Best quotes from IT teacher:

- "C# is a language to program your IDE."
- "C# is a language for beginners, and is not really used in production."
- "We won't use Python to learn programming, because Python is a very old, slow and useless language, and is not really used anymore."
- "Yeah, your algorithm is fantastic, but you wrote 'The answer is: ' instead of 'Answer: ', so it's just a B."
- One of my classmates was bored and opened Notepad++, and when the teacher saw it, she said "I have been teaching programming for years, but I've never seen this program, what do you use it for?"

I feel so lucky that I have started learning programming years before at home, I just couldn't start if I had to learn this way.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.

In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.

Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.

It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.

Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).

Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!

But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.

A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".

So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.

At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.

A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:

"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.

"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!

I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!

It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Dear designers/project managers,

I am a developer. That means you don't have to explain simple programming concepts to me that you half know and think you fully understand as if I have never seen code before.

Save your breath and stop being so condescending. You don't know half as much as you think.

Thanks, from one annoyed dev.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

Story time! This happened several years ago, back when I didn't have a computer and I was just using the computers at the university. They had 8 iMacs all in a row, and I would sign into one and do my work.

Now these computers have Deep Freeze on them, which is a fancy hard disk driver that treats the entire drive as copy-on-write, so when anything writes to the drive it makes a copy of the block and writes to that instead. That way all your changes are gone when you reboot. It's a real nifty idea, but it's annoying that you have to reset all your settings the way you like them.

So as part of my setup routine I signed into iCloud. This automatically synced my browser history and my email, and various other things I didn't really care about.

One of those things I didn't care about was Find My Mac. I found this out next time I signed into iCloud and saw the university computer on the list. I had never seen these computers on the list before since normally the computer reboots and forgets everything when you log out. What I think happened is the sysadmin forgot to check the "reboot on logout" option in Deep Freeze. So I was like "I wonder what would happen if I passcode locked the computer?" I clicked the passcode lock option and entered 5555, and it seemed to work.

The next day I come in and the particular computer I locked was gone. I thought "oh God what have I done". So I inquired with the sysadmin (who I really hope is not reading this) and he said "oh, someone got into the Find my Mac thing and locked it down. We were trying different codes, since if we couldn't unlock it we'd have to send it to Apple and provide proof of purchase and that could take weeks. We had tried all the obvious ones like 1234 and that wasn't working so I was about to give up, but then I tried 5555 and it rebooted! So yeah, it'll be back soon, and I decided to try installing OS X 10.11 on it because we'll all need to upgrade sooner or later eventually and it's best to have tested a bit first."

So in the end I somehow made it out with my skin still on, and also with El Capitan on one of the computers, which was the only one I used after that. Not so bad! Oh and if you've manged to read all the way through you deserve a cookie 🍪😄

Today I have opend a foreign project and noticed a weird bracket ending style.
All closing curly brackets are indented one level further to the right.
I've never seen that style before. Normally I am really agnostic about bracket styles.
I don't care. But this one is so strange and confusing that I wanted to know what you other devs think about it.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

Today I learnt never trust a coworker or see them as a friend.

So I have been thinking of quitting my job to further educate myself. The work I sit with is mostly the tiniest CSS changes. Which is frustating and demotivating to work with.

One of my coworkers told me in confidentiality, that he was looking for another job in another company and he only told me. And wanted to keep it secret from everybody else. I felt this gesture of him trusting me meant I had to trust him back with something else. I told him that I am applying for an education for later this year. But I don't want to say anything before it has been approved.

He understood fairly well and we got to be a thing outside work.

Last week I learnt I was seriously underpaid compared to all other coworkers despite me being one of the people with the most responsibility. I felt this wasn't right, so I talked to the pay responsible and said this paygrade isnt substantial, and I felt it was demovating to go to work knowing I was the least paid coworker.

He understood fairly well he said and said he would bring it into management to discuss.

But then he said one last thing. "I have heard something about you applying for another education, is this true? Since I have seen you put your summer vacation really early this year"

I had to lie and say no, that was like before I knew I landed a job here.

I dont wanna say anything to my company before I get the approval from school.

But still now I am in this position of feeling stupid for trusting this coworker, mad that he violated my trust and feeling very guilty for having to lie to this person's face.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?

My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.

He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.

I want him to learn JavaScript.

He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.

Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?

He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.

What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.

Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.

Fucking Amazon rant again...

TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.

Me on the phone with their support...

Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.

Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.

Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?

Support: let me put you on hold.

.......

Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?

Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.

Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.

Me: The one by the airport?

Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.

Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?

Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.

Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.

Support: There is nothing I can do sir.

Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?

Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.

Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?

Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.

Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....

Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.

Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?

Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...

Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...

Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?

Support: sorry

Me: have a nice day.

————

Here are my thoughts as a student of business...

Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.

However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)

Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)

I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.

But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.

Story time on my job hunt: Currently interviewing with Google during my notice period.

I always had a love hate relationship with Google. Unlike my hate towards Meta or Amazon, where I had a reason to hate them for how ill intended they are, I never had a valid reason to dislike or hate Google apart from the fact that they steal my data.

That's it. That's my only reason why I hate Google. But I fell in love with their products during my trip to Istanbul and how throughout my journey, Google products were there for me to solve all my needs.

