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I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?
32 -
In reply of a great discussion @mojoJojo started on Google's advertising ethics...
GOOGLE Already Pays AdBlock Extensions to Unblock Their Ads. This has been going on for years. Most of the large tech conglomerates have no morals and no ethics, if you ask me. To everyone saying "Oh, Google wouldn't do that" - they already do.
http://businessinsider.com/google-m...
26 -
Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
Its all relative, I've seen a lot of "worst's". Here's one of many I'll try to post.
A (married) DBA would often come to work drunk, starting fooling around with a couple of devs (which we suspect she had sought adventures outside the IT dept based on rumors), and ultimately got fired because she was caught sleeping at her desk (and she was drunk). One of her conquests told us she came from a very poor childhood and this was her first real high paying job. Abusive husband, being attractive herself, and being surrounded by other attractive, highly intelligent, single bucks (aka horny) that had no morals, equaled bad decisions.
She wasn't the worst, it was the assholes who took advantage of the situation that makes it in my top 10 worst things I've seen.8 -
I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are. I don't care if the ads don't track me. I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them. I vote for billboard bans whenever I can. I have zero tolerance for ads of any sort.
Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
— mcpackieh6 -
Trying to reserve a tour guide at Auschwitz in Birkenau. Google captcha wants me to prove I'm not a roboot. Pops up a collection of images where I should select only those with a TRAIN station..
well played google.3 -
During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.
Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.
Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.
The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)
It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.
Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.
You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:
1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries
2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc
From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.
This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.
So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.
Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P
Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.
And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.3 -
!dev philosophical
Quality vs Opinion
I have a feeling that these things have always been at odds with each other and now with the constant connectedness it has just become more apparent that most people don’t understand the difference (or even realize there is a difference for that matter)
Let’s face it. Most people have awful taste. They listen to whatever new music their radio station decides was hot. They watch whatever show everyone else is watching. They are manipulated by large scale news organizations...
Basically, most people are sheep.
The problem is that sheep are a dangerous combination of loud and stupid. Giving these loud stupid sheep a platform to amplify their voice is a bad idea for a society, but a great tool for the pigs to manipulate them.
“Frightened though they were, some of the animals might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion.”
This isn’t confined to one political party or view, it isn’t geographic, it isn’t based on education, it isn’t based on wether a person is ethical or not...
It’s universal.
You can translate “four legs good, two legs bad” into Agent Orange and his followers chanting “lock her up” just as well as it could be translated into the angry leaders of the modern feminist movement.
In both cases (both on opposite ends of the ethical spectrum) you have the loudest dumb, angry sheep getting the even dumber sheep to chant along, wether it is good for them or not.
Now to loop this back. The problem is that dumb sheep are emotional. They truly believe that they are NOT dumb and that their opinions and emotions are a measure of quality.
I FEEL bad, and you are talking to me, so you must BE bad.
I don’t LIKE this amazingly well made movie, so it must BE bad.
And anyone else who has a different opinion is just wrong. Anyone who try’s to explain the merits of the other side is either my enemy or is stupid.
^^^
Their opinion, incorrect.
————
Now for the tough part...
Most likely, based on probability, you are a sheep.
Yes, you! The smartest person you know. The guy/girl who has a degree or masters of a PHD. The person who builds amazing software. You! Are. A. Sheep. And you are dangerous to the world.
To put a cherry on top.
No, you opinions are not important. Your feelings are fucking meaningless. Your morals are worthless. Your voice has as much value and a loose asshole fart from a fat guy trapped in a deep well in Siberia.
But don’t get down about this. It’s doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that almost every person who has ever lived in history has been a sheep. They have chanted one useless, dangerous, misguided, harmful chant after another through the ages.
————
To those of you who try not to be sheep. Just keep trying to get a little better every day. When someone says...
“We do it this way because we have always done it this way”
... be skeptics. Explore the merits and logic of the situation.
And if you are tired of being led by stupid sheep then save some money, build something cool and start your own business.
Just remember, you will always need the sheep. They will be your employees, your friends, your bosses, your investors etc.
Treat them well, don’t hate them, and if you ever find yourself leading a pack of sheep then try to keep a healthy distance from their chanting while leading them down the right path.
They will thank you for it in the end.
———
PS. For those of you thinking “this is very judgemental and self centred”
All I can do is to try to speak your language....
Baaaahhhhh, baaahhhhh, bahhhhh
Which translates form sheep to human as...
“Eat a dick. Have a nice day” -
Dear Thieves.
So I was looking at some guy who's job I designed today.
He was sitting there with the new laptop I bought during one visit here.
It was an hp with a silver keyboard and handrest because supposedly normal people stopped owning laptops when you all decided to embrace schizophrenia and create inane rather stupid meanings that are associated with literally everything but sense or sophistication.
comparing oneself to an animal for example doesn't focus on positive or spiritual values, its something perverse.
ordering food is not about enjoying new things or savoring flavors, its about something perverse.
going to school is not to learn things, its to crash and burn later because the powers that be refuse to update the system from the 1970s.
living, is not living at all, but working to pay bills and get old bitter and fat.
well.
shit.
retards.
anyway. doesn't explain people like myself who made things when we could and were enthusiastic about our jobs at points.
oh. and supposedly the guy who stole the job was 'I".... and it was a job that would become 'outmoded'......
i believe that was the word often used. let;s check. yup, close enough.
then all these people talking about 'new' jobs because noone could trust the group of monsters they made with too much spare time. since you know. they thought it was funny to steal human beings lives since they were not human. subhuman.
anyway.
where suddenly everything meant something else and a whole new world of retarded people emerged from the shadows because the trash children of a former generation got sick of being lectured about morality when they were in fact just bad people who should have been shot.
i don't care how else the whiney bastards explain themselves. i really don't.
you can say that in desperate fucked situations involving psychological torture, rape, etc that a decent person *raises their hand* might do TERRIBLE things to their captors in order to escape, but THEY caused that while whining that someone from the 1940s or earlier made them evil and they had no choice but to steal jobs, money, retirement funds, public institutions, the morals of a generation, i'll bite: toddlers, spread their legs like psycho whores to get pregnant, so steal people's unborn children, turn every fund available that could have gone towards people that needed things to money laundering and in general gleefully fucked our whole country up with the lack of foresight that psychopaths commonly display.
great job.
was it worth dying ?
how about going crazy and letting another group of evil people make an excuse to drive everyone into an endless idiotic loop ?
but hey no, keep lying. works so well.
well at least fedora 37 is released again.
give the stolen photos back.
just want to know what i looked like, and don't want to talk like a retard to get people who understand english to pretend they finally comprehend.
fucking bastards.5
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