So our company hired a new COO few months ago, and he oversees digital department as well

recently he called the digital department into his office to talk about a new campaign for a client, and client's mascot is a ladybug, so he goes like this

COO: So i was thinking, we need to make people more aware about the new branch opening

COO: I have a creative / innovative idea, we probably can get an award for this and I'm sure client will be really impressed with this. Why don't we put ladybug​s on Google homepage, just walking around flapping their wings and stuff, i mean everyone visits Google right ?

Our Team: awkwardly looking at each other
Me: 😐😐😐😐
( I was confused what to think )

Then our designer calmly explained him why it wouldn't work while we were trying our best not to laugh

how the fuck someone like him manage to stay alive all these years and become a COO, i mean he doesn't have to know it all but damn this is common sense

Yesterday I had my performance review discussion with my manager after about 6 months into the job, which is my first dev job. Before this, I had spent about 2 years in a support role after graduation, but always yearned to build something cool and be a full time developer. Hence I had made the lunge in spite of a pay cut into a development role.

For the past 6 months I was asked to develop a bunch of features on top of legacy code which is ~15 years old. I did my best and brought in the best ideas and practices onto the table and delivered on time. The features turned out great. I enjoyed working with the team and the team loved me back!

But at the back of my mind, I was hoping that I would get to work on something new and relevant. To quench this thirst, I used to spend my personal time on side projects.

The managers and the leads who have been observing me all along, told me yesterday that my manager got AMAZINGLY positive feedback from the leads and my teammates (who are like 10 years senior to me). Going forward, I get to work on any CRAZY idea and pick up any technology I like with the goal of revamping our product. Essentially I get to work on my side projects full time as long as it adds value to the company.

Ohhhhhh YEAH!

Wish me luck. 😎

The company I recently started working for are young guys my age, who want me to create awesome stuff, however I feel is best, and they let me think and try stuff, like new cool design ideas and use latest API's to create the most modern site possible. "Whatever you think is the best way to do it"

And I'm paid a decent salary. This is the first job I liked. Ever. I literally wake up early to get going, and work overtime (without them knowing nor paying extra) because I think this project is so amazing and I feel like giving back.. I usually hate PMs, but these guys rock.

I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.

My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!

I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!

WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.

Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!

We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤

I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!

I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.

YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

Removed windows 7 and installing this amazing OS. Excited to learn so many new things. Any ideas for cool nicknames to use as user name?

Serious Question/Poll

Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...

Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)

What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.

What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.

Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.

Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.

Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.

Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.

What else am I missing?

What would you change if you were the owner of a site like devrant?

I've been in devrant for weeks now and the thing I like the most of it is the community (at least most of it).

If you are going through a bad time, they wish you well.
People here also seem to have very decent work experience.
In general, they seem to be open towards other technologies and honest about their shortcomings.

I also like that the site (for better or worse) is not insanely moderated.
For example, in reddit, it's very easy to get a post removed because it doesn't abide to the rules. They can be rudiculous strict, and mods can be trigger happy.

I'm not denying the existence of any moderation here, but for example I've seen some pretty graphic sexual comments, and I appreciate that anything goes (except being a dick ofc).

And I guess that the fact that the community is so chill has to do with that, there's not a huge need for moderation (unless I'm totally oblivious).

But how do you keep a community like that?

I've seen people complaining about the influx of new users and the spam of shitty memes.

How do you keep devrant cool while letting new people join?

I think a necessary thing is that you separate the people into 'universes' and each universe has a limit of x users. And somehow the users are distributed in a way that the average level of 'user likes the universe they're in' is maximum.

Now, how do you create that? Not sure, maybe you let users vote whether they like the other users or not (such votes being hidden to others ofc) and let users switch unis if they don't like them.

What ideas do you have?

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

Somebody has to say it.

React is a lot more trouble that it's worth and has fewer good ideas than people give it credit for. It's a great tool for any other context that's not the browser, and the only reason its the new cool kid in town is because Facebook made it so, and because x-rays went nowhere.

So I participated in this year's Hacktoberfest and it was really cool. Gonna get a free t-shirt and stickers for completing the October challenge. Hacktoberfest 2019 was presented by DigitalOcean and Dev and 4 pull requests were required to be made by you in any GitHub-hosted repositories/projects to get the free swags. It was open globally. I feel events like this encourages budding developers to learn more and exposes them to new ideas. Anybody else out there who participated in the Hacktoberfest? Still waiting for my t-shirt :'(

My goal for 2019 is to write an efficient neural network library with streams and make it very very very customizable. I'll write in C#, cause fuck python script kids. My idea is to make a cool platform for new ideas

Being the only logical next step, do we have any info Microsoft's acquisition of PornHub yet?

Share your ideas what cool new features there are to be 😁

My New medication is !AMAZING....
Yesterday went to the Doc (another 100€ sniff) and got a new update on medication...
(check my profile history for the posts last weekend if ya curious).
One of them must be opium or something... I got so high It looked like Opium (I never did heavy drugs).
Now I'm falling all the time, Can't remember much last night and... man... I use/used Cannabis as medicine for years (on and off as needed) ... Still, remember when I could get high... And the highest time was when I learned cannabis it's great to stop suicide (A friend got me so stoned I couldn't move... Even if didn't really take out the tendencies and thoughts to kill yourself, you can't do it anyway...)
But this new Pill... ONLY SHEEAAATTTT...
Only problem,,, I can't really do shit Until my body gains tolerance... and I was doing so much cool ideas in my Office...
Btw, no more Space Again... The more drawers I place, the more stuff gets here...
But I think I'll lose all my energy again for the next months, so, fuck it.