As y'all know, I was treated badly during my Meta interview, last October. With Google, the experience is on another level.

People are fucking smart and ingenious, but at the same time very polite, humble, and respectful.

During my 3 interviews so far (2 more remaining), each one of them made me so comfortable that I was more anxious before the interview than during or after.

They supported me during each question they asked. They made me felt heard and focused on my strength, instead of the weaknesses (or trying to break me down unnecessarily).

The interview syllabus is so fucking vast, and recruiters know so much that they helped me not only with preparation material, but also guided me personally. Haven't seen such knowledgeable recruiters.

The questions were dynamic in nature and thankfully because of my preparation, I was able to answer them most.

Overall, the culture at Google seems brilliant and an environment where one can flourish. No wonder companies are trying to copy every aspect of how Google operates and no surprise that Google is doing well at scale.

I feel so high on emotions (positively), after these interviews that I wonder how would it be to work at Google with such phenomenal people and exceptional environment.

Before becoming a developer, I used to work as a sales rep at this company that spent a good amount of time building what they believed to be an innovative state-of-the-art “code generator”. It was basically a scaffolding tool for generating software.

They were using it to auto generate customized iOS and Android native mobile app templates, along with a web backed.

The problem was that the generated code was shit, and the developers on the team basically spent more time fixing bugs than if they had built everything from scratch. But their passion for the product meant they just kept using it.

For some reason they never fixed issues in the original templates, so basically all the bugs that were found, kept showing up with each new app!

I have never seen apps like this that essentially had more bugs than features. Opening more than 10 app screen meant the app would freeze and crash. Sign up forms were actually dummy forms. The list goes on...

All the apps had the same shitty UI. For example, Product pages had a product image area that was like 5% of the screen view!

Last but not least, apps had a backend IP address hardcoded pointing to a server with an IP address that was temporary. So one day they had to restart the server and suddenly all customer apps stopped working and required a software update to work!

It was amazing seeing how a team of 3 developers trying to fix messy autogenerated code, couldn’t accomplish what was essentially a website on an app that I managed to build in my free time.

That’s how I knew it was time to quit my job and code full time.

Recently I got an E-Mail from PayPal.de with the headline "Your account gets limited". Fun Fact: I don't have a PayPal account.
This Mail got me curious though, as it couldn't be a phishing mail, since I don't have a PayPal account in the first place, so I opened the e-mail just to get greeted by pure emptiness. It was completely empty. I thought to myself "oh no, is this some sort of new trick? Did I get infected by some sort of a weird hacky backdoor trojan already?!"

Name: PayPal.de
Original E-mail Address: NULL (never seen this before)
I then realized, that Thunderbird blocked the only content from this mail: a clickable image.

This is getting even more confusing the longer I examine this unique mail. The image is showing me a domain from a site completely unrelated from PayPal, so it was obviously no phishing, but I didn't trust this clickable image, so I looked up its hidden link to find an even more confusing redirection to not a picture upload site like the image suggests, but to a game key reselling site instead, like wtf? What was the whole point of this whole e-mail? Was this a weird try to make advertisements for more than one website? It wasn't even a ref-link or something like that. It was just weird, iunno.

So I'm flabbergasted at the current trend of non-native Linux gaming becoming so stable and performant. In these past few months, I've witnessed stability akin to native support on games I had never expected to run well on Linux before.

DXVK had its initial release in January 2018, and so far every single game I've thrown it at has run so well that I forget it's non-native.

With front-ends like Lutris, it's easier than ever to get these non-native titles configured perfectly - to say nothing about what Proton offers for UX.

What will the 2nd year of DXVK bring? Extended Support for Windows 7 ends in one year - and I've never seen such stability and capability from Linux gaming parity.

Been really busy with things haven’t got around to posting a book in like a week or so..

But I’ll post one today..

This book...

This book, available for free online or you can buy it, written in 1994. But so under appreciated by people for some reason most people never have seen it or know about it. But this is the ONLY book I know of that actually covers this topic.. the only book in existence that specifically goes thru how OOP can be done with C.

NOW hold up before you say just use C++ stop and think for a second.. bear with me.

First off this book is purely for informational purposes and educational use to deepen your understanding of what OOP is actually doing behind the scenes in languages like C++ where keywords exist for these things and you just blindly use them without thinking about under the hood.

This book contains a lot of code and builds you up a complexly library from scratch to make OOP in C... now I don’t take this book literally and this but I have implemented some concepts from this book in projects in the past, and it helps a lot.

Also in my honest opinion If you finish this book, you will be a better C programmer AND c++ programmer, C programming because it teaches you a lot about complex things that you never thought about doing with the language. It proves you can do polymorphism can do inheritance and encapsulation. And it’s not really bloated either.

This books is an awesome book, if you don’t understand C pointers you definitely will after this book.. if you don’t understand OOP in C++ what’s really going on.. you will after this book. After all C++ began as just a preprocessor of C.

Great book for writing reusable, extendable large scale embedded c systems.

Anyway.. rare book of which should not be rare considering it’s free.

