I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

tldr:
everyone got the same hardware because senior dev liked it

So my project team was allowed to buy some hardware (monitors/keyboards/mouses etc.) so teamleader asked what we want.
senior dev: i need 1 monitor because i like to work with 1 monitor. i prefer this 27' zoll 4k monitor for around 1k dollars. since i work with multiple pc's i like this bluetooth keyboard and mouse because u can pair them with them and switch witch a click between the pc's costs around 300 dollar (1 setup of this costs 1'300 dollars)

me: so i like to use 2 monitors because i tried out multiple setups and this works for me the best (also what i have at home). but they dont need to be fancy. 2x 24' zoll montitors for each 200 dollar are enaugh (together 400 doller)
i also only work with 1 laptop and would like to have just a simple keyboard and mouse with cable because everytime they dont respons or battry runs out im fk triggered. so for me its okey if its this 30 dollar keyboard and 20 dollar mouse. it would be cool if i could get this mechanical keyboard for 80 dollars but not really needed. i only prefer mechanical keyboards a little bit more. and also i would like this mousepad i really like. it makes the mouse super responsive it's also just 10 dollars (this setup cost 510)

so at the end the teamleader was like. ah u know what senior dev has more xp and knows whats better for coding so we only buy this for every dev. but that 10 dollar mouse pad is okey u can get this extra its not that expensive.

WTF why u dont give me the cheaper setup which i more like. and why u even ask.

!rant
Just finished my CNC.
Lots of problems but it works... More or less.
Need better steppers and other drivers. But I did it, learned a lot, did lots of mistakes, and don't get me started on debugging hardware...
Z axis unfortunaly can't even pull the motor up lol.

Devs in our country are people who will allways have a job. Because companies here need us more than we need them. That's why we have 2x(jr-mid), 3x, 4x (mid), 5x+ (sr) average earnings country-wide.

Job is good, perks are nice, hardware is awesome (idk when was the last time I worked with anything weaker than i7), internet is brilliant (one of the best in the world; I think we have recently lost the "best internet in the world" title recently to some other country). Companies are fighting over us, offering better salaries, better terms. I was even bold enough to list my terms in LinkedIn's summary section and still I am getting offers :D

Devs' life is awesome here :)

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

This freaking laptop.

The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.

The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.

The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.

nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.

In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.

Just. It's frustrating.

It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

Migrated to SharePoint 2016 which included Reporting Services, and trying to fix a bug in the reporting services scheduler, I created a report (aka, copied an existing one) 'A Klingon Walks Into a Bar', so it would first in the list and distinct enough so the QA testers would (hopefully) leave it alone.

The PM for the project calls me.
PM: "What is this Klingon report? It looks like a copy of the daily inventory report"
Me: "It is. The reporting service job keeps crashing on certain reports that have daily execution schedules."
PM: "I need you to delete it"
Me: "What? Why? The report is on the dev sharepoint site. I named the report so it was unique and be at the top of the list so I can find it easily."
PM: "The name doesn't conform to our standards and it's confusing the testers."
Me: "The testers? You mean Dan, you, and Heather?"
PM: "Yes, smartass. Can you name the report something like daily inventory report 2, or something else?"
Me: "I could, but since this is in development, no. You've already proofed out the upgrade. You're waiting on me to fix this sharepoint bug. Why do you care what I do on this server? It's going away after the upgrade."
PM: "Yea, about that. We like having the server. It gives us a place to test reports. Would really appreciate it if you would rename or delete that report."
Me: "A test sharepoint reporting services server out of scope, so no, we're not keeping it."
PM: "Having a server just for us would be nice."
Me: "$10,000 nice? We're kinda fudging on the licensing now. If we're keeping it, we will be required to be in compliance. That's a server license, sharepoint license, sql server license, and the dedicated hardware. We talked about that, remember?"
PM: "Why is keeping that report so important to you? I don't want to explain to a VP what a Klingon is."
Me: "I'm not keeping the report or moving it to production. When I figure out the problem, I'll delete the report. OK?"
PM: "I would prefer you delete the report before a VP sees it."
Me: "Why would a VP be looking? They probably have better things to do."
PM: "Jeff wants to see our progress, I'll have to him the site, and he'll see the report."
Me: "OK? You tell Jeff it's a report I'm working on, I'll explain what a Klingon is, Jeff will call me a nerd, and we all move on."
PM: "I'm not comfortable with this upgrade."
Me: "What does that mean?"
PM: "I asked for something simple and I can't be responsible for the consequences. I'll be documenting this situation as a 'no-go' for deployment"
Me: "Oookaayyy?"

