So, someone submitted a 'bug' to Mozilla.

As some of you may know, in the next year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands is going into effect.

Another fun fact is that the dutch security agencies/government have their own CA (Certificate Authority) for SSL/TLS certificates.

The new law says that the AIVD (dutch NSA/GCHQ equivilant) is allowed to hack into systems through obtained certificates and also that they're allowed to INTERCEPT TRAFFIC THROUGH OBTAINED PRIVATE SSL/TLS KEYS.

So someone actually had the fucking balls to submit a fucking issue to Mozilla saying that the Dutch State certs shouldn't be accepted anymore when the new mass surveillance law gets into place.

This person deservers a fucking medal if you ask me.

devRant meetup in the Netherlands yesterday was awesome! Hereby a group picture we took.

Thanks for the amazing evening, people!

Just watched a video where someone (in relation to the new mass surveillance law in the netherlands) asked people on the street if they had something to hide.

Everyone said no.

"Could you get your phone and show me around?"

Everyone said yes.

"May I take a look at your messages/pictures/browsing history?"

Suddenly 80 percent said no.

"But you said you had nothing to hide!"

"I'm going to take that back."

I just got a mail from a software company in Denmark that they wanted to hire, because they "analyzed my open source GitHub contributions" and they think I'd be a good Backend Engineer using Java.

What they don't seem to realise is that the only thing I use GitHub for is college projects and 2 Minecraft mods, that I'm only 17 years old and not really in a position to move from the Netherlands to Denmark...

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

I ranted about this guy before who thought he was a security expert while hardly knowing what the word is probably. Today I met him again at a party.

Holy fucking shit, this guy.

"we use the best servers of the netherlands"
"we use a separate server for each website and finetune them"
"we always put clusters under servers, that way we have a fallback mechanism"
"companies mostly use bv ssl certificates"
"you're on call for a week? I'm full-time on call. Why I'm drinking alcohol then? Because fuck the clients hahaha"

😥🔫

Mother of god, as if the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands wasn't bad enough, one of the politicians who likes the new law has come up with an even more redicilous idea.

an 'Internet Authority. To put it short, an authority which surveils the internet in real time and sees where all social media shit is coming from/going.

Meaning that it wouldn't just be 'targeted mass surveillance' sometimes but fulltime online monitoring.

This guy has lost his fucking mind.

I sometimes correct people's PRs from under the shower or from the toilet, but my favorite place to code are in the dune forests (Netherlands).

Most unusual place would be operating room at the hospital though, getting my leg/foot bugfixed after a car accident. I asked the surgeon if it was OK if I brought my phone in, to distract myself, so I went through some code cleanup tasks.

I've now got one or more vpn servers in the following countries:
England
France
Germany
Bulgaria
New Zealand (coming soon)
Singapore
Netherlands (coming soon)
Canada

Finally have my own worldwide 'network' of vpn servers 😊

My room fan broke today....

And it has been hot for a while now in The Netherlands, so every store I went to sold out.

So I made one myself :)

On a side note, my pc temperature has never been lower :')

In may this year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands went into effect. Loads of people were against it with the arguments that everyone's privacy was not protected well enough, data gathered through dragnet surveillance might not be discarded quickly after the target data was filtered out and the dragnet surveillance wouldn't be that 'targeted'.

They were put into the 'paranoid' corner mostly and to assure enough support/votes, it was promised that:
- dragnet surveillance would be done as targeted as possible.
- target data would be filtered out soon and data of non-targets would be discarded automatically by systems designed for that (which would have to be out in place ASAP).
- data of non-targets would NOT be analyzed as that would be a major privacy breach.
- dragnet surveillance could only be done if enough proof would be delivered and if the urgency could justify the actions.

A month ago it was already revealed that there has been a relatively (in this context) high amount of cases where special measures (dragnet surveillance/non-target hacking to get to targets and so on) were used when/while there wasn't enough proof or the measures did not justify the urgency.
Privacy activists were anything but happy but this could be improved and the guarantees which were given to assure privacy of innocent people were in place according to the politicians... we'll see how this goes..

Today it was revealed that:
-there are no systems in place for automatic data discarding (data of innocent civilians) and there are hardly any protocols for how to handle not-needed or non-target data.
- in real life, the 'as targeted dragnet as possible' isn't really as targeted as possible. There aren't any/much checks in place to assure that the dragnets are aimed as targeted as possible.
- there isn't really any data filtering which filters out non-targers, mostly everything is analyzed.

Dear Dutch government and intelligence agency; not so kindly to fuck yourself.

Hardly any of the promised checks which made that this law could go through are actually in place (yet).

Fuck you.