I'm not much a fan of JavaScript. In fact, I am not very fond of any dynamic language, but JavaScript is one of my least favorites.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS for all of my web serving. Why would I do that? Am I a masochist? Yes.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS because having the same language on client and server side is something that web has never really seen before, not in this scale. Something I really really love with NodeJS is socket connections. There's no JSON parsing, no annoying conversion of data types. You can get network data and use it AS IS. If you transmit over socket using JSON, as soon as that data arrives on the server, it is available to use. It gets me so hard.

JavaScript is built to be single-threaded, and this is rooted deep into the language. NodeJS knows this isn't gonna work. And while there's still no way to multi-thread, they still try their best and allow certain operations (Usually IO) to run async as if you were using ajax.

With modern versions of the language, the server and client side can share scripts! With the inclusion of the import keyword, for the first time I have ever seen, client and server can use the same fucking code. That is mindblowing.

Syntax is still fluffy and data types are still mushy but the ability to use the same language on both sides is respectable. Can't wait for WebASM to go mainstream and open this opportunity up to more languages!

Me, the only iOS dev at work one day, and colleague (who we'll call AndroidBoy), the only Android dev at work that same day (he's been working with us for less than two months). There was a change in one of the jsons we received from the server: instead of receiving a list, we now received a dictionary with strings as keys and lists as values. My iOS colleague had already made this modification on our parse function the day before.

AndroidBoy: "Hey what happened with the json?"
Me: "Oh, well instead of parsing a list, we'll parse a dictionary and get the list from each key. You basically have to do the same thing, only this time the lists are organized into categories."
AndroidBoy: "Oh, ok. But I don't know how to parse a dictionary while using Retrofit." (Context: Retrofit is a framework for request handling - correct me if I am mistaken, that's just what I've been told)
Me: "Sucks, dude, can't help ya. I've never worked with that and don't have that much exp. with Android."

I go out for a cigarette break. When I return, AndroidBoy is nowhere to be seen and suddenly I can't seem to get that data in my app. AndroidBoy comes in from the room where the backend colleagues work.

AndroidBoy: "Solved it!"
Me: "Solved what?"
AndroidBoy: "I told them to change back to a list and just put the key inside the objects of the list."

... he used the precious time of the backend colleagues to change the thing back hust because he was too lazy to search how to parse a dictionary. I was so amazed by his answer, that I didn't know whether to laugh, scream at him or punch him in the face. Not to mention the fact that now I had to revert just so he could avoid that extra work.

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

This is the first time I have inherited a project. ever. I have always seen people on devrat ranting about inherited projects. Never had I experienced it.

Now, the design agency that hired me would outsource web projects to developers before hiring me. I was recommended to them.

Now then. Today I was tasked to fix a couple of issues a previous outsourced developer had abandoned. I had a look at the issues and started fixing them one after the other. Its a wordpress project. Coding for wordpress is super fucking easy by the way.

You create a default page by going to the admin dashboard.

You can create a custom page by creating a page-PageName.php file. and place all the bullshit you have for the custom page IN THAT FILE.

So this developer who i assumed claimed to be a professional. PASTED ALL THE FUCKING HTML IN THE WYSIWYG TEXTBOX. WHO THE FUCK EVEN DOES THAT?

THIS WAS A FUCKING SIMPLE TASK. THIS ASSHOLE CREATED A CUSTOM PAGE CALLED HOMEPAGE AND PASTED THE HTML IN THE TEXTBOX. WHY THE FUCK?! ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY DUDE? AND OH MY GOD DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE HTML WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THAT &QUOT CRAP. YOU MY FUCKING FRIEND IS THE FUCKING REASON THIS PLATFORM EXISTS. BE PROUD. YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE. YOU CAUSED A PLATFORM TO BE CREATED.

PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR AND NEVER FUCKING TOUCH A COMPUTER EVER AGAIN! YOU ARE NOT WORTH IT.

In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.

This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.

Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.

The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.

The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.

Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?

I was asked to fix a critical issue which had high visibility among the higher ups and were blocking QA from testing.

My dev lead (who was more like a dev manager) was having one of his insecure moments of “I need to get credit for helping fix this”, probably because he steals the oxygen from those who actually deserve to be alive and he knows he should be fired, slowly...over a BBQ.

For the next few days, I was bombarded with requests for status updates. Idea after idea of what I could do to fix the issue was hurled at me when all I needed was time to make the fix.

Dev Lead: “Dev X says he knows what the problem is and it’s a simple code fix and should be quick.” (Dev X is in the room as well)

Me: “Tell me, have you actually looked into the issue? Then you know that there are several race conditions causing this issue and the error only manifests itself during a Jenkins build and not locally. In order to know if you’ve fixed it, you have to run the Jenkins job each time which is a lengthy process.”

Dev X: “I don’t know how to access Jenkins.”

And so it continued. Just so you know, I’ve worked at controlling my anger over the years, usually triggered by asinine comments and decisions. I trained for many years with Buddhist monks atop remote mountain ranges, meditated for days under waterfalls, contemplated life in solitude as I crossed the desert, and spent many phone calls talking to Microsoft enterprise support while smiling.

But the next day, I lost my shit.

