There is no shame in using google to program.

'Back in the day' we had phonebook sized books of documentation on our desks we would reference constantly.

Why?

No one is going to memorize a phone book sized book. Not to mention three or four of them.

Being a good dev is about creativity, not memorization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

school takes the creativity out of programming.

you want to try something new?
sorry, can't have that. functionality = priority.

school takes the choice out of programming.

- you're gonna use x language
- with x api
- in x environment
- and make it in x way
- because if you don't, your gonna fail x assignments
- because programming is about getting the job done, with no creativity

yeah fuck you too

school takes the cleverness out of programming

you get a turn left function. it turns a 'turtle' left any amount of degrees that you pass it, you have to make a turn right function to turn right 90 degrees. well, if you thought turning left -90 degrees was a good idea to make a turn right function, then fuck you. you have to turn left three timeswith the default 90 degrees instead because it's more practical/logical.

fuck that.

anyone else hate the movements to get programming into schools?

My friend and boss，told me he would teach me code 2 years in a half ago.

I didnt know what css or html was and i used to call java javascript.

I can know create my own module with webpack， have my automated doc， use react， redux， he taught me linux， git，unit testing， databases，docker， and so on...

Im not an expert in any of it butbi know what they are for and can play with them more or less comfortably.

The best advice he ever gave me was:

“coding is not about coding. We are like the greath painters of history. They were great at painting but even more at creating. If you have no creativity， you can paint as well as you want， its worthless.”

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

So far all designers I worked with do the following:
1. Use "creativity" to come up with stuff that the system does not allow implementing, for example: Changing clock color in mobile statusbar to Blue!
2. Use "creativity" to come up with a heavily customized calendar for a windows software which requires building the control from scratch, but they explain their creativity by saying: Can't you use CSS?
3. Provide iOS only design which follows android guidelines and refuse to provide android styles for at least pages that to be handled differently on each platform, for example, we had a checkout page in an app, and they wanted the same style for both WITHOUT building custom control for it, they said: Can't you use the android custom control inside iOS
4. They design for a website and send same mockups for me to implement on mobile apps, the problem is a web page runs on a big screen when the mobile app doesn't have room for half the stuff they designed but they must look exactly the same as website !!
5. They send entire PSD with no color codes and say: You can extract icons, and colors from psd ... When they should provide them as per our request which is: SVG for Android and PDF for iOS with the color codes, but no, they are lazy!
6. They ask the team to create a page in the app which is almost production ready just so that they test different font sizes and see how it will look on the phone
7. Same as #6 for images that contain text

The list goes on, but those are by the far the ones that made me one step away from resigning, some of them made me resign...

PORTFOLIO INFLATION

when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.

Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.

And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.

And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.

And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:

Welcome to costco. I love you.

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

Story Time.

TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).

In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).

We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.

So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.

But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.

Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.

Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.

Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.

Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.

And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

have you ever felt that you enjoyed and loved your job and coding, then after a while all of the joy, contentment and vigor just left together with the wind?

Well I have, and let me tell you the story of my peope and the feature whirlpool drain of death, slowly `agile`ing you to the death of creativity.

First everything was seemingly good, Its your product, a baby that every one is contributing to make, a great idea in the making.

Fastforward after the baby was fully materialize, and you are watching his first step, usually you are happy seeing his slow growth. But ITS A BIG FUCKING NO. He wants the baby to go faster, bigger and stronger, more than what he can chew. Then you watch as the baby grew into an abomination. A monster of undistinguishable and parts. It grew inhumanly large. BUT it never grew and it never matured. The baby sits there, and were just here injecting all sorts of stuff just to make his father happy. But the end of the day he will ask more and more and more, until the cycle goes on. The baby grows but does not mature, and were here trying to make his father accept the baby. But NO he like more. Sadly we have no power over this. we are mere slaves of the fathers bidding. his bitches, tools and nothing more...:(

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

guess what i learned today?

i have no creativity whatsoever.
or at least in a design sense.

i bought a website my first website a few weeks ago and the main page looks, well, barfable.

orange on blue? i have no where near enough css experience to pull that off. i ended up trying to make it like a linux distro (zorin os), which is neon blue on black.

i asked for advice on the ux stackechange network, and of course, two people with a low reputation both answered, and of course of course, both their answers contradicted each other.

welp, fuck me.

I've been working like a mad woman in a startup for 3+ years now. They feel like 10. Or at least the tech stacks we went through.
Never, ever join a startup, regardless of compensation, unless you know you can emotionally and mentally recover from that startup failing as if it is yours, not your bosses. Otherwise, it's just a shitty short experience.