So, as some people here probably know, I don't use any of the mainstream, mass surveillance integrated social media and messaging services. Since I'm located in the Netherlands especially whatsapp is nearly a life requirement but Facebook and such come close as well and I don't use anything related to Facebook, Google, Apple and any of the other companies related to mass surveillance programs which often puts me in awkward positions.

Every time someone wants to stay in touch and the fact that I don't use whatsapp comes up again, it usually turns into an explaining session with much disbelief from the other party but more and more often, I'm getting rather tired of that.

Recently, I had one of those moments and instead of saying 'sorry, I don't use whatsapp', i went for 'sorry, I'm old school, i only do texting and calling!'.

No discussion, just got a "ah, fair enough!"

😮

I started doing this more and more and I get the same response every time!

I find it quite astonishing how bringing something another way can get one a completely different response, especially in this context.

With the wake of some rants shouting at Linuxers who express their opinion in a considered to be very not good way, I decided to make such a rant. Not to be annoying but because, although I get that fanboyism in that way isn't even good in MY opinion, I do think that one should be able to express their opinion.

But, If you'd like to express your opinion, I think you at least should do that with some good arguments. Not everyone might agree with those arguments but hey, that's the point of opinions sometimes :)

I don't hate windows/mac for being windows or mac. Nope.

I hate the systems for not giving the user freedom to do what they wish with the system but more importantly, for integrating their users in worlds biggest mass surveillance program AND on top of fucking that, not giving peoples the option to look at the source code aka at what's ACTUALLY going on in the system. Next to that, Windows 10's data collection is officially not legal in the netherlands so don't even try justifying their fucking data slurping.

Of course there's a chance that they don't contain any bad stuffs but since the Snowden revelations I don't trust those commercial companies anymore on their 'blue' eyes.

Yeah, I've ranted about this before, I know, felt like doing it again in combination with my reason above. I also know that I will probs receive hate for this but oh well, i'm used to that by now.

So yeah, windows and osx: go fuck yourself.

Big stormish weather in the Netherlands today. I rely on public transportation for work and the trains are down 😩
Glad my parents live nearby my work!

To all dutch people on here, the new surveillance law I ranted about a month or something ago has passed if my source is correct.

Passed as in, the government has voted in favor.

Time to start encrypting/vpn'ing/torring and securing your computers!

Feel free to use this rant's comment section as Q/A and tips section for this subject as well :)

So the country I live in is going to get a huge mass surveillance law. Currently we're trying to force a referendum because this is highly (privacy) intrusive. We can still sign them for a little bit and a friend of mine hadn't done that yet. His reasoning was that it I isn't binding anyways.

We've got this John Oliver equivilant in the Netherlands who did a piece about this.

I put it on for my friend saying that I just wanted him to watch it. If he wouldn't change his mind afterwards, I wouldn't pressure him or anything.

We watched it.

Afterwards he looked at me with eyes like 😵😧😷😲😮😫.

"they'll REALLY be able to do this shit!?!"
"where can I sign this fucking thing to get this referendum going?"

So I asked him why he suddenly was all for it.

"I'm not much of a privacy guy but this shit just crossed a fucking line".

He's going to sign it as fast as possible 😁

"yes, sir, we block ftp and ssh connections from outside the benelux (shortcut for: belgium/netherlands/luxembourg, didn't say this part but it's a very widely known term here)"

"if you allow connections from INSIDE the benelux, why can't I connect from Germany, eh?!?!"

💀😶

At one of the biggest venue's of the Netherlands. The Heineken musical hall.
Windows is starting....

I haven't attempted any dating yet but I have attempted staying in touch with girls and this has failed big time. Not due to coding but due to me not using social media (especially Facebook and Instagram) and also - this is a huge deal in the Netherlands - not using WhatsApp.

The second girls hear/notice/discover that when exchanging information, it's shut off right away. (Or, this has been my experience)

On the bright side, I might find a very good match this way and I'm at least holding on to my principles/values :)

Completely forgot that regional busses are down in a big part of the Netherlands today.

FUCKING FUCK.

So the tax authorities in the Netherlands have this slogan that roughly translates to:
"We can't make it fun, but we can make it easier."

I'm not sure how this is going to be easy for me. This arrived in the mail today.
Even worse this is a fuck up from them. They are saying our company did not do it's taxes but when we log in their online portal we can see that we did them. But they are saying that they don't see it in their system.

Who build that system?

Trying to stay calm when they are claiming I own them more taxes then my company has earned in a year.

I did not have enough sleep for this drama.

By the way how about we save some trees and don't send 30 letters on 1 day.

Services/apps and their automatic general sayings. I fucking hate that.

'apping' is an abbreviation for either whatsapping someone or messaging them in general (in the Netherlands at least).
Sorry but I fucking hate WhatsApp and I'm not going to say that fucking app/apping word. But then in general it's confusing imo.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO TEXT ME, DON'T SAY YOU'RE GOING TO APP ME.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO SIGNAL ME, DON'T SAY YOU'RE GOING TO APP ME.

