Found this in a 15 year old computer magazine!

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

We have a couple of magazines on the lunch table at work.

There was a paper cloth covering one magazine and one of the Linux engineers lifted it up. This is how it went:

LE: (Linux Engineer) hmm what's under here...? *picks up the cloth*

*a windows magazine appears*

LE: (while putting the cloth back) ew windows, let's keep you hidden!

*other engineers laughing*

devMag - A regularly published digital devRant magazine with tech articles written by users, user interviews, etc

Headline of a computer magazine our class gets:
"AI is missing one of its important parts - intelligence"

Changelogs are like a magazine for programmers...

For any job, you can include in your resume, without a hint of lying, that you are Time magazine person of the year 2006. Seriously.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Boss : Can you please make a page where I can add a magazine cover image, summary and source urls.

Me : Sure.
..
..
..
Me : here you go.

Boss : How do I upload multiple images in this page ?

When your code have more issues than vogue magazine.

devRant my new in toilet magazine

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

From Datamation magazine circa 1968. Now you can really geek out your friends. This is the kind of stuff you can throw out at a party to kill any discussion.

Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?

Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.

some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.

BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....

"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"

Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?

Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)

"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.

Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.

Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.

Just wanted to share what I got for Christmas. It's a Ruger 10/22 Limited Edition TALO. :3

Also got a 15 round magazine to replace the California legal 10 round, because fuck California! :3

Subscription for hard-copy professional magazines indicates a new low in my social life.

I hate cliched lines in office.

When someone I respect leaves the company I don't say "Good luck for your future. Keep in touch". I shake hands, look them in the eye and say "It's been an honor"

On a birthday I don't say "Happy Birthday". I say "May you grace the cover of Time magazine" or something else related to their aspirations.

Tl;dr: I spent more than 2 hours and $429 on a book thats as thin as a pancake.

I needed to go to my campus to pick up my textbook from the school store for my Software Management class. The bookstore is in the building next to the construction site. I had to park on the opposite side of the campus and walk the 2.3 miles to the store, stand in line for 20 minutes to have them tell me that i need a printed out class schedule. I had to walk all the way back to the building next to where i parked to print out my schedule in the library. I then walked all the way back to the bookstore, and the line has maybe tripled in size. I stand in line nearly an hour to have them tell me that they no longer had rentals available for my book, even though i reserved one (they thought it was cool to just rent it to someone else apparently). So instead of paying $45 on a rental, i payed $429 for a brand new textbook that looks like a magazine. Its stupid thin, i could probably read and study it all in less than a week. Thinking of this, i ask the cashier about return policy. She says i can't return it, but i can sell it back to them within 10 days of purchase for about half the price i paid for it. I walk the 2.3 miles back to my car, decide to sell the book on Amazon or something after the semester, and once again leave my campus angry. I cannot wait to be done with this place.

What is your story of your first encounter with a Linux Distro?

Here's mine (Slight long version) –
Back in my 8th grade I used to buy Tech magazines that used to have DVDs filled with random updated contents like Audio/Video tools, Wallpapers and other stuff. There used to be this "Linux Distro of the Month" section that I used to ignore because I didn't know what it is.
But one issue of the magazine had a review of this "amazing new" Ubuntu 10.10. I read it and at first I thought it's some kind of theme for Windows (I know). But then I tried it out on my HP Compaq nx6120 which had a pure BIOS. No UEFI shit. Ubuntu came with it's wubi installer and it installed Ubuntu smoothly like a normal software. Later I discovered that it is a completely different operating system that doesn't run anything from my Windows. I was upset about it and I booted back to Windows.
But I never removed it. I felt like exploring what it was and why people use it.
It's almost 9 years later and I'm so glad with what had happened back then.

1) That loud ass mother fucker sitting besides me, shut the fuck up.

2) Air motherfucking condition turned all the way to the max makes me horny and want to fuck your motherboard.

3) Illiterate assholes writing code without any comments and half assed function name just to look cool when we approach them for doubts.

4) Onsite motherfuckers enjoying their lives, taking photos of it and posting it in a monthly magazine while we s(h)it behind the fucking systems all day.

Thank-fucking-you, y'all can die suffocating in your own smelly dierraea poop.

