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Search - "master of none"
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Devs regularly complain that our skills are not valued enough and that people think what we do is easy.
But, we don't really help the cause when we run around casually claiming to be "full stack" and not turning down work that clearly isn't in our area of competence.
We act more like Victorian amateur scientists.
Every seen a "full stack" doctor when you go to hospital? "Brain to feet---I can do it all."
OK, we have general practitioners, but they are really the BAs of the medical world. When it comes to getting into the weed, everyone specializes.
Full stack lawyer? "Hey, you did an excellent job of dealing with my house purchase. I've just been accused of murder. Can you represent me?"
While we continue to say that we can provide a high quality "full stack" experience I think we are signaling that this stuff *is* easy.19 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
--- GitHub 24-hour outage post mortem ---
As many of you will remember; Github fell over earlier this month and cracked its head on the counter top on the way down. For more or less a full 24 hours the repo-wrangling behemoth had inconsistent data being presented to users, slow response times and failing requests during common user actions such as reporting issues and questioning your career choice in code reviews.
It's been revealed in a post-mortem of the incident (link at the end of the article) that DB replication was the root cause of the chaos after a failing 100G network link was being replaced during routine maintenance. I don't pretend to be a rockstar-ninja-wizard DBA but after speaking with colleagues who went a shade whiter when the term "replication" was used - It's hard to predict where a design decision will bite back and leave you untanging the web of lies and misinformation reported by the databases for weeks if not months after everything's gone a tad sideways.
When the link was yanked out of the east coast DC undergoing maintenance - Github's "Orchestrator" software did exactly what it was meant to do; It hit the "ohshi" button and failed over to another DC that wasn't reporting any issues. The hitch in the master plan was that when connectivity came back up at the east coast DC, Orchestrator was unable to (un)fail-over back to the east coast DC due to each cluster containing data the other didn't have.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that pants were turning funny colours - Monitoring systems across the board started squealing, firing off messages to engineers demanding they rouse from the land of nod and snap back to reality, that was a bit more "on-fire" than usual. A quick call to Orchestrator's API returned a result set that only contained database servers from the west coast - none of the east coast servers had responded.
Come 11pm UTC (about 10 minutes after the initial pant re-colouring) engineers realised they were well and truly backed into a corner, the site was flipped into "Yellow" status and internal mechanisms for deployments were locked out. 5 minutes later an Incident Co-ordinator was dragged from their lair by the status change and almost immediately flipped the site into "Red" status, a move i can only hope was accompanied by all the lights going red and klaxons sounding.
Even more engineers were roused from their slumber to help with the recovery effort, By this point hair was turning grey in real time - The fail-over DB cluster had been processing user data for nearly 40 minutes, every second that passed made the inevitable untangling process exponentially more difficult. Not long after this Github made the call to pause webhooks and Github Pages builds in an attempt to prevent further data loss, causing disruption to those of us using Github as a way of kicking off our deployment processes (myself included, I had to SSH in and run a git pull myself like some kind of savage).
Glossing over several more "And then things were still broken" sections of the post mortem; Clever engineers with their heads screwed on the right way successfully executed what i can only imagine was a large, complex and risky plan to untangle the mess and restore functionality. Github was picked up off the kitchen floor and promptly placed in a comfy chair with a sweet tea to recover. The enormous backlog of webhooks and Pages builds was caught up with and everything was more or less back to normal.
It goes to show that even the best laid plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy, In this case a failing 100G network link somewhere inside an east coast data center.
Link to the post mortem: https://blog.github.com/2018-10-30-...6 -
Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.
After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.
Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)
Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.
This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...21 -
Random post on linkedin...
"Jack of all trades, master of none"
Being a generalist does not make you a master of none.
You are at a position to apply your diverse yet relevant experiences into a singular objective. This makes you strategic and holistic.
A jack of all trades, a master of integration.2 -
Why its so hard to understand that - not always... - frontend devs will give you a sweet ui with medium back end and back end devs are gonna give you a medium ui with sweet back end?
Why can't we just do what nature made us good for and work in collaboration?
Fuck7 -
I didn't..
A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.