I had been working out quite a bit too so I could have probably flipped around ten large tables before I got tired. And I’m talking long tables you’d need two people to move.

For context, unresolved comments in our pull request process block the ability to merge. My code was ready and I had two other devs review and approve my code already, but my dev lead, who has never seen the code base, gave up trying to learn how to build the app, and hasn’t coded in years, decided to comment on my pull request that upper management has been waiting on and that he himself has been hounding me about.

Two stood out to me. I read them slowly.

“I think you should name this unit test better” (That unit test existed before my PR)

“This function was deleted and moved to this other file, just so people know”

A devil greeted me when I entered hell. He was quite understanding. It turns out he was also a dev.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

I usually crib about how stupid people are and how I struggle to stay afloat.

Let's switch some gears now. A post about some good people, product, and processes.

You know what the common theme here is?

The goodness here cannot be measured. Your first interaction with them makes you feel so comfortable that you start feeling butterflies.

These people just keep on giving. They are selfless. They are pure. They actually care.

And when you think it's done, then they give you some more.

What blows me away is, they don't expect or accept anything in return. Absolutely nothing. Not even a simple thank you.

And they are like a wizard. They walk into your life when you least expect them but need them the most. And when the task is done, they'll be gone before you even know.

No lingering, no drama, no bullshit. Just pure goodness.

Like my ex-lead in current company, I have a very senior guy in neighbouring team (for which they were gonna hire me initially), who also happened to interview me, is a gem.

He takes care of me like his own younger brother. Supports me and always answers my queries no matter how occupied he is.

And same is with good products and processes. They feel effortless. So smooth and add exceptional value to your existence. They give rise to wonderful companies.

You'd never experience a single negative aspect about them. No matter how much you try, things will just keep getting better until they don't need to.

And then they'll be long gone. Never to be seen again and never to be forgotten.

You cherish them only in your memory and wish they lasted longer. But they didn't because the purpose was served.

Such people and experiences inspire me. They push me to become a better human.

No matter how the world is or how it treats me, I must always live with high values and be a better version of past self.

The other evening, I was conversing with my mother where we spoke about some family friends who are insanely wealthy but humble and kind.

Mom and I mutually agreed that they don't have such good traits because they are wealthy, but they are wealthy because they live with humility, kindness, and pure intentions.

World is surely a beautiful place because of such people and I aspire to be one. May lord guide me well :)

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

Beginner mistakes?
Putting two single quotes together instead of a double quote

So the last 2 devs who I really looked up to and respected at my company peaced out within the last 2 months. So I began seriously chasing offers while the market was hot. The new bigwigs that were brought in at the company knew I was one of the biggest flight risks, so they threw more money at me without me asking for it.

I just got an offer from a company that I really like that matched the salary that I was bumped to - to them it exceeds my expectations because they did not know about this preemptive bump.

Best part is, I applied to this company on my own, the old fashioned way. No recruiter as my hype person or negotiator. I made a good impression on them myself.

No, wait, the real best part - they offered me a senior level role after seeing my code in a day-long working interview (virtual of course). I mean I had to do some shit with RabbitMQ, which I had heard about and seen in passing, but never worked with before, which to my own surprise, I got working in a matter of a few hours. Blows my mind that someone outside of my old company actually thinks I'm good.

No, wait, the REAL real best part: I've spent the last 4 years - a large majority of my professional career - at my current company. I experienced a lot of growth, but they shoehorned me into a development manager role, which bummed me out as i found myself getting farther and farther away from the code. I'm so excited to get a fresh start and go back to spotify + code for 10 hours a day.

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

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

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

"Hey guys we originally set the demo date to August 5th and thus far I have not seen any previews before that, what's going on here?"

Ok see, that is the kind of thing that I would take to me own lil broken heart IF:
1 It was coming from a product manager at where I work

2 He would never get any sort of updates or would just plain not know about us

3 He would be I dunno....fucking paying us?

This is the thing, a friend offered the chance to help him build a product for a business man somewhere down in the land of tacos. Being in a "fuck it" mood and not wanting to say no since it sounded interesting enough I said yes. The "owner" said that he would not be able to pay since he already had hired a team of developers before that did not deliver and as such he was instead offering a part of the company.....sounds familiar?

Not wanting to let my friend down, I told the owner that I would help just as long I get complete CTO power over the product and not crying about the stack being used or ME NOT GIVING THE PRODUCT MY FULL ATTENTION BECAUSE HE WAS NOT FUCKING PAYING.

He said ok.

Of course he did not like it, but he said ok.

He has been asking for the code, the platform, demos and a bunch of other shit which I continue to refuse since he has not offered me or my boy a copy of the legal documents that we require.

Him: "You will get them soon enough, I still need to see the product just to make sure everything is ok"

Me: "You wouldn't even know where to begin looking unless you have a third party that could verify the code, last time I checked I was to be the only one good for this"

Him: "Yeah and you and <friend> are, but I just need to see the product"

Me: "I send you videos and demos, sorry dude, but no binding document == no code. I know you think I am young, give me some fucking credit because this is not my first rodeo"

Him: "I am not trying to play you or anything, you can trust me"

Me: "No, not really. Talk to me about this when you get the documents"

Him: "Well its cuz this is taking too long...."