It was 1986. I'd just bought a computer because I wanted to make a cool flight sim like I saw a friend at school do by typing in a bunch of code from a magazine. I read a thick book on DOS/BASIC and another on Assembler. As I had no idea what Assembler could possibly be useful for in my life, I went the DOS/BASIC route and made some fun programs. Then it was Prolog followed by C and Smalltalk and then HTML and JavaScript. All by taking classes or reading books and then making something useful or teaching others.

When I was 11 or 12 and I found a magazine for kids that for some reason had an HTML tutorial to build a personal site with Microsoft Frontpage. I think it was 2006 back then and for a few weeks I learnt a lot about HTML, managed to create my site and upload it to a free host. I was fascinated. That was my first close up, at least, to something related to programming. From that day, I knew I was going to work with computers. Now I'm a Java dev but I'm still seeking the language for me. Maybe Javascript.

Time travel is real ...reading magazines of the future today ..thanks to JIO

Got my first Linux magazine with real worth tips for noobs with advanced stuff (like mounting a web mail server using Nmap, create personalized distros ssh, terminology and stuff , you don't see that in most noob magazines).
First point... Comes with a CD with 4 distros (OK... I perfer to download the latest for my VMs) and 200 euros worth of.. Linux software?
And I ripped this beautiful cover before even reading it... Killing a wasp. So, worth the 10 euros even before opening it

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.

Suck my hairy asshole, devs who disable paste for web forms. Or more likely, management softs who read in a trade magazine that paste is bad.

The most epic magazine ever made.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

Last year my boss made me develop a way to "creatively" feature ads on our online magazine.

It was a piano keyboard. Yes, I created a pure HTML and CSS piano. Every key had a small title, when HOVERED emitted a sound (tuned on D btw ) and when clicked opened a pop up with the ad content. We tried a black and white piano and also a rainbow-like coloured one.

I strongly advised against everything. We're small and I have a good relationship that soured because he thought I was just being lazy.

Guess what happened? Advertisers saw the live piano and ran away. Hours and hours of development thrown away.

Please. Trust your front-end developer.

Because Vogue magazine is where I get all my computer recommendations!

Was in our mail today... It's a magazine where you can take evening classes in the IT branch. Who can see the error? It can be found without speaking french. Here is the translation of the headline: Application programming in Java.

(Hint: Web development was on another page.)

Typing 2 pages of sprite codes from a magazine, then saving the little game onto an audio cassette...

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:

Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.

Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.

We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.

We LOVED that computer.

We made it into MagPi Magazine!!!!!!

We had a lab in middle school, 5th grade, I think, where they had a few Apple IIe computers.

I remember one day looking over at a smart friend's screen and he was playing a flight simulator. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me a computer magazine where all the code was published for it. He had typed the whole thing in and saved it to a floppy.

It was part of a turning point for me when I was deciding between social groups: wanting to be a dumb jock or wanting to be smart. Thanks to that kid's example, I chose being smart. It cost me dates with the hot girls later in high school when I should have been carrying a pager for all the teachers who needed me to fix their computers for them, but I made sure to cry all the way to the bank when I was eventually making six figures.

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Meh... The only magazine for us lazy folks.

Saw this magazine at the store. Read it the wrong way around the first time.

Cant believe this shit happened in my country today

A mass school shooting where a 13 year old kid shot and killed 9 kids, teachers and a security guard. Several other kids wounded and one girl having brain surgery

All of this because he got an F in history class

He was a quiet kid, well behaved, got straight A's and very intelligent. But he was reportedly bullied and no one did shit about it

This the type of shit you see in america daily. But now Serbia marks #1 country in europe with a school shooting

The kid planned all of this attack for 1 whole month. He drew a sketch on the paper of the school's pathway so he can know where to go, from enter door to exit door. Even wrote the names of kids he planned to kill, sorted from high to low priority

Due to Serbia's law, no one under 14 will be held accountable or go to jail for any crime, and this 13 year old kid was so intelligent of knowing this dumbass law that he executed on this plan Now in May because he turns 14 in July this year

Ironically, his dad was a well known doctor, and now the dad is fucked. Dad's gonna go to jail. Because the kid stole his dad's gun with 5-6 clips of magazine

Very bizarre

!rant
A friend of mine got this piece of gold, im so curious to read it tomorrow at work!
(He bought it in a german store called "Kaufland")

I wrote a tech book several years ago for O'Reilly, which itself was a dream come true. I'm still amazed I got that deal done, and the fact that my name was on a title with a unique animal on the cover is SUPER cool.