I figured out the bug, deleted the 'Klingon' report, and the PM couldn't do anything to delay the deployment.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Fucking shit, this university's website is so damn slow! Basically Every Semester, every student need to enroll to certain classes in University Website.

But the Infrastructure is not enough to handle such a big amount of students, we have approx. 7000 students enrolling at the same fucking time.

And here i am can't enroll to any class at all this semester. Fuck such a waste of time. This always been a thing since they digitalize enrolling system.

I don't want this to happen again. The student always be a victim since they cannot handle the request. Now, as a dev, i want to propose something better to optimize the server, i have some connection to pass some bureaucracy. I am going to do some brainstorming and I will need some solution.

Here some data i gather when i am mad from my univ infrastructure division :
1. The Server is a simple Local Server Forwarded to the Internet.
2. The Server use Windows Server 2007.
4. Web Server Using Microsoft IIS
3. The Website built using ASP.NET
4. The connection is not SSL encrypted (yes its fucking use the http)
5. Hardware Spec (not confirmed officialy, i got this information from my professor) :
- Core i5 4460
- 4 GB Ram
- 1 Gbit NIC

I will summon some expert here and i hope want to help me(us all) out.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

I'm so tired.
Got enough sleep but tired nevertheless every day.

Situation in the company isn't helping, would really like to get a review as I'm really close to a 'final' version for productive use, none given.
Didn't think far enough and didn't include various OO-things when starting to program this application, so I had to rewrite lots of it. It certainly got better by the time but as it's a grown structure I'd feel happier if someone other than me had seen and cursed the code.
Coworker that has most experience in C# only once implemented something with multiple threads, couldn't help me there.
Could not test the code yet because the hardware was inaccessible and is now potentially broken.
I really like working independently, nevertheless I feel a little bit lost at sea - I can deal with that, but it's exhausting.
Also, trying to get an answer from the colleague who should act as my supervisor whether or not I can work remotely during a CS related course in the semester break for > 2 weeks now. Course admission is the mid of January so I'd like to have an answer this year so I can repeat the basics I'll need if necessary.
Also, Midterm is coming.

It's a lot of little things piling up right now I wouldn't mind if there were only 1-2 of them.
I'm just so damn tired.
I'll go to sleep now.

(In happy news: my internet connection is working pretty decent now, technician that fucked it up apologized and said that he probably needs glasses, he misread the connection number. :D)

So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...

So I bought a gaming laptop a while back, and Cyberpunk 2077 binaries got leaked a few days ago... So I wanted to play it, kinda. It looks really good from the screenshots. Friend asks me "what CPU / GPU do you have"?

My gaming laptop is a Y700 so an i7-6700HQ and a GTX 960M. Turns out that even at low settings this thing probably won't pull even 30 FPS.

So even with a gaming laptop, you don't get to do any gaming. 10/10 would buy again! I'll enjoy Super Mario because imagine caring about gameplay rather than stunning graphics that you need tomorrow's hardware for, and buy it yesterday! And have it already obsolete today.