My long experience is shitty, but man. I don't know.Those who built google, wanted to make a search engine. Did they know they're gonna be good? NO. This is the result of them being good. They now have that great product that succeeds and is able to become a self-referential piggy bank. You cannot be a self-referential piggy bank based on a fucking belief and idea, and a bunch of VCs who already put money in you. You know why? BECAUSE GUESS WHO IS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUSTAINING YOUR START UP NOW?

The bloods and passions of youth, that join your startup, thinking they can make a difference, and you just undermine them constantly thinking that no engineer can make a difference if they can't ensure compliance with your dumb funding strategy.

Don't even get me started on the fact that most people who work for startups, rely on either laziness or passion. It's like a bunch of kids in art school, whose professor doesn't like anything they make, but they still kinda like it hoping one day they leave and become artists themselves. Then they discover that this shit professor actually taught them nothing about creativity in the real world, and what it takes to push something out.

And, it finally fucking hit me.

The reason startups will never work in this year, and beyond, AND TILL I SEE A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE IN 10 YEARS.....

The market won't fucking allow it with the current strategy tech companies are a fan of: hire a bunch of passionate devs who wanna learn a tool through doing our unique work. Doesn't matter. DIVERSITY. THE UNION IS THE PASSION. That's dumb as fuck.
Why?
Here:

- Passionate people do not have to use passion as an incentive, the passion was there, and them getting their idea made or money is the incentive
- If you hire a passionate person - even if they are the fucking best - you just made their passion a tool, in getting your PRs done and shit epics scoped AT BEST, and so the tools you're teaching them to use are getting away with doing less impactful, productive, creative work.

I AM SO DEPRESSED.

At night is when my creativity starts flowing like a motherfucker. The moment when all the tasks are done for the day and you can start working on your own projects and just lay back and smoke (or drink, whichever you prefer) and zone the fuck out with some good music. Oh and if I've gotten a good work out in that day, then there's no stopping me.

I had no plans to even create an admin panel for my own small project but last night I made one just to make it look professional. After that, I got an idea for a separate project which I started working on. I usually write my ideas down so that I don't get into a complete project cluster fuck with 50 half completed projects, but sometimes you get that golden one that you have to start (currently those are the only two unfinished projects I got).

I'M OUT OF WHISKY!
Creativity -= 100;
Motivation--;
Productivity--;

I guess no home project for tonight...

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

I always hate how I get a great idea for an app/game, and then I open up the play store and a very similar thing is on the first page.

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

So I had this thought all of a sudden. (Without any drug in my system)

Why are we still developing same old systems, softwares and web applications till now?

Websites, games and creativity involved development are understandable because people have different taste.

But workflow and process are supposed to be precise, standardized and consistent. No?

Is it because businesses are operating in various ways? Then again why?

Shit. I should stop my thinking at this level. 😑

"What is going on... this should work?!
Is my maths wrong?
My maths is wrong...
Oh no!
It's a model view projection matrix?!
I'm shit if I'm failing at this, it's 3D dev 101!
I got a first class degree... I don't deserve any of this or this job!!"

<2 seconds later>

uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.matrixWorldInverse.elements);
uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.projectionMatrix.elements);

"You set the same uniform twice you tool, due to copy and paste..."

Imposter syndrome in my early days put myself into a roller coaster of emotions. I always compared myself to others to the detriment of myself.
Thankfully overcame that working with some great guys.

But yeah, coding has impacted life for the best though. The challenge, creativity and constant learning is beautiful.

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

Work/life balance doesn’t exist!

I have no personal life outside what I do. My creative expression. It heavily influences my every decision and makes up who I am, and it is not possible to draw the line where my creativity ends and my personal life with my partner, friends and stuff begins. Coincidentally, it is also my “job”.

The day my creativity stops will mark the end of what makes my life meaningful.

in the workplace, i have no access to internet, am not admin to my own computer and am not allowed to install anything (due to security reasons). i also happen to have quite some spare time so i'm writing nokia's good old snake game in visual studio and opengl so i can amuse myself both coding and playing. in a way, company pushes creativity and productivity even for slacking.

As we are all aware, no two programmers are identical with regard to personal preferences, pet peeves, coding style, indenting with spaces or tabs, etc.

Confession:
I have a somewhat strong fascination with SVG files/elements. Particularly icons, logos, illustrations, animations, etc. The main points of intrigue for me are the most obvious: lossless quality when scaling and usage versatility, however, it goes beyond simply appreciating the format and using it frequently. I will sit at my PC for a few hours sometimes, just "harvesting" SVG elements from websites that are rich with vector icons, et al. There is just something about SVG that gets my blood and creativity flowing. I have thousands of various SVG files from all over the web and I thoroughly enjoy using Figma to inspect and/or modify them, and to create my own designs, icons, mockups, etc.