Back then, their publishing system was based on Git with their own markup language, and it was sort of a chore to use. Easy and straightforward, but laborious. I spent 3 entire days just (re)formatting my drafts to their code. They've upgraded it since, I see, based on the same fundamental versioning idea and still using Git. Neat!

I've also done tech writing for .NET Magazine, which used Word's change tracking, and penned articles for other publications using Google Docs, or even drafts in WordPress.

Have all of you run into interesting systems used by publishers to manage content?

Worst coding mistake was copying data from a live site to a sandbox site. Data was 1 year old and it's a magazine site.
Accidentally restored year old data to live site. Rolling back all content to a year back.
Thankfully I had a backup that fixed the issue.

Tomorrow, my team will receive TV reporters for an economy magazine.
We'll have to fake a meeting and the Marketing Officer insisted that everyone has to be present.
I wanted to do teleworking on that day because of the huge strike of the public transports.
Guess who will wake up at 5:45 tomorrow morning?

A company I work with are reluctant to change their hosting provider until the end of their hosting term. (Which may be a perfect reason as it's paid for)

The website goes down everyday!!!! Not to forget it's a popular magazine website!

Here are the new relic emails at 1 minute intervals:
- HTTP 500 Response Code
- HTTP 508 Response Code
- NetworkError: Read timed out
- Connect to domain:80 failed: connection timed out

Received this from a magazine in the mail today and i don't even know where to begin with this so much fail...OK Vista that's where I'll begin...Windows Vista...

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

This was at my first job, a site that sold magazine subscriptions during the dot com boom.

Times got rough during the bust. First sign, free snacks disappeared. Everyone started worrying, and checking fuckedcompany.com to see if we were on it. One day everyone's machines shut down, and someone walks around saying company meeting in the cafeteria. My Russian coworker asks if I have a screwdriver so he can liberate his hard drive. Go to the meeting. Most of the company is being laid off immediately. You have to hang around having interviews with your boss to see if you still have a job. I don't.

2 weeks later they call and ask if I'd like to come back. Turns out trying to run with 1 programmer wasn't working out for them. I go back.

First problem we try to tackle - the shopping cart is slow. We put in a hack SQL file to delete carts older than 1 week. Gets better. Then gets slower again. Rinse and repeat 2 times. Finally digging through the source in the perl folder (not what the main site was in) we find what scheduled job was supposed to do this. Dig in. What do we find out? sa_scheduled_tasks user account was deactivated, because only user accounts belonging to people who still had a job were left active.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

thought about buying an entertaining magazine while grocery shopping as the kids got theirs too. i was delighted to find a beginners guide to python (right beside the xxx-zines 🤔 ) but after a quick glance embarrassed it was 10 bucks for like the first two sololearn chapters.

TODAY IS THE LAUNCH DAY OF THE BIGGEST PROJECT IVE WORKED ON..

A magazine website.
We launch the redesign in three hours.

AND IM HERE SITTING SEARCHING FOR BUGS

Got a new Mac from work, wanted to do some magazine editing so downloaded Scribus.

I begin to panic because most of the top toolbar icons were not visible. I figured it was bugged.

Okay, calm, it's still vaguely usable with shortcuts and menu. But damn this sucks.

Oh,

They just haven't adapted the program to work with system wide dark theme.

That, that would be why.

RIP the great Jerry Pournelle. Enjoyed his wonderfully witty dawn of PC revolution columns in Byte magazine - Chaos Manor. So many memories.

You guys would have loved his columns and he would have loved devRant 😪

An arts online magazine. The manager needs to include ads but don't want to do it on a obstructive or invasive way. So far so good, I agree.

Since this is an arts and culture mag, he gets the idea of having a piano keyboard on the sidebar. Each of the keys has to be animated so that on hover it seems to move and play a note. When clicked, it displays an ad. The user don't know or see the ad until he/she plays the note.

Of course no one bought any of the keys. Hours of work wasted.

We all hate ads but some workarounds are not worth it.