Me: "Tssss I know!!! It sucks right? Want a good product, built with all the bells and whistles and YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY? guess what dude, I do have a full time job, your product gets my minimal attention, right there at the bottom next to taking a shit, meaning that I will give your product the same time and attention as I would going to the throne. Aye don't feel that bad, I normally take about 1 hour on the shitter, you get that for fucking free."

To be fair ladies and gents I normally don't just explode on people like this. But I just can't fathom not paying someone for a rather large software product, with only a promise that "it will sell" and then telling them to hurry up.

Far as I am concerned this product will flop, but he seems to think it is the next big thing(of course).

He can go choke on some chode.

Fucking prick.

Background:
I graduated high school from a technical school. And my teacher asked me to come in a few times a week and assist (which I LOVE doing)

So they’re working with circuits and raspberry pi’s and when I can in they pointed out that there was a project they couldn’t get to work. So I had to look at it. Now I was not given the original it was one a student tried to copy in (like they were supposed to) but it was awful. All the indentation was even more off than the original and on top of that. The original and what I was given wouldn’t give an error code.. and so I had no idea what was happening so I just decided to try to fix the indentation and take out stuff that didn’t look right (what else was I supposed to do when I didn’t know where to start?) and while I was doing it another student started to try to fix it and it legit barely took 5 minutes and now my spirit and confidence is broken. I wasn’t petty I observed the result and congratulated him cause he deserved it. After I took the code and put it on my laptop and figured out it was an “inconsistent use of tabs and spaces” error which is fucking stupid and I’ve never seen that in python before so after I debugged that there wasn’t really anything left to debug. So I guess I somewhat redeemed myself but I still feel like shit

Just set up my own IoT device for free thanks to the guys at Losant.

I met them at codestock a couple years ago. They were running a workshop with some Adafruit boards and at the time I had never seen anything like Arduinos before. I was fascinated. So I walked up and asked about it. They said they sold the chips just to demo their IoT stuff. I said I'd buy one. I then waited like 40 minutes for them to get their card reader working. They gave up and handed it to me, gratis. That started my dive into electronics from programming.

Few years later, I needed a remote temperature sensor to make sure a certain unattended appliance never got below freezing. I suddenly remembered that kit (now buried under my heaping stash of electronics), followed the tutorials, and had the exact thing I needed up and running in like a few hours, with all the bells and whistles I could want. And for free.

The icing on the cake here? I went on their website to look at a kit to replace it. I found one with even more goodies in it, and the entire kit cost less than the cost to go to adafruit and buy just the board alone.

Thanks Losant for being awesome. If you wanna do IoT anything, look em up.

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

So, I'm going to apologize before I even start this rant...lol. I am the Senior level web developer at my job and have been there for around 12 years now. I have been there at least 2 times as long as everyone else.

I also want to say that my boss is a good man and I really like my coworkers and he has helped me through a lot over those 12 years and I don't want to sound ungrateful. However, I am so fed up with my job. I think the only reason I stay is the fear of the unknown of switching jobs and that I really like the overall work environment and my coworkers.

With that being said I have been with my boss almost since the inception of the company and I am the only original employee there. I have seen the company grow from 3 employees including the secretary there. We now have like 20 employees.

I have never complained and I have showed continual growth and loyalty over those 12 years. However, like a month ago they had me post a a job position and it was for a social media position and the job required only 5 years of experience and it was within 8k of what I currently make. That made me so angry.

I am literally capable of doing everyone's job at my job including my own with ease. However, no one else at my job is capable of doing my job at all and I have a bachelors degree as well and certified in many different things as well.

Again I am the most senior person at my job period and the most senior person at the entire company. Not only am I an expert in the programming languages we use at our company, but im an expert at analytics(certified in GA4, looker studio, tag manager, etc).

Additionally, a month ago I was reached out to on linkedin by another company and was offered a job for almost 30 to 40K more than my current job is paying and better benefits than where I currently work and it was fully remote.

Should I even bother asking my boss to match this or should I just walk and go to the other company? Apparently loyalty and knowledge hold no value anymore.

Every one of our sprint "planning" meetings.
We would sit and be told to estimate a bunch of defects we had never seen before. And then we wouldnt actually decide as a team what to commit to because it was assumed that we had to deliver everything in the backlog every sprint. This is what happens when you try to apply scrum to a maintenance team.

One of the projects that I have to do this semester is a React-Native, I was very eager to start coding until a friend of mine got an error never seen before, when he googled the problem, literally in StackOverflow somebody posted the same issue just about 2h ago, still with no response. This is going to be a fun ending semester project.

PS: this project is going to have a Lisp code project connected somehow

Update to previous rant: My e-banking account is blocked, because apparently I already set a password on a website I never seen before.

- Tried the declined one
- Tried the unsecure one I chossed after the declined one
- Tried the pin number from mobile app.

BAM@#%$#%!!1!one1! YOU ARE BLOCKED FOR ENTERING WRONG PASSWORD TOO MANY TIMES. PLEASE CALL THE FUCKING BANK ON MONDAY.