I work remotely for a team that works together in an office, and this morning on the conference call a team member said

"one thing i think we need to do with this is stay on task, because while these things that have been added are cool we don't need to be doing anything not outlined in the MVC requirements"

Okay first of all -- this is a completely foreign technology to this team. It's not like I diddled around adding fancy animations and no function. The problem working in a new technology with an old mindset is assuming that it's going to move linearly from step 1 to step 2. And that drives me fucking insane.

- Progress in paid contracted work is done by staying on task.

- Progress in research isn't done linearly. You have to try shit -- and figure out what doesn't work.

I feel bad because I'll chime in and shoot down ideas with a fucking guided missile because I know the answer and I've done the fucking research -- I'm not a dick about it, but replying with a simple "no that's not possible, because of this or that", the call becomes silent for 30 seconds because I've shattered their understanding of the technology because nobody has taken the time to understand anything about how this thing works!!

So until they either listen to me, ask me, or learn the smallest amount to get on my fucking level, I'll keep progressing -- because whether the old world idealists like it or not -- that's my job.

Progress.

</ rant>

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

The new devRant avatar feature is so cool and there are so many ideas for customization being posted. Maybe at some point our dev community can build and submit custom devRant avatar objects according to devRant specs. I might even try to build a Bernoulli box 😀
Thoughts?

How do you make up new cool features for your platform?

well you don't because UX and PM think it best to look at competitors and implement whatever shit they come up with.

once, someone came up with a cool feature and some basic prototype for it and they ignored it. the competitor thought of it years later and did it. when they did it, suddenly its a priority at our company to do it as well.

sure, why be the first to do the feature. im sure being unique and creative is overrated not like our profit comes from user subscriptions.

Some recent PM decisions similar to the one above are driving me crazy, its not like u dont know what to do we literally have a ton of ideas so stop ignoring them and prioritizing being a knock off app of someone else. FUCK YOU.

Guys help me grow my small collaboration group. If you're interested in learning new things,collaborating new ideas or just wanna talk to some cool cats then join us. My goal is to grow it as much as possible so anyone can find the help they need on their next/current idea. If interested drop your email and ill send you an invite to our slack. I don't care what your skill set is. You might learn something new. You might not . if anything youll make new friends:)

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Ive repeatedly posted this over and over and i will continue to because i really want this collaboration network to grow! If you're not interested then share this with anyone who might be:

"Guys help me grow my small collaboration group. If you're interested in learning new things,collaborating new ideas or just wanna talk to some cool cats then join us. My goal is to grow it as much as possible so anyone can find the help they need on their next/current idea. If interested drop your email and ill send you an invite to our slack. I don't care what your skill set is. You might learn something new. You might not. If anything youll make new friends :)"

How do I come up with ideas for side projects to practice new frameworks and skills I pick up?

I keep learning new languages and tools, but have no "worthy" project to show for as proof.

How do I come up with cool project ideas? Any sources? Any outright examples for cool ideas I could take inspiration from?

Over the last week I've slowly grown to fucking hate IMAP and SMTP. You'd think after so many years we'd have come up with better servers to manage email but no we still rely on fucking decades old protocols that can't even batch requests.

To make things worse I need to attach to IMAP through node and that has been a nightmare. All the libraries suck ass and even the ones tailored towards Gmail don't work for Gmail because Google decided one day to fucking out the header at the bottom of some emails and split into mimeparts. Also why the fuck is fetching email asynchronous? There's no point at all since we requests are processed line by line in IMAP, and if the library actually supported sending asynchronous requests it wouldn't require a new object to be created for each request and allow only a single listener.

Also callbacks are antiquated for a while and it pisses me off that node hasn't updated their libraries i.e. TLS to support async/await. I've taken to "return await new Promise" where the resolve of the promise is passed as the callback, which let's me go from callback to promise to async/await. If anyone has any other ideas I'm all ears otherwise I might just rewrite their TLS library altogether...

And this is just IMAP. I wish browsers supported TLS sockets because I can already see a server struggling with several endpoints and users, it would be much easier to open a connection from the client since the relationship is essentially:

Client [N] --- [1] Server [1] --- [1] IMAP

And to make the legs of that N : N which would fix a lot of issues, I would have to open a new IMAP connection for every client, which is cool cause it could be serverless, but horrifying because that's so inefficient.

Honestly we need a new, unifying email protocol with modern paradigms...

I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.

Okay, great, so what?

The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.

I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.

Im always trying to learn new things. Im passionate about learning new things, especially development. So much i started a small collaboration group of developers and slack group to collaborate new projects/ideas,get to know new people, and just to learn new things from each other. The group is not language specific developers only, but mostly consists of PHP/Laravel developers at the moment, so im always trying to grow that network as much as possible, so if you would like to join my network to collaborate new ideas or to just even talk to some cool cats, ill send you an invite any day. Anyways, back to my original reason for this post. Im mid level developer who considers himself pretty knowledgeable in PHP and Laravel. Im curious to what other developers use to learn new things. Im constantly questioning my skillset and compare myself to senior developers who always blow me away with their knowledge which often makes me feel like i dont know enough. Currently I use resources such as:

-laracasts.com
-serversforhackers.com
-digital ocean articles or any textbook that wont cost me an arm and a leg lol

I mean i just want to learn about tech related stuff always but currently interested in learning specifically about development topics such as:

- Server administration because i would consider this my weakest skill set (things like provisioning,nginx/security, deployment)
- Continous Integration (as ive never been at a job that practices it)
- RESTful APIs(as ive never developed one)

and so much more but i wont waste your time with my never ending list. What resources/tools do you guys use for your learning?

I'm looking for a new side project.. I want to write in Python or React, haven't used those languages before but want to learn them by doing something more or less useful :D
Do you have any cool ideas? Thanks a lot!