimes, I still wonder where did those effin 700 rows come from, even after I skipped an excel while uploading

First time I started playing with the VB macros in Word making little joke viruses to scare my friends.
Was 1997 and I was about 10 years old. Thankfully my playful streak never went past harmless practical jokes.

Considering applying to a regular administrative job, where I can use just 1% of my dev skills in BAT files, Excel macros, browser automation with Selenium, and people will be like "oh man, you are like a hacker!!!"

Programming excel macros is the worst thing one could do to himself. VBA is the most cancerous anderen inconsistent language I had the "pleasure" to work with. I have problems like the following all the time for no apparent reason. For example: you script something, test is and everything is working just fine and dandy. Next day when you run the script, guess what...i doesnt work anymore. For no apparent reason what so ever. Maybe its just me, but i just want to hang myself working with it.
Anyone else has had such "Love story" like mine?

I've seen a lot of stuff mentioned here from little hobby projects to Matrix. This might seem unreachable because it's just too utopic, but I'd really love to at least see the world using one single platform for software that would "just work™".

Like, here you have - simple glue lang, SDK with billion _useful_ libraries that also just work™ and no need to change the code too much or select an alternative function for each different platform e.g. via macros and one last wish - it'll work on every machine that's capable of running any code.

Maybe one day...

React has been a gateway into the practical functional world.

Having a crack at Clojure/Om/Datomic, and then recognising the roots of functional and immutable programming that I've seen before.

I have a lot to learn.

Looking forward to grasping macros fully. Walk before I run though

My father is a psyhologist, but he has always been a computer enthusiast. Particularly, he once started learning Excel macros, and then evolved into Visual Basic over Excel, with which he built a fairly large piece of software that is now run in many Spanish schools. I was 14 or so at that time. I always liked computers, and one afternoon my father and I sat down, and we built a simple calculator in vb. That was an amazing afternoon, and I got hooked immediately. From there I transitioned to Python, C#, Java, php... And now, many years later, I am about to graduate in CS, and I am still totally convinced that this is my passion. I owe this to my father, and in fact now I help him maintain and update that old piece of software.

been exploring the options for cross platform desktop app, and i found :
java : both awt and swing look ugly, i really like OOP of java, and the way projects are organized is easy to scale, but i need to deploy the jdk, and the speed on gui apps isn't that great
C# : (.net/ mono, i can't grasp F# and vb is stupid) looks native on windows, not so much alien on both linux/mac, and being a java cousin is a pro, i found the Eto library for mono even looks more native on *ix than winforms
wxwidgets: for C/C++ so far this looks like the best option for total native feel and performance, but man i fucking hate C code, and this looks a lot like C code, even with proper native Cpp support, maybe i should dive deeper in it
GTK+ : did any one mention C code ? because this mother fucker is plain C with macros all over the place, it made me realize why wx is promoted as Cpp friendly, i doubt I'll use this
tcl/tk : even tho ive never wrote a single line of tcl in my life, the tk lib is the default ui for both python and ruby on all supported platforms,
and i really love ruby, and Python is Usually a joy to work with
Qt : this by far looks like the best option, proper OOP in C++, bindings for python (ruby binds are outdated), almost native look and feel on supported platforms, and even has a gui builder in xml or json/js (qml) however i bet I'll use such a thing, the building tho depends on an external preprocessor "moc" and some wicked macros, also makes working with templates a fucking mess, and the heavy dependence on QObject inheritance makes integrating external libraries a bit more tiring, the signal slot system makes more sense in python than in C++, since it makes me confused about the flow of the code
lazarus: is a freepascal implementation that looks and feels like delphi, not so much for native look and feel, but good performance and easy language to handle
electron : this fat mofo is fat, it's the slowest of all options, if i want an html app, I'll just compile a stripped down webkit and deploy that
what do you think ? and did i miss something ?

When you rewrite a macro 15 times before you realise that you never needed a macro in the first place

So far I've been pretty lucky... except for the code some of my professors at uni used in their assignments. A couple of them had this horrid habit of giving you a horribly-written, out-of-date (we're talking these chuckle heads used the same code for years on end and wondered why it didn't work on new versions of Java), messy source file with "fill in the blanks" sections like it was some kind of Java Mad Libs book. One of them had an entire jarchive of data structures we were required to use that he'd written in the '90s and NEVER UPDATED. Another one had a script he'd written for his own specialized assembly macro preprocessor that he'd been using without update for who even knows how long. Now, we were using one of those goofy virtual machines with its own simplified assembly language, and we were on the fourth version of the program. This guy'd written his macro processor in Java for the second version, never updated his Java source, only provided a barely-working .bat script for running it, even though the department's official preference was a *nix environment, and implemented this horrid "pretty-printer" that had a regrettable little habit of eating code. You heard that right. You'd run build.bat and it'd expand your macros then send it over to the pretty-printer which would very infrequently just replace the existing program file with an empty file. When we brought it to his attention, he goes "...huh. never happened to me." and proceeded to use the very same set of programs for the next three semesters, even when the assembly simulator was updated again. I heard wails of anguish from the poor sad souls that came after me as their macro processor created program files with deprecated operations, their pretty printer printed out beautiful, perfectly-organized empty files, and the professor responded to every second of a student begging for an updated version with "...huh. never happened to me." I never saw a single bug reported to either of those professors even acknowledged, let alone fixed. Some of the Java Mad Libs were the same ones they'd started using when they first switched the curriculum from Ada to Java. Thankfully after my first year I escaped into the bliss of the next three years, which were full of *nix and C and beauty.