I seriously hate this stupid country, and companies that don't know a first thing about web getting picked on government and public sector projects, sucking 100s of thousands of euros and providing the user experience that gives you a fucking diarrhea, at every SINGLE ONE OUF THEM!

So here's where I'm at:
I was just offered a position as employee #5 at a small startup in my area with stock options. I've never experienced this before and I'm unbelievably anxious. On the one hand I genuinely believe in their solution/product and can see it being successful. On the other hand I know there's a huge risk associated with joining the company at that stage. Heck, they're still only going for their seed round in Q2 of next year! Meanwhile I'm working comfortably in an intermediate full stack dev role with 150+ people where I feel that I can be as much/little seen as I want. In other words I could probably coast for several years (and maybe slowly move up) without any trouble.

Has anyone else gone through this before? The opportunity could be huge but it feels like I'm rolling the dice... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

Revision to the Peter/Dilbert Principle, the ProjektAquarius principle: a company will systematically shift the least competent employee on to the assignments the competent employees can't be bothered to do until they become an integral part of the team and drag you down with them. (E.g. eventually they completely fuck up your delivery process, although it's probably still cheaper and quicker than having them do anything else.)

ProjektAquarius principle: A Case Study

We have an engineer who is getting paid quite a bit more than me. Over time his responsibilities have gradually been reduced to documentation and running our almost entirely automated build. Well today the build failed. He pulls me over to tell me, and says he's confused because there is a file there he has never seen before in there and a file he always has seen that isn't there (basically a file got renamed. It was not non-obvious). Answer: change the file name.

Then he comes over and tells us that it's failing again because the script is not finding a file. So a coworker of mine and I go over. He explains the whole build process to us when we ask if there is any point in the script that would help us identify where the script is looking for the file and failing (there wasn't but that's besides the point).

Turns out, he had decided to put the assembly list in order. Normally no problem, but the list is in source destination pairs. So the fucking file was being put in a different directory than the one the script was looking for it in and failing. And that's the story about how my company just paid 3 engineers a quarter of a man hour each for something that would have been resolved in 30 seconds via file search/copying and pasting a file path. Related note: our process for building an install is now about 4 hours long with no change on process besides the BCAK.

Never seen this one before...

Just came across a website that asks you an addition math problem to prevent bots. Except it's always adding two single digit numbers. And they are always 2 and 9...

In every single group project at my university, there is always that one guy that doesn't do shit:

Last year, we were a group of four students developing a website. One guy had never seen HTML before and was just filling the website with lorem ipsum and break-tags. One student didn't work a lot on the project, but developed a few bugs. The last guy, did not even spend 1 second working on the project.

A few days remaining before the projects deadline, and all we had left was to write a report on how we did acceptance testing. I was sure he would not get the same grade as the rest of us since I emailed the course coordinator, saying that this guy hadn't been contributing with shit.

However, just before the deadline, this guy starts making massive amounts of commits to the repo were he changed like one single character in our report, or just edited single words. The course coordinator probably just checked to see that everyone had committed to the repo, because everyone got the same grades!

My manager had someone else manage me for my whole time at the company so far. Nearly two years now. Anything I’d come to him with, he’d direct me to this other person.

Fair enough, dude’s really good and I learn a lot from him. I see why they trust him with so much. I think he’s a genius. I’ll never be that good. Embarrassed I’m only a few years his junior. Wonder why he’s okay with being a manager for employee pay. Don’t think about it much, normal corporate BS.

Well it got way more “normal” when his ass got laid off without notice. Feel terrible. Him and 70% of my branch’s full timers. Wonder how I got so lucky. Everyone’s gone. We barely have enough people to do a standup. They all had 5+ years on their belts minimum. Only the contractors are left.

Manager emergency meets with me. Tells me all his best staff are gone and I am now the only front end guy on the team. He tells me he is not confident in the fact I am responsible for all of the old guys work and he is worried. He thinks I can’t do it cause he thinks I suck. Fuck me man.

My manager is pissing himself realizing he has lost the only people keeping HIS job for him. He has no clue my skill level. He sees my PR’s take a bit longer to merge, yet doesn’t realize I asked that friend of mine who was managing me to critique my code a bit harder, mentorship if you will, so we’d often chat about how to make the code better or different ways of approaching problems from his brain, which I appreciated. He has seen non-blocking errors come through in our build pipelines, like a quota being reached for our kube cluster (some server BS idfk, all I know is I message this Chinese man on slack when I get this error and he refreshes the pods for me) which means we can only run a build 8x in one day before we are capped. Of all people, he should be aware of this error message and what is involved with fixing it but he sees it and nope, he reaches out to me (after the other guy had logged out already, of course) stating my merged code changes broke the build and reverts it before EOD. Next day, build works fine. He has the other guy review my PR and approve, goes on assuming he helped me fix my broken code.

Additionally, he’s been off the editor for so long this fool wouldn’t even pass an intro to JavaScript course if he tried. He doesn’t know what I’m doing because HE just doesn’t know what I’m doing. Fuck me twice man.

I feel awful.