I pick up whatever is required by my projects, but I do prefer backend & scripting to graphic fuckery.. // pixel left, pixel up...blah, not for me..3 -
So my department is "integrating CI/CD"
Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"
So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.
First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.
The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.
They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)
I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.25 -
My biggest insecurity?
That I'm fascinated by a lot of domains and rather than mastering one I'm just intermediate in all of them, making me a jack of all trades but a master of none.7 -
So apparently there was a prod issue all day today because some server app couldn't start up.
The error was caused by missing Params...
And seems everyone that got asked to look at it are pretty clueless.
I looked at the text msgs now cuz my phone wouldn't stop vibrating from notifs (yes it got that bad) and I'm thinking, of all the ppl you guys could've asked, no one reached out to me... Who well knows exactly it works, and how to fix it.
But the issue with the team is everyone works on everything but most people have no idea how the apps actually work...
Jack of all trades, master of none...
Anyways, sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos ain't too bad either....1 -
I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.
Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.
Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.
I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.
Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?
Any advice would be helpful.4 -
Giant, month-and-a-half-long-ticket.
After learning six or so complicated areas of the system and updating them all to work with the new changes, make them all play nicely, etc. I finally got everything working. 95% spec coverage, though no ui tests because I haven't gotten selenium working. whatever, everything's done and works.
Second dev bases her ticket off of mine and continues working. Work elsewhere continues and there's an official release, so we both merge in master. I run tests, everything passes, and go back to working on other tickets.
She finishes her ticket.
We do end-to-end testing, and everything works perfectly. Time for a demo!
She merges in master again, and pushes her branch to two staging servers. (idk why two.)
Demo starts.
We connect to the staging servers, and... none of the UI changes exist; they aren't running the correct code!
So she runs it locally for a demo instead. Two features in my ticket no longer work. She throws me under the bus. She throws me under the bus again by criticising a rake task I scrapped because she wanted to do it. Then again because I didn't update my branch to master and push it before the demo, despite having no reason to. and despite the demo being of her branch.
Then she continues to show off and brag about how she's like the "legend" (senior dev) she envies. QAbuys it.
I'm having an emotion, and it's called anger.rant unfounded superiority complex people suck anger what the hell did you do to my project? i miss working alone8 -
It is time... to rant about macs!
No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....
Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).
Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).
Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!
OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.
Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).
Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!
Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!
OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)
Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....
Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...
To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.
Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....
Rant over.
ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)8 -
Just had a great interview :)
The guy was really cool, asked actually relevant questions (my learning process, what I specialize in, etc), talked about the tech they'll be using and none of that "wHaT aRe YoUr WeAkNeSsEs?" bullshit.
He seemed to like me, he seemed to like the fact that I've been programming for a long time even though I'm in my second semester in college and he also seemed to like that I'm somewhat of a Swiss army knife, a jack of all trades but master of none.
I just I was a bit too informal in the interview but whatever. I'm not taking this very seriously, if I get the job I get the job, if I don't that's fine too.6 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.3 -
"A jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."
How do you think this fits in the dev world? Yay or nay3 -
Now I feel a bit bad about the guy I ranted about before, who did all the talk but none of the work. I started to tell my colleagues and even my boss about my impression. And my boss concurred, was actually so fed up with him that he confronted him...
Later on turned out he was the only one able to repair our mangled git history. Dunno how it'll pan out. The guy is also our 'scrum master'. Maybe doesn't always have to be love, peace and harmony. Time to explore our darker sides and yank out some motherfucking code.1 -
No idea how I ended up here. So basically started with simple wordpress websites, transitioned to react. This move was the hardest.
Then caught up on node and mongodb. And before i knew i was doing db, backend and front end tasks. Now i know bits and pieces of everything
I don’t like the term “full stack dev”. I personally feel like I’m a Jack of all trades and master of none. There’s so much to learn if you’re a full stack developer. Endless possibilities, endless rants and endless frustration 🤯 -
I'm still studying computer science/programming, I still have one year to do in order to graduate (Master). I am in a work study program so I'm working for a company half of the time, and I'm studying the other half. It is important to mention that I am the only web developer of the company
When I arrived in the company 9 months ago, I was given a Vue project which had been developed by a trainee a few weeks before my arrival and I was asked to correct a few things, it was mostly about css. Then, I was ask to add a few functionalities, nothing really hard to code, and we were supposed to test the solution in a staging environment, and if everything was ok, deploy it to prod.