"but I meant that" - THEN FUCKING SAY IT.

I DON'T 'GOOGLE SOMETHING'. I FUCKING DUCKDUCKGO IT. NO, THAT'S NOT THE FUCKING SAME.

FUCKING HELL.

When you are from Bulgaria and work in the Netherlands. Something your colleagues should know xD

A lot of times during holiday parties, I meet new people.

Afterwards, often a quick group chat is created to share pictures with all the people there.

Every goddamn time we come at this point again where this is done and since WhatsApp is nearly considered a requirement to function in society (Netherlands) and I refuse to use it and other mainstream media...

The moment that I have to explain why I don't use WhatsApp arrives, yet again. I don't find it awkward anymore but it doesn't improve the atmosphere and getting called paranoid for the rest of the party also isn't the most fun thing ever!

In the end I usually get the pictures emailed.

With the new Dutch mass surveillance law comming soon, I am interested to know what you are doing with it?

Nothing?
VPN?
Something else?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't live in the Netherlands?

Monitor at the train station in Zwolle (the Netherlands) was showing this all day 😋

PSD2 is into effect in the Netherlands.

Because let's enable others to fuck over other peoples privacy!

Back to cash as much as possible it is.

Fucking hell 😡

I was about to use the Duolingo but I think it triggered me to hard. 2 mistakes in a row.

1. I have Portuguese origins and they used the Brazilian flag

2. I was born in Luxemburg and they just used our flag for The Netherlands (I know they're pretty similar but cmooooon)

*looks for jobs in system administration*

For our client in $location we're looking for a Network and System Administrator ... to manage our local IT infrastructure (so far so good) ... that's Microsoft-based.

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

Requirements: deployment and maintenance of servers, backups and storage, updates, yada yada.. fine with me.
yOU wiLl mAiNtAiN WanBLowS sUrVaR sYsTeMs

Fuck that company too.

Does anyone here in Belgium even work with fucking Linux servers?! Or should I really relocate to the Netherlands to get something decent?!!

Okay dutchies and other people who'd like to join.

devRant meeting in The Hague. As far as I can see, Saturday is a good option for many people and for the people who'd like to do a weekend, they can find some sleeping accommodation in The Hague.
I'm personally more than willing to do two days!

Anyone any ideas for a good meeting place? Also one in case it'll rain which is quite likely in the Netherlands.

Please comment your ideas on this information!

We won a robotics competition and we went to the next competition in the Netherlands. I saw this while traveling and had to take a picture

Ubuntu spotted in the wild (in the NS intercity train, the Netherlands)

It happened me a few years ago. I live in the Netherlands, but I am Hungarian. My new "friends" asked me to fix their laptop. I did it for free. It turns out, it was a huge mistake. In the next half a year I've solved several issues to them and to their family members (I don't get it, how they can ruin a well working hardware and software that fast, but it is another story). It takes a lot from my free time at the end. Then I had enough and ask some money to fix the next laptop. The price wasn't high, a bit more than a half of the repair shop's price. They tried to press me to do it for free, cos "you are our friend and you are hungarian too, we have to help each other out". I said no. It is too much. I've never seen them again...

A company called me for a job interview for my internship. As they saw my LinkedIn, they said I had a great skill set built up as I was studying Software Engineering and working aside as a freelancer.

After a short talk they mentioned my international business management (IBMS) minor that I have taken and criticized me that I took a wrong path of my career, told me to rethink my position of my studies and said they will not take me into consideration for the position.

That left me puzzled. Like what was the reason of that call, just to criticize my decisions?

Can't remember the company name that called me here in The Netherlands.

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

!rant && rant

I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.

I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).

About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).

For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.

A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.

I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.

I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.

Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)

Arrived after just a few days in the Netherlands! Thanks @dfox @trogus :)

Thanks devRant for sending it all the way to The Netherlands

Swag from my previous rant got delivered to the Netherlands in less than a week (more like 5 days). Thanks @dfox and @trogus

Hey there devRanters!
In a rants comments I came to the idea (yet again) of doing a kind of devRant meetup in the Netherlands! Would any fellow dutchies be in for this and if yes, lets discuss some details in the comments!

I have been in Netherlands for just two days and I am already in love with this country...
Too bad I'll leave in two weeks 😱😢

yay! thank you from the Netherlands!

I don't know how recruitment goes outside of the Netherlands, but here they can be very very aggressive due to the scarcity of programmers.
One was even so blunt that he called the office I was working and asked to be connected to me with some bullshit story. Now you have to understand that this was a small company, so small that it was one open space. You can imagine how I felt when he was asking me questions and offering me work while the rest of the people could actually hear me. I got mad at the guy and refused.

What are your weirdest recruiter stories? Beside LinkedIn spam...