The dude who got fired has been called in for pointless meetings TO REVIEW MY CODE still. Like a few a week since he was laid off. When I ask my manager to approve my proposals, or check to verify the sanity of something (lots of new stuff, considering I’m the new manager *coughs*) he tells me he will check with him and get back to me (doesn’t) or he tells me to literally email him myself, but not to make any changes until he signs off on them.

It’s crazy cause he still gets on me about the speed of stuff. Bro we got NOTHING coming from top down because we just fired the whole damn corp and you have me emailing an ex-employee to verify PATCH LEVEL CHANGES TO OUR FUCKING CODE.

GET ME OUT

I been looking over my profile and god it's been a while, programming as still been going on in the background but more for game mods and alikes, kind of been lazy but same time dealing with life.

I really had forgotten my passion for tech and programming it's just become a tool I know and use and I kind of feel bad for doing that. I got in to computers when I was 6 years old built my own PC our of random spare parts at 7, was teaching family members how to repair there own pcs by 9 at the age of 11 was helping with the schools computer department repair and fixing networking problems and my ideas and comments mattered.

Now I am an adult ... Sadly it seems the enjoyment of any idea is shot down with some rude remarks from another Dev, but isn't the point we all see a problem different so we all can contribute?

Like I said I never worked away from computers or programming but now I more like your little side computer repair shop I can do it, I get the job done but the passion isn't there and the end result reflects it.

I believe it's the human part what put me off not just others but myself, I used to put my heart in to my projects and when someone comes alone and rips them apart for let's say a spelling mistake what I state everywhere I am dyslexic but seems to be over looks alot. I became more stale in what I was willing to take on. My own websites now reflect this I am using crappy reinstalled software over me doing it myself.

But the passion for the idea what tech and programming never left I just hope one day soon I am enjoy it again, the wow factor is still there, god there is some talent out there and some of them people I meet before they became big but my aim was never to be come big I would be happy to be on a small project what only as a few eyes on it as long as it makes a difference and that's my problem tech like everything as become so commercial.

Even small projects are ran like a company and the wow factor is gone or the risk factor of trying a unknown way is dismissed for trying to keep face.

If I was born 20 years before right now I would be glad to slow down but I am 30+ and seen the world change so much in this last 10 years where I can do it but .... Why would I do it, when most cases it goes out of my moral ideals

I still mess around with teck, I still have Pi's kicking about and you bet your bottom Dollar I will be trying to get a Pi 5 lol

The love of tech hasn't gone but the communities I enjoyed have, I know this is a me not adapting but I don't need to adapted, I want what we do to matter to someone to make a difference, and I mean with there life's and wellbeing not there bottom line.

If you have any communities to look in to please comment below and of you was able to read this then OMG I am so sorry, I didn't proof read this or anything it was just a little rant about how I become disconnected from the world I have always found enjoyment.

I slipped away to game at late but this last few months I seen myself wanting to be apart of a project or community for tech/programming and even just be a voice helping even someone else get the answer.

I do still have hope for the geeky nerds of yester years even if we are now just a relic of the past lol

Well sorry to put anyone's eyes though this lol enjoy your rants guys and keep up what ever projects your working on.

!dev

Nothing is a dream.

My very first step, as I left the staircase, was on a plate. A loud click made my instincts tick, pushing me to blindly roll forwards.

Before I even had the time to process, that I had just evaded being burnt alive by a wall of flames, the rumblings of another mechanism made my heart accelerate yet again.

Five iron spikes descended uppon me, scratching my cloak, but no more. Twice I was lucky...

But three doors: one behind me, two to my left and right. The ones at my sides spring open with a loud crack, and four terrors pour out, seeking to flay me alive and wear my skin.

I slash at them with my bloody falchion, walking backwards, seeking to escape through the remaining door. Primal fear runs through my spine as I realize: it's barred from the other side!

Burning through my mana, I manage to unlock the door, and quickly close it behind me... but the terrors do not abandon the chase. With inhuman strength, they pound on the door, while desperately crying out for my blood.

I try to escape to the next room... another locked door. There must be another way! There has to, or I'm as well as dead...

What's this, in the corner, among cobwebs? A handle... and a secret passageway, that I can close from the other side! Magnificent!

Another flight of stairs takes me deeper into the tomb. I find an oil lamp, suspiciously well-maintained. Someone has been here recently...

I marvel at the macabre carvings on the wall, depicting scenes from when immortal tyrants ruled the earth. Haven't I seen these before... ?

No matter, I must focus. I was instructed to find an artefact hidden within this acursed place, that I may use for the purification ritual -- there is only one way, so onwards.

An old wooden gate, with a broken bronze knob. Soon as I put my hand on it, it opens inwards...

Eyes black like diamonds, she awaited me inside.

I had never been, simultaneously, just as terrified as enraptured. Day and night, her voice still reverberates inside my mind. And even as I lay dead, her inescapable gaze still clutches the very bottom of my heart.

"Did you come for me?" she asked, smiling, opening up her arms, so that I may fall into her sweet, loving embrace.

"Yes" I whispered as I walked towards her, enthralled.

In a bout of deranged ecstasy, she drank every last drop of my blood. But then... she cried, cuddling my remains.

"No... no, no, NO!" her screams tore apart her very soul "I killed my son... I KILLED MY SON!"