However, the more I did what I was asked, the more functionalities I had to implement, until I reached a point where I had to modify the API, create new routes, etc. I'm not complaining about that, that's my job and I like it. But the solution was supposed to be ready when I arrived, it was also supposed to be tested and deployed.
The problem is, the person emitting these demands (let's call him guy X) is not from the IT service, it's a future user of the website in the admin side. The demands kept going and going and going because, according to him, the solution was not in a good enough state to be deployed, it missed too many (un)necessary features. It kept going for a few months.
The best is yet to come though : guy X was obviously a superior, and HIS superior started putting pressure on me through mails, saying the app was already supposed to be in production and he was implying that I wasn't working fast enough. Luckily, my IT supervisor was aware of what was going on and knew I obviously wasn't to blame.
In the end, the solution was eagerly deployed in production, didn't go through the staging environment and was opened to the users. Now, guy X receives complaints because none of what I did was tested (it was by me, but I wasn't going to test every single little thing because I didn't have time). Some users couldn't connect or use this or that feature and I am literally drowning in mails, all from guy X, asking me to correct things because users are blocked and it's time consuming for him to do some of the things the website was doing manually.
We are here now just because things have been done in a rush, I'm still working on it and trying to fix prod problems and it's pissing me off because we HAVE a staging environment that was supposed to prevent me from working against the clock.
On a final note, what's funny is that the code I'm modifying, the pre-existing one needs to be refactored because bits and pieces are repeated sometimes 5 times where it should have been externalized and imported from another file. But I don't know when and if I will ever be able to do that.
I could have given more context but it's 4am and I'm kinda tired, sorry if I'm not clear or anything. That's my first rant -
Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)
Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?
I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.
There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.
This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.
Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.
But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...
So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...
If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.6 -
We have a three bedroom house that fits us perfectly, or did anyway. In the upstairs there is a master bedroom which my wife and I share, and two smaller bedrooms. One is my son's room and was his nursery when he was smaller, and the other is currently being used as my office.
We had a second child-- a little girl --in October. As she is still very small, she sleeps in a bassinet in our bedroom, but those days are numbered. She will need her own room within a couple months, for naps and for her to sleep all night on her own. That means my office will soon have a crib, dresser, and changing table in it, and I will be unable to use my computer after the wife and kids are in bed.
For this eventuality, I've been preparing what I call my, "table kit." Costco sells these really nice collapsible plastic crates. I have filled one with computer things, with the intention being that when my office is not available to me, I have a crate with everything I need in it, and can quickly set up at the dinner table. When I'm done, I can quickly tear down and pack everything up into that collapsible crate, so none of my equipment will "live" at the table.
My question is: what would you put in your table kit? I currently have a System76 Oryx Pro, a 23" LED display, displayport cable, power cables, mouse, keyboard, microUSB, and type-C cable, Bluetooth headphones, and I'm trying to decide whether I'll need a laptop stand. What would you pack?5 -
Agile/Scrum is the worst project management style in software development.
Rather than focusing on delivering a feature or changes on the project, everyday there is always a meeting that you need to attend to, other than the daily huddle. And those meetings are none of your concern or why they needed you there
And my Product Owner and Scrum Master does not know even though how software development cycle works. When you discuss technical details or constraint to them, they either look confused or don’t know what to say and just say “If you need anything, always communicate or approach me” even you already told them the issue.
Or maybe we are doing it wrong. But it is been 5 years when they implement this Agile/Scrum and we are still bad at it.
Just ranting4 -
So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.
It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.
I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?
After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.3 -
Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.
I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.
1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture
If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL9 -
Around the time Apple was denouncing it, I joined a chatroom for Adobe flash game developers. I really loved the idea of making games too, so I tried to learn ActionScript3. That failed, because it was my first language and since I was broke, I couldn't afford flash pro, so I was using an open source ide with okay documentation, but no newbie coder tutorials. I didn't actually start learning to code till Codecademy came out, I learned js, then I learned visual basic and Java for online courses the local community college had available, and now I'm taking C, C++, Java, and Python in college while I use C# at work and JS during my free time. Sadly, in a jack of all trades, master of none :/1
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Having a hard time finding work. Jack of all trades, master of none. Went to college for a while, but never finished a degree. Mostly self taught and can easily learn on the fly.