Long story short, I kinda hate the gaming scene. I'm not a gamer either by any means. Even this laptop just runs Linux and I bought it mostly because some of its hardware is better than my x220's. Are gamers expected to spring the money for the latest and greatest nugget every other month? When such a CPU and GPU alone would already cost most people's entire monthly wage?

What's the point of having a game that nobody can play? Even my friends' desktop hardware which is quite a bit better still - it only pulls 45 FPS according to him. Seriously, what's the point?

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

Do you all remember the dark ages of DVDs when honest customers made a worse deal than pirates because legitimate media was packed with unskippable advertising and PSAs about piracy?

Well, looks like video game publishers are on their best way to recreate that mistake. Why do games nowadays need to be forcefed with storage-consuming, unappealing and technically nonessential launchers that all look and do the same? And why for God's sake do very old and offline-only games need to go through this sodomizing procedure?

prime example: GTA 3 was released back in 2001 and capable of running on Windows 98SE/2000/XP. There's a Steam-only release out there that requires you to install community-made patches if you want the game to run smoothly on modern hardware. Steam itself as a requirement for this atrocity to even launch the executable dropped support for XP more than two years ago. If you'd wanted to play this game on original hardware, you would rely on a real DVD that was made back then, but there are even better options if you know what I mean.

When a multimillion-dollar industry relies on communities of volunteering enthusiasts to make its products work, it won't receive a trace of my empathy when customers and non-customers alike try to download their games from more reliable and honest sources.

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

Why is it that so many developers have trash tier hardware? Sometimes I feel like 90% of developers are hardware retards. You work on a computer all day why the fuck are you running one from the early 2,000's that takes a year to boot and can barely run the applications you need? Hardware is a lot cheaper than time and better hardware will save a huge amount of time. And why the fuck do so many devs use laptops? Trashy little craptastic aluminium shit cans folding under the weight of the heat they produce. The more work you do the slower they go. Meanwhile I sit back on my heavily over clocked, water cooled, desktop and fly through workloads that laptop users wouldn't begin to be able to think about. So basically buy a desktop with high end hardware and you'll be amazed what you can get done and how much less painful stuff will be. And if you need to go mobile just grab a Chromebook and remote into your desktop. You'll be happy you did.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

## building my own router

I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.

What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.

I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??

And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.

Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.

Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?

iw list

My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!

Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.

BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.

I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.

Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.

And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)

iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.

After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.

Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).

Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).

Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.

I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.

Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.

I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.

That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).

I've been trying to find a linux distro/de that "just works" for like a week and honestly, I'm kinda giving up and going back to Windows.

Everyone single one I've tried had some weird quirks, mostly audio and video related. Screen tearing everywhere, mic not working, distorted audio, jittery animations and very low responsiveness.

I really wanted to use Linux as my main OS, at least for work. I love the simplicity of package managers and the terminal. But honestly, I don't understand how something like that could be depicted as better than Windows. I'm sorry but Windows runs waaaaaaaay better on my desktop and PC it blows linux out of the water. Zero issues with drivers, no screen tearing, no distorted audio flying smooth animations and responsiveness.

I'm very disappointed, I was expecting Linux to be quicker and less bloated but god those hardware compatability issues just destroy everything good that linux has to offer.

Guess I'm going to install some background VM since I only really need to run terminal stuff and daemons for work.

!dev

I need some help with advice regarding getting new headphones, as my current ones are quite literally about to fall off my head. Thing is that I have a hard time finding what I want, and even then be able to determine stuff based on reviews.

My current ones are a pair of Turtle Beach Ear Force Z60, which is my first headset to have surround sound. They also sit very comfortably on my head without really pressing on my ears at all, and the audio when playing games is nice and clear. Unfortunately that has now set the bar pretty high when trying to find a new pair.

I tried out a pair of HyperX Cloud II, but I can't configure the settings and the surround sound doesn't seem to work at all (there seems to be a "gap" between one o'clock and three o'clock, so to speak, as well as between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock). I tried listening to a 7.1 audio clip, but the only ones in the right positions were center front and left and right fronts. The left and right sides, and left and right rears were all at the center point. And besides that the audio is unbalanced and just... not quite muffled, but not clear as with the old ones.