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

It sucks when the Project Manager assigned to you ruins your website and you get all the blame like you're not doing your job properly. It even more sucks when the Designers /PM / TL gets mad at you changing /adding something on the website that is not in the slices they submitted. Yes, I respect your work but the boss and the clients want to have their website more interactive. We're not doing brochures and magazine, people.

In the old days "hacking" was used for just about any coding, or "computer programming" as it was called back then. There was even a programming magazine called "Hacker", which had nothing to do with the "malevolous programming" that the word "hacker" has become to mean.

I've complained about this friend who I help out with a side project before and I don't know how to deal with this anymore.

He decided he wants to send out a free weekly newsletter with content that takes a lot of time to create.

He got burned out from all of the work. I tell him to only do it bi-weekly. Still doesn't listen.

He doesn't work, whereas I have a full-time job, his mom feeds him and does everything for him.

Someone on the newsletter said they didn't receive a newsletter they signed up for and now he's dumping that on me. I refuse to deal with it. I have paid a lot of my own money for the website he uses to post stuff. He knows more about the newsletter software than I do. The least he can do is deal with the people on Discord and the email newsletter issues, because I honestly don't have time. He has a solar generator at his house, so he can work through the power outages we have on a daily basis, I do not.

He keeps wanting to give out free shit to people, whereas I told him this side project needs to start making money to make it worthwhile for me. He's always making excuses that he doesn't have money, blah blah blah. We designed a cool magazine and it's pretty much finished, but now he's stalling with things he needs to do to get it published on Drivethrurpg.

He just hassled me again to check this gmail I made for him to use for the newsletter and this YouTube he wants to start. I told him, no I haven't had time.

The other day I went to his house to hang out, he gave me a taste of his home made ginger beer and I said it's great, but then he went and drank a pint of it without even offering me some, right in my face. His mom came out and asked me an hour later if I wanted tea. These people are weird. Maybe I am weird.

He also doesn't use the project management software I showed him how to use, so I don't know what's going on. And I told him this a couple of times.

Think I should tell this dude that I don't have time to work on this stuff? And how do I do it politely, yet sternly?

Received insider information about my magazine. Two possible things cab happen tomorrow:

- I wake up tomorrow and we go through our first meeting of the year (general meeting happen three times a year) and everything is fine

- I wake up tomorrow as the new editor for my section but at the cost of my closest friend leaving the magazine.

Theregister.com is wrestling with gpus that need 700 Watts of juice and how to cool them. 50 years ago I was reading an excellent magazine called "Electronics". And I remember that IBM came up with a scheme to absorb enormous amounts of heat from chips. You simply score the underside of the chip in a grid pattern and pump water through it. Hundreds of watts per degree Celsius can be removed. Problem solved.

I did some online shopping on the weekend. And oh man, this retailer’s checkout had so many problems.

I placed an order for a 2022 edition of their magazine. My confirmation page lists the 2020 edition. I didn’t get a confirmation email and I’m sure my email was right.

I chat with customer service and they said my order was for their car buying guide. You bet my my response was what the fuck.

"Leafing through an old magazine, I noticed a small ad about a design course by mail. The headline read, 'Art for pleasure and profit!' I have never found a better definition to describe my profession. Of course, at times it is more the pleasure and less the profit, at times the contrary. But if one of the components were missing, design wouldn’t exist. " - Carlo Angelini

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

Tandy 1000SX. 1986. I got home from school, and Dad had set it up. He got us a subscription to 321 Contact magazine, so we could learn some programming on it.

I remember playing the space quest games, King's Quest 4, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Carmen Sandiego, and a lot of others. Eventually we got a 10 MB hard drive for it, but for years, we booted its dual 5.25" floppy setup with a DOS 3.2 floppy.

I was subscribed to a computer book and magazine publisher in my country and I learned many things such as Word, PowerPoint, etc from its books. One day they sent me a book about Visual Basic 6. I didn't have any idea about it but I started it and at the end I was able to make an app to calculate my exam scores in a graphical interface. Since then I was addicted to coding. Language after language...

When you need to fix a windows password, and a Trinity Rescue Kit CD arrives through your door on a magazine.... :-)

I'm pretty sure the talk about the dangers of AI is nonsense. Private Eye magazine was dead on with this:

I was probably 5 or so.
This was during the time when i heard that dial up modem sound from my dad's "computer room" every night when i went to bed.