Can program, 3d design and model, ins and outs of unreal engine 4, web stuff, can do IT work, knows VR standards and tricks, powerful desktop and powerful laptop, plenty of uhd cameras, knows Android and ios, etc.
Where do I look? What can I apply for? Can I make money on my own? Can I provide a service? How do I sell that?
HALP 😫8 -
If I get asked why I didn't complete a task tomorrow I will respond politely with "because we outsource all of our projects, I am fixing shitty bugs resulting from abismal code on 6 different project, merging requests, project managing even though I'm a developer, liaising with clients, writing scopes of works, estimating new projects whilst being the lead dev on 4 projects. Sorry you're right, like everyone else you need this today. I'll get right on that"
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Budding Developer here...
I've tried to teach myself Web Dev over the past 10 yrs on/off... Sad. But now I'm actually in a developer role moved up from IT helpdesk a year ago.
In the past year I've learned SQL, SSRS, SSIS, database concepts, and.... VB6. I am a master at none due to having to cram so much in a year while taking on various projects, issues, and learning the organizations software infrastructure and processes. I also taught myself current HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. Learning the different basic concepts with each.
Over the past couple months I've been given a new project and now learning ASP.NET and C#. Actually trying really hard to get adept at these as I'm finally doing Web Developing in my role...
I am also dealing with multiple major family issues and a near 2 yr old that we cosleep with that still doesn't sleep through the night.
Why the crap is it so easy to convert an enum to a string but takes 50 functions to convert a string to an enum???
Cast, convert, parse... Why so much logic???
When the online teacher says type why do I have to rifle through 7 different meanings in my head before I know what kind of type he's referring to??4 -
In the kingdom of aws reigns the Owner of Products.
In his court many a vassal noble (or a "sre" as they are often called) delivers their tribute.
Wise ministers (called "analysts" in these here parts) advice the Owner of Products on how to instruct his sres and where to lead the kingdom.
Needless to say, in the court the blabber is endless and the egos of the courtiers, deservedly or not, are even larger.
But there is but one member of the court, leader of none but master of japes, who dares to mock not just the courtiers, but even the Owner of Products.
Tester the Jester, from the houses of Operations Research and Quality Assurance.
There is a unique relationship between a ruler and his jester. The jester mocks the ruler, with the most outlandish of propositions, with the most malicious interpretations of the ruler's orders, evidencing the most absurd (but mathematically viable) results of a plan.
The jester makes ridicule of the ruler's edicts... so that the Owner of Products may remain humble, without need to defer to any upstart courtier.
And, in a more subtile manner, the jester prevents any courtier from maliciously complying with the edicts of the ruler.
For all in the court have heard how the lowest among them voiced the preposterous interpretation... And dare not show themselves to be even lower.
TL;DR had an all-hands meeting of tech leaders with the allmighty PO. In the meeting there is this bloke who apparently spends all his time just fucking with the bigwigs' ideas. Dude is a department of one. It seems that his whole job is being an outlandish scenario simulator & sarcasm artist. I now have way more respect for this place. -
I've been training a few junior devs for about a month in the use git and adopting to a collaborative team workflow. My blood is boiling at this point. As part of the training we had the junior team build an iOS app. Their solution was for each of the to have a git repo of their own and a master repo for everyone. If they can get it to work in their individual repos, they would move that code over to the master repo. This seemed to have worked for them but it's completely wrong in trying to understand how integrating their work by the hour or so would benefit everyone involved and ultimately how that can influence the quality of the product. So I highlighted the problem with the individual repos and encouraged the use of a single remote repo. OOP is none existent all the code is slapped into a view controller. I have about given up. Let's see what this week will bring.3
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I'm currently having a problems sleeping my inner philosopher just keeps thinking about various things. I wanna try to write some of them down as an simply to see what will happen.