Unrelated to SVG, but I also find myself formatting code by hand every now and then. Not like massive, obfuscated WordPress bundle/chunk files and whatnot, but just a smaller HTML page I'm working on, JSON export data, etc. I only do it until it becomes more consciously tedious, but up to that point, I find it quite therapeutic.

Question:
So, I'm just curious if there are others out there who have any similar interests, fascinations or urges, behaviours, etc.

*** NOTE: I am not a professional programmer/developer, as I do not do it for a living, but because it is my primary hobby and I am very passionate about it. So, for those who may be speculating on just what kind of a shitty abomination of a coworker I must be, fret not. Haha.

Also, if anyone happens to have knowledge of more "bare-bones" methods of scraping SVG elements from web pages, apps, etc. and feels inclined to share said knowledge, I would love to hear your thoughts about it. Thank you! :)

I am honestly flattered by the fact that @scor really, unironically thinks that “by the frequency and varsity and depth you post and comment and self imaging”, I can't be a single person, and there is a whole TEAM behind me!

Honestly, I don't care about insults. Neither yours, nor of that schmuck that is salty because he posted some stupid misogynic shit a while ago, I reposted it as a screenshot, and he was obliterated by the community.

I'm only posting this because people out there legitimately think I'm a hive mind. It's not every day that you're told whatever you do cannot be done by one person. To me, this is more of a compliment.

Looking past devRant, I would like to meet @scor and other haters IRL. I have no hard feelings. I'm just an autistic person with bipolar disorder. I post whatever I want, as it's somewhat therapeutic.

You don't have to acknowledge it, but here's an honest, personal message: if you at any point compare yourself to me and lose, remember, my personality and creativity is a negligent, slight payoff for a literal hell that is a mental disorder. My thoughts are thinking themselves. I can't control them. My body is twitching constantly. I'm both actively anxious and always tired. My intellect suffers a massive penalty in a depressive phase, like now.

Finding at least some positive side to that hellscape is absolutely vital, and any person with a disorder can tell you that.

The fact that I'm social, I have friends and a job is a miracle. I'm privileged. I've seen a lot of people less lucky than me. They weren't able to monetize their troubled, sharp brain. I was.

I feel like I have a creativity blackout.
I want to develop a self-toy project but I have no idea what to do.

I just spend my free time on web courses. I guess that's better than nothing.

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

Why do you think restarting the device mostly works? Be it phones, laptops or routers.. No real answers pls.. Let see how much creativity we can get 😅

(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)

Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.

I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.

But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.

Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:

defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end

Jesus christ, I hate this shit.

Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.

It appears to be written by a child.

js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.

You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.

require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.

Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".

Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.

And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)

You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)

To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.

But here's where i drop the shit.

Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.

I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.

Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.

Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.

We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.

But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.

Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.

Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.

Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.

DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".

I still remember that afternoon when I was in 9th grade, it was raining outside, I entered in the lab for the first time, and there she was sitting alone, shining like a dew drop. I could not resist, and I sit with her for a while, we talked, we touched, and the magic happened. that was the day and today is the day, no one can take us apart. We are like made for each other. That was for the first time I touched a machine, and never looked back. The endless possibilities with programming, and desire to fulfil the everlasting thirst of creativity and problem solving made a developer/programmer/mathematician/physicist.

Question for you guys.

I have an Android app in which you can track when and how much you have worked, etc., especially aimed at (food) delivery drivers. I know those kind of apps already exist, it's a hobby project :). But I have no idea what to call it.
Any suggestions?

I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.

I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.

Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...

today I will have the last of my high school finals.
I feel like after today I will be a free boy (for three months, at least). Like I have won the game, beaten the boss level.
After 7 years of resisting to comply to this system which tries so hard to shape every pupil into a compliant individual, it will be done.
My creativity and productivity (which lies in tech, which isn't really represented in any subject in my school), set free.
No more mandatory pseudo-interest in loads of literature and cultural history. The bits that are interesting would have come to me anyways through Reddit.

Victory is mine. YAY \o/
World, here I come!

P.S. yes, of course, there were also positive things. I'm actually thankful for that time I failed the year's end exam about literature which ended in me having to redo that year. It landed me with loads of free time, which got me into tech-tinkering, a now two-year employment as a programmer, and a juniar participation at the nearest Hackerspace. And a chance to pretty much build and operate a 3D-printer, for which the physics department mostly covered the cost. The school unknowingly gave me the opportunity to extend my own horizon outside of school, and it brought me so much nice things. :) But the mandatory interest in literature and cultural/religious history and the lack of technical subjects and the digital oppression still sucked.

P.P.S. oops that was only supposed to be a short P.S.