The computer had a huge CRT monitor which made that annoying high pitch noise but i loved playing with it so much i didn't mind.

My dad installed a Croatian knock off version of Super Mario from a floppy disk he got from a magazine (i still have it lol).
Every time you died you'd have to start the game again by typing "mario" in CMD. Me and my sister played it so much we became pros.
He also tried explaining how he codes in Turbo C but i guess i was too young to understand it.

Does anyone else remember magazine articles from the 90/00s talking about gasoline fuel cell powered cell phones? I guess lithium killed that tech path.

Saying you read other stuff than FOSSPicks in Linux Pro Magazine, is like saying you read Playboy for the articles.

How many people remember that cracked used to be a magazine along with Mad in the same genre ?

Do you guys read any journals (like ACMs "Journal of Experimental Algorithmics" or ACMs "Queue") or technical magazines (like Oracles "Java Magazine" or "Arstechnica")? If so, which is your favorite or which do you recommend? Curious to hear your suggestions 😉

"To create anything–whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom–is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic." - Tom Bissel

This is not a rant, but I've searched this for some time now and can't seem to find it so maybe any of you will be able to help me.

A good few years ago, when I was still a 4-5yo I had a Win95/98 (I don't remember which). We used to have this CD that had a bunch of games, like Chucky Egg or Mahjong, or a xmas-related one (where you could bake cookies, serve drinks - there was a red and a yellow one - and more I don't remember), one with a (purple?) dragon (in a dungeon, that was played in levels, but every run was randomly generated, I think), and many more.
The CD was white with black text, and had a yellow-ish/orange-ish grinning face, that looked like a man's, with a few hairs, that was drawn simply, nothing too complex. I also know there was this one game that made the computer/game freeze, and that was in a blue palette?

I played the crap out of that CD with my mom, and she used to play the dragon one for me (until she found out Mahjong), but it all ended when it broke inside the tower and we had it replaced by the WinXP tower we currently have at home (and that's in pieces because me and my brother disassembled it).

I know it's not much, but does any of you remember anything like what I just wrote? It should be from around the 2000s and probably from a gaming magazine.

pupils in the bus discussed when the next pharmacy magazine (primarily used to produce fear of daily things you use) is released... They've been around 15 years old. What's wrong with the world?

school got to try a old win 3.1 computer played around with paint drawing mario...
then we got a computer at home and i got Delphi with a computer magazine around age 14 and I've been coding ever since :p

1988 - Age 8 sees a young boy with a Commodore 64 and several copies of commodore format typing in code from the magazine. First program I got to work was a dtmf dialler using to speaker to ring a grandparent. Been hooked ever since

Found a little magazine when I was 12 which talked about HTML.
Then later, a friend talked about VBS and VB.NET and I just started making prank shit in that...
Then later back to making websites and basically just grew from there really...

Only followed a formal education on programming once... Which I got kicked out off because I ended my first year with a splendid 2 (that 1 point for adequate attendance).
The fun part? I failed because I was too good :^)
All my grades where a 1 or a 2 because my code was made using tools and libraries that they didn't want me to touch or even know about until 3rd of 4th year...
So yea, I failed everything with the reason being: "Not according to the exercise".

Another fun part: We had to make a personal blog in the 1st year using the techniques we had learned.
Sites were published on a *public* server...
Someone hacked all sites... except mine :^)

my first project was a star trek themed text based rpg adventure. it was a hell of spaghetti of if queries and gotos in gw basic. later these kind of things got something like an ui.

my first experience was my father doing mandelbrot sets from a magazine and i was watching building them up green pixel for greenpixel on an 8086 pc. it was raining outside and i was sitting in an arm chair with a warm blanket. this cozy feeling remains until today and might explain my personal attachment for this topic.
fortunately his failed attempt to introduce me into programming doing a morsecode translator did not stop me for long.

Someone in advertising at time magazine shit the bed

"To create anything–whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom–is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic." - Tom Bissel

My student magazine will begin recruiting new members in the coming weeks. And this is the second time they will be hiring a web developer. (First being me) However, they would like me to interview and test the applicant.

What would be some interview questions you guys would suggest?

In addition, I would like to ask him to solve some programming problems in html/CSS, JavaScript , and PHP. Can you guys suggest some problems I can give them? (I will surely ask them to do FizzBuzz.)