Thing is also that I don't know crap about audio stuff, like if it's got to do with me doing something wrong in terms of drivers or hardware or something, or if it's actually got to do with the headphones themselves. I've tried to find info but there's just none to be found, it seems, at least nothing that works. :(

Currently I'm considering trying out another pair from Turtle Beach, but it's so hard to trust the reviews. I mean, like the Z60 has pretty halfassed ratings, but I personally like them a lot. :/

Does anyone have any advice at all? Whether it's recommendations of headphones, or ideas on things I could try on my end to make things work.

AND, side note; I don't care for any comments along the line of "surround sound is bullshit, just stick with stereo, it's better", because 1) I don't agree nor do I care, and 2) it's unconstructive as shit.

I'm thankful for any ideas or advice you guys may have. :/

Why do some firms think you can skimp on hardware for devs. I am expected to do full stack windows Dev on a 3 year old dual core Dell with style 16gb of ram. Asked for a replacement you need management approval for anything better than a 128 ssd and 8gb of ram. Some of our databases are > 100gb.

I hate the company (agency) I moved to...I've negotiated good pay and the project for cutting edge medical product which will change the world (cancer diagnose and it actually works).

Now the dark side I've got shit tier laptop which I don't want, overtime is payed 30% less, all the people in the agency from development team don't know shit and are mostly I would call them juniors (of course who would with enough seniority work with shit hardware and almost not payed overtime), only tap water and since this is the old part of town you instantly get sick, they treat people like shit.

The product dark side. We are actually working on crm for doctors to input patient data, we cannot have any real data because we are the agency people, product is being led by the guy who has 0 production experience (they choose the database basically with coin toss and emulated the mongodb in postgress with jsnob, they don't know how to build their own auth system hence my previous rant about b2c, they are using cognito and now moving to auth0 which probably won't fit their need because a lot of stuff needs to be custom), they are choosing every hipe tech out there without any prior experience. It's chaos...

I'm trying to guide them but i think this will be a huge expensive failure and that i need to leave asap.

There I feel better now, moral of the story, choose startups wisely.

Linux vs Windows (vs AnyOtherOS) | The Age Old Question

The short answer: It depends. And probably isn't even up to you to choose

The long answer:
No one's forcing you to choose. And you have more than 2 options. (The 3rd being... both. (Unless you're running out of hardware))

You have to mentally replace "Which is better? Linux or Windows?" with "Which one gets me sooner to a completed task that more closely matches the end-user's expectations"

If it's something you're developing for yourself, then use whatever the hell you want, because you know where you want that "finished product" to be used, and in what manner.

But often, everyone around you and their cats are not using what you're using

Have to write a document? Oh.. there's this blue program thingy (no one talks like that), I think it was called "Microsoft Word"

Oh, you don't have that?? How the hell do you edit documents then?
~ Some employer still using MS Word 2009

"I'll send you the PSD", "Make it a PSD", "You need the PSD file for reference, right?"

psd? More like PTSD at this point

It's like Photoshop is suddenly the only way to edit images, oh.. and Paint.

* Use paint. I don't care. If it gets the job done, do it.

Hate Photoshop? Love Gimp? Too bad.

When that god forsaken PSD is emailed to you, you better have a copy of Windows and Photoshop just in case it looks like garbage in.. OR OUT of gimp..

Bottom Line:
Don't use what people use. Just have everything ready in case your boss still uses MS Word 1839 and you want to ENSURE, it'll look the same on his screen

*It's wrong to limit yourself to just ONE SINGLE OS

So this my final year as an IT student, and I need to make a desktop app for the college which is about monitoring and diagnosing network flow and connected hardware, the question is: is there any stuff that can help and will it be better to use a specific language ?