I'll write my opinion down as honest as possible so feel free to disagree, but point out what I should rethink, if you want me to consider it.
To me respect has to be earned. I think especially on the internet many people try to skip this crucial step when they try to get respect. Most often when they want an opinion or their ideals to be respected. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like they want to be respected, but rather accepted.
There's nothing wrong with accepted in my opinion, but there are several approaches to get to this point and I despise some of them.
Earning acceptance by earning respect is one of the right ways to do it. Working hard towards your goals, showing your individual strength, standing behind your ideals. These are things I can respect.
I should also mention that these Ideals should be concrete, based on rational thought and a general good will or you will just twist my words to say that I support e.g. IS, Stalin's politics ect.
On a side node, I think it'd be wrong to disrespect everything Stalin did, since, from an economical point of view, he pushed Russia forward by quite a bit.
Then on the other side I see crybabies. People who want to be accepted, without putting effort in their ideals. Most of the time not even aiming for acceptance through respect, but through pity. Honestly, that's all they're going to get from me.
Pity, for their petty ideals.
Basically all I ever see these people doing is attention whoring and practicing multiple deadly sins at once.
Wrath, jealousy, sloth, pride, greed and optionally also gluttony.
Lust is rather a separate package. When I think about it, I link it mostly to horny teens and "send bob and vegane" type of stuff.
Gluttony being powered by sloth or vice versa, enhancing it.
The clear image I have in mind, while I write about this packages of deadly sins however, is that of a jealous person, complaining / getting angry about something they could change change themselves, but want them to be changed for them. Mostly through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and whatever the fuck Tumblr is supposed to be.
"I wanna be rich, why is <person> richt but I'm not? This world is so unfair 😡". Have you tried working towards becoming rich?
"I don't don't feel pretty. Accept me". Accept yourself. Done.
"I don't like <person or organization>'s doing". If that's the whole message, all you probably did so far is complaining or crying. Sweet tears.
Stuff like that can happen to any person, just like any person makes mistakes.
Mistakes are made to learn from them. If you realize realize and accept your mistakes others may do so as well and forgive you.
But we are he towards this idiotic trend where people just can swallow their pride even for microscopic things. They instead push their pride to higher levels of ignorance, blaming other people, l(ying)mfao, creating black holes of density in the process. Makes me wonder whether their real motive is an inside bet on who can get the most people to kill them selves by face palming.
Most of my life I have been fairly protected against these people, besides some spikes of incompetence, but recently the have invaded 2 areas in my world that make the world somewhat less of a pain. Programming and the internet culture.
Yes, I'm talking about that master / slave BS renaming and article 11 and 13.
The remaking itself isn't really the problem, but rather the context. This was basically a show of power for the self proclaimed "social justice warriors" or SJW for short.
The fact that this madness has spread. That's what worries me. To me it feels like the first zombie has spawned.
Then we have this corrupted piece of incompetent shit, called Axel Voss, and other old farts.
They live in a galaxy far away from reality, somewhere in the European Parlament, making laws they don't know shit about, regulating things they know shit about.
All in the name of the people of the EU of course. And by people we obviously talk about the money.
I can honestly not think of another reason, after reading the replies Voss and his party gave on Twitter regarding the shit they pulled off.
Well, at least none that doesn't involve some firm of brain death.
For now I'll show them as much as possible how much I despise / reject them. Currently playing with the thought of some kind (social media?) website were posts from other sites or actions in general can be rated only with "Fuck you"s.
Given these articles, I should not have them hosted in an European country though 😅.
Almost hitting that 5k character limit 😰1 -
"i encourage you to take these traning. the trend now is to be multi-skilled. be the jack of all trades!"
fuck.3 -
Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:
So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...
Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.
Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.
Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.
Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...
None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.
The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).
By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.
In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.
To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!2 -
Is it better to be a full stack developer or switch to some form of domain expertise ?
With the advent of chatgpt it's really easy to have entry level knowledge on pretty much any technology
Full stack devs too operate in similar manner , (good in backend can build some decent front end with bootstrap )
Basically if i have to be smarter than the AI , should I try to develop a deeper expertise on a particular stack or still prefer to jack of all master of none3