In the Netherlands you need to pay 60 cents copying levy for a USB stick..

Why, seriously.

Tldr; its a long introduction

Hi Ranters,

I've been on this app for quite a while now. As a shy cat watching from a distance and reading all kinds of rants. Anywho I feel comfortable enough to crawl out of my shell and introduce myself. Since I feel you guys together made such a pleasant and safe community, I'm really happy to be a part of it!

Anyway I'm Sam, 24 year old, from the Netherlands. My favorite color is green. Mostly the green you can find in nature. The one that calms you down:). I'm a very introverted person but always very curious and eager to learn new things.

I started to program when I was 12. I did assembly and C++. Because I liked making cheats for online games. Later I learned about C#, Java and Python. Mostly used it for web stuff, scraping, services etc. But also chatbots (for Skype for example).

Currently I'm 2 years in as a data scientist, mostly working in Python.

But on the side as a hobby and with an ambition I have a basic understanding of full stack development.
Mostly Nodejs, express, mongo, and frontend, no frameworks.

(I will later ask you guys some more questions about that! I could really use some advice!)

Anyway enough about me! Tell a bit about yourselves! Happy to get to know you all a little better!

Finally fucking managed to setup quite fast map tile hosting including the tile generation after ages of research and trial and error.

I love this open (source) maps (openstreetmaps) project but man, figuring out what to do from a gazillion sources can be rather hard.

Now I'm just having some styling issues and the filesize is fucking insane (only the Netherlands with all data, 20gb+ if I remember correctly) so I'm just generating road maps for now. If someone knows some more about the styling as for the maps, please let me know!

Yeah, this is fucking satisfying.

Thanks for the stickers :D
Smooth delivery even in the Netherlands :)
Here are the stickers in action.

We have a saying in the Netherlands: "You have no, you can get yes."
We changed the saying in our team:
"You have yes, you will get no eventually."
Because even if stuff gets approved by 3 managers... in comes the 4th to unapprove and block everything...

Dear mom,
Good for you you have so many contacts. Lovely. But when you visit someone and they tell you they have a problem with WhatsApp - or anything on their device at all - DON'T YOU EVER PROMISE AGAIN THAT I WILL COME TO THEIR HOUSE TO FIX THEIR PROBLEMS. I already ate enough candy today. And if they were to give me money (rare, we're in the Netherlands) I still couldn't care less. If you're too stupid to fix the problems on your phone you probably shouldn't have any phone at all.

Look, if it's my grandma who's kindly asking me whether I'd sometime like to look at her tablet to fix it, or I just happen to visit her (once in a few months): sure, I'll try my best. But for a stranger I haven't heard about who just got here? NO. I don't know you so I honestly couldn't care less about your problems. Go ask your own grandchildren.

Meanwhile in Beurs, NL

srv.sys

Anyone from Netherlands or nearby building something awesome where i can help?

I will be digital nomad for the months of September and October in Netherlands and wish to join anyone there and would love to contribute my web development skills 😊

!dev rant, but dev company rant (if that makes sense)

<sarcasm>
I love my company's HR, she is such a wonderful and caring woman.
</sarcasm>

<rant>
'Breng' (a public transit company in the Netherlands) was on strike today, so I couldn't go to work. No problem I thought, I'll just work from home. So I send a screenshot to the HR where you could see that every train was canceled.

A few moments later I get a message back saying that I should wait for the next train (although you could see on the screenshot that said train was also canceled)

Now I finally have a train to go to work... After sitting an hour in the cold... And I already see the smile on her face when I arrive at work...
</rant>

<prayer>
Please trains keep driving so I can go home tonight...
</prayer>

Niew avadaar! Hek is bioutiful

*tries to hide he isnt form the netherlands*

I just received this notification on my phone. Robeco is a large investment bank from The Netherlands. 🤦🏽‍♂️

I'm thinking of buying a Samsung Galaxy S7 as a replacement to my Nexus 6P.. from what I can tell, it ticks all the boxes.. nice battery (3000mAh), 5GHz Wi-Fi, octacore CPU, kernel source being available, QHD display... However, it being sold at €350 - and that only in the Netherlands - does introduce quite some hurdles. For anyone who's owned this device, how long did you own this device and did any issues show up, especially hardware-related ones? Last time I owned a Samsung device was with a Galaxy S3 Mini, which was a delight to use. Other than that I don't really have any experience with it.

Another thing that piqued my curiosity - I still have 3 Raspberry Pi's unused, as well as one LCD display (but without touch). It got me thinking, the only things that I really use my phones for on the go is for calling, texting and listening to music via Bluetooth. Perhaps a Raspberry Pi or even an Arduino could take care of that? The smart devices that I'd consume and produce most content on are my tablet and my PC anyway.