Oh, mother...
Don't cry mother
it hurts no more.

Now I live again.
And I forgive you.

Because I loved you,
as ashamed as I am to admit,
the very moment I saw your eyes,
I loved you.

"I was imprisoned here, so that I may not harm anyone else" she muttered, tears in her eyes "I cannot stop myself -- I am cursed"

Do not ask of me, that I end your suffering.
How could I?
If there is no cure...

"Please, my love... " she begged "kill me... "

No... I can't...
I can't bear either weight
for the rest of this wretched eternity!

How could I take your life?
But how could I leave you to suffer?!

"Now we'll be together... " she smiled, as I raised the falchion.

"Forevermore" I wept, before bringing it down.

***

Nothing is a dream.

Somber, I returned to the Santuary, having fulfilled my mission.

But looking uppon the bone mask I donned, obscuring my eyes, the Matriarch knew that I had been... changed.

I felt no remorse as I slaughtered the witch that doomed my beloved, right on her own altar to heresy. She earned as much.

Her guards, however, I could not defeat.

But that doesn't matter;
deep inside, I was already dead.
And behind the mask,
the whole way through,
I had shed tears without pause.

"Now we'll be together... " I prayed to the nightsky, as silver blades punctured my thorax.

"Forevermore" her sweet voice replied.

***

Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen

how can i learn to drive without killing myself?
i have several constraints around me, some seems solvable but others seems kinda messed up:

1. no vehicle?? my family owns just one scooter with a 125cc engine that my father takes for his job.
solution : i can buy another vehicle , i got finances.

2. problem of keeping? : living in the world's 2nd most populous country, we had to fight worse battles with our neighbours to get the parking of 1 small 2 wheeler. we might get another one somewhere for another 2 wheeler, but anything bigger than that, and I don't know if it could fit.
solution : ???

3. what to buy? cars are usually most preferable since they are made for multiple people travel. but bike riding is a good skill and bikes can cut through traffic pretty easily. light scooters are also very good as they are easy to balance and cheap, but some highways don't allow them as they can't reach the std 80-90 kmph speed limits
solution??

4. my history of shitty driving and how to get better? we have this scooter in our family for last 4 years (and a few before those that my father used , but this was the firs vehicle that i bought ) , but i haven't been able to get better at it. i can surely ride it myself and drive it at slow speeds without someone sitting on the backseat, but if there is someone at the back, then my hand shakes and the backseat person will be shit scared. i also failed my driving license test, and it will he awkward to buy a new vehicle of I can't properly learn it /use it on daily basis
solution : ???

5. why buy? i never really had a use for it. my college was 90kms away from my home and required train+bus+auto travelling for 2 hours on highways.
and now my work is from home. i sometimes think that my lack of necessity has also caused me not to learn this skill properly
solution : ??

i really wanna learn this skill and be seen as a more maturw reliable person but everything around it seems confusing.

I never finished it, but before I was working in the industry, I was coding through a book called Build Your Own AngularJS. My intent was to have piecemeal instruction/example in TDD and code way above the level of complexity I was used to. You essentially build the core of AngularJS in about 900 unit tests with total coverage. 1000pages long, its no walk in the park.

I gave it up when my time was short, and focused on higher level concepts: building apps, learning tools of the trade.

Now that I am getting plenty of exposure to that level, I am thinking my free learning hours may be better spent going down into the complex worlds shown in this book. A couple of things I found there really stayed with me and shaped how I think about problems. It was also very illuminating to see how complex algorithms work “in the wild”. I cant stand learning algorithms in isolation, generally speaking.

Has anyone seen this book? I know the framework itself is older now, but I don’t think that is much relevant for this learning use case.

I only know of one student who completed this. Took him a few months. He is an absolute machine.

I have never seen core coding questions here so this is one of my shots in the dark-- this time, because I have a phobia for stackoverflow, and specifically, discussing this objective among wider audience

Here it goes: Ever since elon musk overpriced twitter apis, the 3rd-party app I used to unfollow non-followers broke. So I wrote a nifty crawler that cycles through those following me and fish out traitors who found me unpleasant enough to unfollow. Script works fine, I suspect, because I have a small amount I'm following

The challenge lies in me preemptively trying to delete some of the elements before the dom can overflow. Realistically, you want to do this every 1000 rows or so. The problem is, tampering with the rows causes the page's lazy loader to break. Apparently, it has some indicator somewhere using information on one of the rows to determine details of the next fetch

I've tried doing many things when we reach that batch limit:

1) wiping either the first or last
2) wiping only even rows
3) logging read rows and wiping them when it reaches batch limit
4) Emptying or hiding them
5) Accessing siblings of the last element and wiping them

I've tried adding custom selectors to the incoming nodes but something funny occurs. During each iteration, at some point, their `.length` gets reset, implying those selectors were removed or the contents were transferred to another element. I set the MutationObserver to track changes but it fetches nothing

I hope there are no twitter devs here cuz I went great pains to decipher their classes. I don't want them throwing another cog that would disrupt the crawler. So you can post any suggestions you have that could work and I will try it out. Or if it's impossible to assist without running the code, I will have no choice but to post it here