That feeling when you decide to do something cause "it'll save so much time and boilerplate later on!" Just to have it take you all night

"object doesnt support this property or method"

THANKS EXCEL VBA!

VERY USEFUL

Who wants information about the line, the object name, type, or any other useful information? Yeah sure, i will track that object by placing Debug.Print till i find the line that causes this.
(its a bit my own fault, i found out how to solve the problem (or thought so) and wrote like the entire code without testing it inbetween)

#define AUDIOLB_EXIT_ON_ERROR(hres) \
if (FAILED(hres)) { goto Exit; }

#define AUDIOLB_SAFE_RELEASE(punk) \
if ((punk) != NULL) \
{ (punk)->Release(); (punk) = NULL; }

Looking through old audio code I wrote. Found these macros. Will most likely reuse for a new project. It works damnit!

Do you feel lucky?!

!rant

I keep diving into Racket (my first lisp-like), I often get totally overwhelmed by macros.

You don't know what power means until you program a programming language.

Not nice, Plug… not nice! You define a Plug Module with 2 functions (init/1 & call/2) and the result of init/1 is passed in as the second argument of call/2… but init/1 is executed in compile time and call/2 in runtime.
WHY?!?!
I can't think of any other behavior that… well… behaves that way!

It's not even in the official docs (¬_¬)

Wrote some macros for Excel to make my job easier and decided I'd rather only do that part of my job, so I went back to school to learn to code for reals

Devs with gaming mice.
What hotkeys / macros do you use?

For years I've been using gaming gear with additional buttons to map various hotkeys and macros to speed up my work flow.

Let's share the use cases here.

JavaScript decided it wanted to be a Prototype based language because it needed to feel special.
Freaking Prototypes.

Classes > Prototypes

That moment when you discover that Vim has macros, tag support, marks and other cool shit you didn't know about all these years in Uni... well, at least I knew about plugins lol

Trying very hard not to slam down my shitty monitors in protest.

Was just informed by my manager that all coursework has to be directly related to my present role. Since I am not a developer than my classes will no longer be covered.

Same company that spent 15 grand just for the food at last year's company xmas party.

Even though I have already used my skills to revamp the company intranet, created macros that halved my workload and now able to understand the developer docs for 3rd party software we implement.

When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.

After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.

My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.

Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.

I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it.

What keyboard macros do you guys use when you have programmable function keys?

Also a funny little story that I just remembered. My brother used to have a key that would type his password cause he was THAT fucking lazy. He was writing an NPC for a private Ragnarok Online server that I was testing with a couple people. Apparently he had hit that function key in the middle of an announcement command.

So basically, everything went as planned, but then while announcing an event, it would announce his password to THE ENTIRE SERVER. Lucky for him, there were only three of us online at the time, and we told him as soon as it happened.

When 3 letters can fuck you for 3 fucking days.. Damn long macros..😔..

In order to make PRs/codebase more readable and 'arranged', I introduced common formatter in team since people were using different IDEs.
Still, there were missed PRs coming. Turned out people aren't used to formatting. So I created macros for different IDEs, to format on save, when keypress 'cmd+s' happens.. Found out this is common practice in many places.

Still, PRs are coming messed up...

Turned out people don't use 'cmd + s' at all... they use IDEs' auto-save support.

Now I'm out of ideas... Any help?

Looking back I realise I had Lego Mindstorms. That had basic drag and drop programming for the robot. I could say I started there, but really only messed with it for my pretend play. Then I did data entry in HS. Never messed with until my wife made me pick a major so i would stop being a professional student. Started C++ in college. Where I work uses Excel, so I have been messing with the macros using VBA. Currently building websites for another class.

It is not vim. It is vim mode. IntelliJ. VsCode. They have great vim modes. Not perfect, but great. I am happy as long as I can write my vim macros. Do you know what else has vim mode? Vim! Granted, it is far harder to turn vim mode off in the latter. But to be quite honest, I usually only use vim itself to modify config files.

I was working as a lab tech/data analyst and wrote a bunch of macros to make my job less monotonous and decided I'd rather code all day than make graphs in Excel. A year-and-a-half later, I was 1 internship away from 2 associates degrees, so I quit my job and got the one I'm doing now. I love the work, but wish they'd pay me more.

"preprocessor directives are capable of unspeakable evil" - NSObjCRuntime.h:506

That moment when your boss doesn't allow you to use SQL but complains about how slow are your macros on VB Excel

Am I the only one that in order to keep C code clean has a horrible file with macros and util functions?

Needed to write excel macros to make my job easier. Somehow I went from that to web programming, and I haven't stopped since.

Bought a stream deck on prime day with the intention of using them for macros. Now it has arrived, and I realized that I don't have a clue what macros to make.

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

Not a function but X macros in C. Using them makes the code significantly more manageable and cleaner