There was a competition being run by a large bank in the Netherlands. The competition involved playing a simple game on Facebook to win prizes. After discovering that much of the game logic was client-sided, I used a combination of cheat engine to speed up the clock and auto mouse clicker to keep the games restarting. Turns out I was able to play several thousand games in a few minutes.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

I thought I’ve moved to Netherlands 🇳🇱 , not Croatia 🇭🇷 🤒

People here in the Netherlands where unhappy with Facebook's data leak...
So they "organized" that they would delete their facebook yesterday evening at 20:00.
A lot of people on my list said they would delete their account.
In reality, only 3 of them deleted/deactivated their account :^)

And I have a feeling that those 3 will come back rather soon when they realize they get bored without :^)

In the Netherlands they have a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" culture around wages, how is this in other countries?

You ask for what you think you're worth (and are happy to work for) and if the company agrees they pay you.

There's no guarantee you'll be paid the same as your colleagues working the same job because they might just have the confidence to ask for more money.

I have no idea how my wages compare with my colleagues but as I am happy with what I earn it doesn't matter. Seems to solve a lot of the dick waving issues that stem from everyone comparing salaries.

At first i was like lol Netherlands Root CA not trusted anymore, then i was like WTF Amazon-CA when the fuck did this happen?

I am graduating in a few days for my MBO 4(pretty sure that's like community college/college in other countries) in The Netherlands and i'll be going to start working on getting my bachelor.

To prepare, i have devised a learning plan for in the summer.

Should I learn:

(C)++ and Python
(C)++ and NodeJS
(C)++ and C#
or
(C)++ and assembly

C and C++ are languages I want to learn in any case, but as for the others I am undecided.

Thanks

thx devRant for the stickers.
Got to find a place to stick them on now.
gr. from The Netherlands

In the Netherlands most trains have a wifi network called WiFi in the train, it's rather slow so I always use my hotspot

Guess who decided to name their hotspot 'Internet Cable in the train' 😛

Just got a job offer in a DevOps team, the cloud company is Netherlands based. But I'm worried about the Brexit because the day is a coincidence... and I'm in London.

Programmers Bike

Oh boy the schools in the Netherlands have began again, the amount of people in the train is insane... (Also one of my biggest annoyances is) the way how people pile on top of the check-in checkout poles... They try to do it as fast as possible, but because it is an unstructured pile of garbage... It takes way too long...

Is it so hard to stand in a line and just keep your card STIL AND CORRECTLY INFRONT OF THE NFC READER!?

apparently it is because I see people slamming their wallets against it, moving it around wildly and keeping up the line being Angry why the reader can't detect their card... In their wallet, probably between multiple other NFC cards within a second (BECAUSE YOU KEEP MOVING IT FROM THE READER TO THE FUCKING SCREEN!!! WTF)

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

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

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

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

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

@adli89 happy birthday!!
(In the Netherlands it's 7am)

My pet peeve with LinkedIn: messages from recruiters on another continent offering me a job because I live in the same country as the job offer. Just because the Netherlands are a small country doesn't mean I will take any job anywhere in the country! Open Google Maps and check the driving distance, then you'll find that the job is 150km away from where I live, and it would take me 90 minutes to get there in good conditions, not to mention rush-hour traffic! Thanks but no thanks!

Coming back home to find out that my parents switched to optical fiber and can download with 50MB/s WiFi speeds makes me feel sad to go back to my 15MB/s campus speed. Even more when I go to Germany.

I'm wondering if recruiters are just as irritating everywhere or that this is just the shitty situation we have in the Netherlands.

I was once called by an unknown number and heard a typical recruiter story. Since i never heard of or spoke to this person i kindly asked where he'd get my information from. Since mr, Recruiter didn't answer and just kept selling his great position i hung up.

He called back.

I picked up the phone again and he told me there were connection issues. I once again asked where he found my number. And again he just acted like he didnt hear me and sells his great position.

Hangs up and blocks the number. Go f(...) yourself damn recruiter!

Hello! I’m from Nigeria(Africa) and I have two Job offers in Lithuania and Netherlands as an intermediate level dev (software engineer, no senior or junior attached). I am still early in my career, 1.8yrs professional experience. Which would you advise I take and why? Assuming you don’t know how much pay is. Thanks!

they arrived here in the Netherlands today, thanks for the stickers they will get good places

Hi guys, I'm planing to move to the Netherlands(Amsterdam) by the middle/end of this year and I would like to ask for advices, recomendadtions or any info is welcome.

I'm 23 years old living in Spain since 12. Frontend Developer with 2 years experience in Angular, Node.

Also would like to know the salaries range for frontend Developer if someone knows anything.

Thanks a lot

Shout out to the devRant community, thanks David and Tim for the stickers. They arrived in The Netherlands.

Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;

I have a VPS for years by a local provider (the Netherlands). Just came to the conclusion that Digital Ocean have the exact same VPS (specs) for half the money. :'(

fuuuuuu

Didn't know this but it turns out there is a cinema in the Netherlands called Vue 😂

So I've just moved to Amsterdam from London. What prepaid/pay as you go Sim card you recommend me to get? I don't call or text much, data is more important to me

The mass surveillance thingy in the Netherlands is not something I want to do with, so I'm thinking of moving my droplets to London as I heard Germany might also implement something similar. I have two DO droplets that are relatively easy to transfer but I'm open to suggestions, should I move them?

My favorite item imported all the way from the Netherlands. best drink ever. love using my soda stream to turn it into a soda :)

I was told by my aunt that my niece (who also lives in Colombia) would call me (I live in the Netherlands). When I asked why she would call my aunt responded saying that she did not know. I was happy, it is not very often that my Colombian family calls me.

So I waited.... and waited... and waited... finally she called very late. Turns out she wanted to ask me which Smartphone was better.... :-(.

That was a disappointment... Normally if I go visit my familly there in Colombia they bring all there devices and ask me if I can fix them or install a certain program on it. I dont mind doing that. It can be very interesting. For example: a few months ago another aunt asked me to look at her computer to find out why it was so slow... turned out she had a very old PC with Windows XP installed on it. I fixed the problem by installing light linux distro on the computer. (she only used the browser so that was not a big problem). But yeah... I played for a while with good old Windows XP.

Okay back to the beginning. It is awful if family just calls you to ask witch phone is better.

Thats all... :-)

Did a project in my first year of "vocational education"
(in the Netherlands there's different levels of studies)
For some big Corp.

They were amazed by what I had made (really just a simple website) and offered me an internship on the spot. Then they asked when I was finishing my bachelor's (hint: vocational education is one level below) and when I told them I was a first year student of that vocational education they basically told me they aren't allowed to hire anyone that doesn't have or isn't pursuing a bachelor or master degree...

That felt really bad, getting an actual offer based on my skills but be rejected for my level of education.

But it has made me want to prove them I can do it, and so, I am now in my first year of computer engineering.

Google T-rex says thanks all the way from the Netherlands!

Being a Dutch developer & student I'd love to seek new challenges and participate in coding events and Hackathons. Seeing as Devrant has so many amazing developers from The Netherlands around, any suggestions where I could go and find information about such events?

Why are the damned Spaniards so small? Because of them I am unable to sit in the newer trains that go around the Netherlands. The angled headrests (they are supposed to kinda wrap around the head). But these headrests start below my shoulders and my head then floats above the headrest. This causes my shoulders to be folded together.

FU you spaniards (no offense to everyone who didn't design trains), if you can't take in consideration what the average length of the users is you have failed as a product designer.

Yes I am tall (1.95m) but not really above average around here (maybe a cm or so)

I'm officially convinced that my computer is cursed by now:

I get a Oculus Touch Bundle. Connect it to the computer, both sensors through USB 2, HMD too. One of them on an extension cord, experimental 360 degree setup (and yes, I'm covering the lenses when not playing).
Works great for a couple weeks, then I start getting 8603 and 8609 errors (USB connection bad or too little bandwidth. Usually happens when you do something else on the same USB controller).
Trying all of the setups that comply with the setup manual, none works...

... Thinking "fuck it, can't get any worse now", I connect both sensors to the USB 3 ports on my board (A big thou shalt not according to the manual).

Works perfectly. No lag, no loss of tracking.

Well, I guess if something applies to 99.9% of all computers in the world, mine is among the 0.1%. I'm a living corner case, 🤣

Guess I'll move to the Netherlands and become a Ganja farmer.

Alright, it's been a while since I expressed my thoughts/feelings but here is what I'm dealing with.

Ever since I was a kid I've played games and even ended up enjoying the testing of new beta games more than actually playing games. The first games I played were atomic bomberman and worms. I was 4 at the time and lived in Denmark. By the age of 6 I moved to The Netherlands and have dealt with 8 years of being bullied for a reason I do not know. So as you can imagine I've dealt with a serious depression for a while and have always felt out of place.

Later after a few failed attempts of following an education I got into development. This was after I wasn't accepted into an education of game design. The course I follow now describes itself as application development but all we're doing there is building websites and not learning a proper way to keep code clean.

In the second year of the three year course we had to follow our first internship. This was the first positive thing I've had with school in my entire life. I ended up working for a company that had a game which tested your skill, the game was used by recruiters for bigger companies to pre select the right people for interviews. I had a look at the code of the game and it was a mess, after a couple of meetings further I managed to get them far enough that I could start working on a complete rewrite of their game.

So far it's been a rough road to becoming a game dev but I most certainly hope to own a studio one day. Now I only need to manage until I've got there

Is bunq netherlands only then or is it just full of NL fanboys? I find it pretty funny considering NL doesn't like foreign cards, debit or credit. Oh you want to pay for your stroopwaffels with a Visa card ? no... want to buy your la trappe with your mastercard? no. ING or Rabbobank only.... Netherlands needs to join the 21st century...

Stickers arrived in the Netherlands!

<rant>
So we've been doing the final project for college which has 2 parts

1. preparation of a project
2. creating an application

The first part wasn't a problem, making UML diagrams(ERD, Class Diagram, Use case) and SCRUM related documents.

But BLOODY FUCKING HELL was the second part bad.

You get a premade preparation for the second part of the exams... it was the most disturbing thing ever! The ERD which you have to follow is entirely made out of varchars, terribly built for the system you're creating by the way.

We ended up being able to use our own preparation instead after going back and forth... but damn. A company makes these things and the government pays millions for it! What the fuck are they doing? Hiring third graders to play around with lines??

No wonder IT is looked down upon in the Netherlands.. the government is entirely at fault due to their terribly outdated exams, projects, etc.

I thought i had seen it all... but holy fucking shit

</rant>

Not really programming related other than it has to do with my work.

Why in God's name are the trains in the Netherlands so annoying, Autumn started what 4 days ago? And both the Friday and Monday I have had delays or just trains that refuse to drive... Probably because there is a single wet leaf of the railroad... Oh no! We wouldn't want to slip WITH A TRAIN

My biggest ambition tbh is just to be an employed webdev working in England or the Netherlands. Its something that feels both big and small at the same time

do you know the feeling, when it is friday and it is like nice hot weather 26°c. you kinda wished you could just zit outside and enjoy the view days of the summer that are not to hot or to cold (location: the netherlands).

this made me slack off today. only did my sprint planning for next monday and wrote some unit test and some software modification documents.

<long post>

To start of I'm a student in the Netherlands, I have just finished finished a support management study and I'm currently starting with a IT Management study on MBO 4 lvl.

At the moment I'm in conflict scout doing the IT Management study or doing a application development study as I just don't know what to do. I kind of want do development as I do it in my free time and I like it but I also want to do data center engineering as I also like to work with the hardware.

Should I take a month break of my study and try to get in contact with company's to work there to finalize my decision or should I just drop in the towel and do this study without knowing if I'm going to like it in the end.

And if you work at a company in the Netherlands do you think i can do some orientation internship at your company or do you guys know some places to look at.
</Long post>

Devs act like princesses more and more, since there is such a shortage of developers. So many of them are never satisfied and always want more and more. Is this a problem only in the Netherlands, or also in other countries?

Any one here in the Netherlands that considers to start freelancing? I'm asking this because I'm a freelancer myself and joined a cooperation. This allows me to focus 100% on what I love doing. The cooperation does everything else for me: legal, sales, finance, trainings, events etc. etc.
In fact, the only thing that is left for me to do is my income taxes once a year but even that can be arranged!

We are always looking for highly skilled people to join us. Many areas: development, agile, testing, fintech etc.

If you want to start freelancing but have any doubts in taking that step feel free to contact me. I can help you out!!

Lol, the Netherlands is slowly falling into a lock down till 6 april 🧻 get your toilet paper while you can

I'm looking at replicating to the Netherlands. Would any devs on here be able to tell me what the living cost is like and what a decent salary is for a new graduate with a bit of experience?

Hi Hi fellow devs and sysadmins hiding in the dark,

In august of next year I need to do my final internship for my IT Management Study in The Netherlands. My study level is between the US Community College and Associate Degree.

As you can see from the tags I'm looking for a International internship as I'm looking for experience and a challenge but its annoying and pretty hard to find something on the internet due to all of the places that "help you find a place" that ask 4.5 EUR.

So I wanted to ask you guys for help, I'm looking as you can guess for a IT Management internship and I have a slight preference to Asia(With very big preference to Japan) due to interest in the culture.

If you guys know of any places in your company or other places I would love to hear and if you have tips please share them.

Best regard,
Marcel aka inpothet

!rant but more of a question to all you devs out there in the netherlands.

Anyone of you ever considered freelancing but didn't take the step for some reason? Let me know because I can help you!!!

Didn't really know how to categorize, bit of a question/discussion/curiosity, so I put it here.🤷

Just today I read an article that stated about the Netherlands, where the police will use an "AI surveillance camera" (yey buzzwords incoming 🙄, but it would actually make sense(?)🤷) to detect and punish drivers, holding a smartphone. Pictures without smartphone shall be deleted. How would this system work without having non-smartphone pictures? It needs to build a classifier, doesn't it? (To be clear, the system only reports those images to an officer for further analysis and actions.)

I mean let's consider that the images are somehow pre-processed, then some convolution(s) for feature extraction, then maybe some more intermediate steps and at the end apply the results on a classifier. How would that classifier work? Would a probability between 0 and 1 suffice? And if so, report those from 0,5 and above? Or would there be better techniques?

So my government is proposing a new National ID scheme. This will be used to identify s citizen as well as keep track of property, taxes etc.

Parliament just started the debate on how it would work today. It’s set to be implemented by December 2019. My government tends not think things through so as to prevent s disaster like what’s happening in the Netherlands as per @linuxxx musings, I’m trying to gather insight from the industry to compose a document of considerations then getting a law firm to draft the laws it would need to compliment it

Hey. So like I know been gone a while straight to the point.

Anyone in the Netherlands looking for a team member for the Odyssey Hackathon?
In addition to design and front end Ive also got you covered for legal and ethical.

So please if you’re interested hit me up

I want out!

I am an Indian student, graduating in 5 months with bad GPA from not so fancy university. I like to call myself highly motivated individual. I am looking for a job in Silicon Valley.
What skill sets should I prep myself for a job in the United States right after I graduate?

I have enough skills to get placed in Mid-Tier companies. I can spend my rest of the days learning and hyper-focusing to get an job in the Silicon Valley.

My priority is USA>Netherlands>Ireland>India.

I can provide more details as required. Help me out!

So I've gotten my first real assignment. I'm a second year media design student in the Netherlands. My job is to work out a design I've made for a platform into some front-end. The website just has to function as a product to show other people to get an idea of how it will look. It has to be responsive and has like 3 pages: Frontpage where all kinds of courses are displayed, the course page itself and a page with information about the site.

Long story short: they asked me how much that'll cost them. And I have no clue what I should answer. I think I can make this pretty quick so hourly pay would not be beneficial for me I think. What is the devrant opinion or what are your experiences with first jobs

Hello Devrant! It’s ya boi!

Update. Currently back in school in the Netherlands. Studying law and technology. Yeet.

But yeahhhh so stressed omfg. Finals already in October. This school is a mess.

And I’m the middle of that my thesis got rejected so here I am. Crying. Asking y’all for ideas. Anything you can think of please say.

It’s gotta be tech but a legal question. Ethical is fine too tbh. So if there is anything you’ve wondered or think is of please tell me the question. 😭

all I’ll say is that the last one they said was too vague and not specific enough. And ideally it should be AI or data science but anything tech would do.

Not sure if this is the place to ask but thank youuu.

Age old question among SWE:
Should I get a degree?

I studied Software Engineering two years ago, but had to cancel my studies due to financial inability and losing 50% of my body mass (yeah, I’ve struggled).

As for today, I have 2+ YEO as SWE. I was recently promoted to mid-level engineer and Front End lead. Software development was my passion since I was 16 (23 now).

Now, I have been saving up for studies in the Netherlands for the past year, but I’m not sure what to do. Financially I’m really well - I could pay for a new house near the seaside (one of my biggest dreams) or spend that money on studies and boost my ego with additional diploma.

Fallow the heart or ego? 🤷🏻

Would appreciate any advice.

Anyone living in France, Netherlands or Germany?
Could you guys suggest me any companies for a placement/internship?
I've been struggling quite a bit with finding them outside of the UK.
😭😭

Last night on uyouthe’s weird dreams:
- I gave an interview about my ex and why she died
- my other ex got involved in huge marketing campaign of a new laser surgery by receiving said surgery but they somehow completely evaporate her pelvic and hip bones with laser. I saw her body after that happened
- I somehow live in 2003 Netherlands and work for some scientific lab as a frontend developer. All that ie and ancient JavaScript shit but I like that, processes and culture are flawless
- many other weird shit regarding self-driving vehicles being a mainstream and me owning one, my grandma turning evil and send swat to take me down, also I met a lot of hipsters at defcon and I don’t know why are they there

All that in one dream. Amazing.

Is it very common for Developers are in such a high demand? Or is that just in the Netherlands?

I am so fucking done with Webstekker. This is one bad fucked up webhosting company in The Netherlands. In the past we had so many issues: managed hosting websites getting hacked (you can brute force.ftp etc they don't monitor anything), not restoring db views after they migrate a db server, week down time because they fucked something up etc. Last 2 years were ok but today I discovered that one of my money making adsense websites is running on a cms database from another website!! What the fuck?!! I haven't touched that site for at least 2 years and it was running fine.

No Webstekker I don't want to check all of ny websites every day to see if everything works properly. I want to trust you to do a proper managed hosting job. But you retards have proven to be incapable over and over again.

That said, anyone here can recommend a good, solid, trustable Dutch webhosting company for asp.net hosting on Windows?

I do run other sites on VPS but that is much more work for me and don't want to manage all (small) websites myself but unstead rely on a solid company with competent people to do that for me.