I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Not my mom, but my girlfriends grandmother. I told her that I am a software developer, a guy who makes the programs which run on computers.

She became really excited about that, because finally she found someone to repair her 40-year-old radio. I told her that I have no fucking idea about radios, but she did not want to hear that. So I looked at the case, randomly pushed some buttons and again told her, that I could not find the broken part, let alone repair it. But she didn't listen and told me to open the case and look inside.

Sighingly I opened the radio, looked at the inner parts and told her once more, that I don't know anything about this stuff. She told me to look more closely. About to lose my mind about this pointless task, I finally told her, that "the transistor" is the problem and that the best thing she could do is to throw it away and buy a new radio. She was happy with that answer.

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

So my actual job is being a nurse at the local hospital, with coding being just a hobby. However, the way some IT–Related things are treated here are just mind-blowing. Here are some examples:

Issue: Printer is not recognized by network anymore due to not being properly plugged in

Solution: Someone has to tell the house technician, if the house technician is currently not available, ask his assistant who only works part time and like twice a week. House technician took the printer (God knows why), came back 2 days later and plugged it back in.

Issue: Printer 1 of 2 on ICU has run out of ink and since all computers default to printer 1, nobody can print.

Solution: Call the house technician, blah blah, house technician comes, takes ink cartridge of printer 2 and puts it into printer 1.

Issue: Public WiFi is broken, can be connected to but internet access is missing. Probably config issue as a result of a recent blackout.

Solution: Buy a new router, spend 5 days configuring it and complain about how hard networking is.

Issue: Computer is broken, needs to be exchanged with a new one, but how do we transfer the data?

Solution: Instead of just keeping the old hard drive, make a 182GB backup, upload it to the main file server and then download it again on the new computer.

Issue: Nurse returns from vacation, forgot the password to her network account.

Solution: Call the technician who then proceeds to open a new account, copies all the files from the old one and tells her to pick an easier password this time. She chooses "121213".

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

Me: Sitting in beanbag chair in development office, using closed macbook as a plate for a large walnut-brie-honey-rucola sandwich, honey dripping all over the aluminium top.

New manager (well, he's pretty old, but newly hired): "I don't think you're allowed to eat near the computers"

Me: "And I don't think you're allowed in my dev cave".

*Put macbook to the side*
*push him out of the office*
*close sliding door*
*close blinds*
*sit in beanbag chair*
*eat sandwich*
*lick honey from macbook*

I'm sorry, coworkers. Two weeks of writing MySQL queries made me a bit feral.

When I was a kid I used to play on my old Pentium computer all night after my mother sleeps. One night she caught me playing, she pushed the cabin from the table and broke it 😵. After then I tried to fix it and succeeded. Since then started learning about computers and now a back end engineer..

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

I usually don't work for indian clients. But when I do, they make sure I don't get paid.

Some highlights from my last project,

Client: Do you know ERPnext?

Me: No, but I am good at python.

Client: My boss wants me to find a guy who can create barcode generator for erpnext.

Me: I can use pyBarcode to do it.
This is exciting I thought. I get to learn a new framework. Start working on it. Not an hour passes by,

Client: hey can you remove this menu item?
Me: Which one?
Client: Also can you add the dashboard icons to left sidebar? Like Odoo? Do you know it? It is also python based.
Me: Then why don't you just use Odoo instead?
Client: My boss wants it. He doesn't understand computers. He is pissing mr off.
Me: Then how come he suggested erpnext?
Client: His friend told him.
*experience mindfuck*

For the next 3 days he has me working on these UI tweaks, never mentions barcode again.

But I finish the barcode stuff. Tripple check everything to make sure they work. Tell him to check so I can get paid. Guy asks his boss to check.

Boss > Client: It doesn't work
Me: What doesn't work?
Boss > Client: Everything!
Client: I actually tested everything and they work. My boss doesn't know how to use it. He is very old.

Makes me make more changes and finally when I ask for the work done so far,
Client: Boss didn't come to office today. I'll get you paid. Please try to understand my situation.

Me thinking, "mofo your boss didn't hire me,l. You did". But I keep calm and tell him I won't work until I get paid 50%.

3 days passed. No reply. Set his skype status to "Away" forever.

*spidey sense tells me I'm not getting paid, again*

U am beyond pissed and burnt out. I fucking wish there was a mafia I can request to collect my fucking money from them.

So, continuing the story, in reverse order, on the warship and its domain setup...
One day, the CO told me that we needed to set up a proper "network". Until now, the "network" was just an old Telcom switch, and an online HDD. No DHCP, no nothing. The computers dropped to the default 169.254.0.0/16 link local block of addresses, the HDD was open to all, cute stuff. I do some research and present to him a few options. To start things off, and to show them that a proper setup is better and more functional, I set up a linux server on one old PC.
The CO is reluctant to approve of the money needed (as I have written before, budget constraints in the military is the stuff of nightmares, people there expect proper setups with two toothpicks and a rubber band). So, I employ the very principles I learned from the holy book Bastard Operator From Hell: terrorizing with intimidating-looking things. I show him the linux server, green letters over black font, ngrep -x running (it spooks many people to be shown that). After some techno-babble I got approval for a proper rack server and new PCs. Then came the hard part: convincing him to ditch the old Telcom switch in favour of a new CISCO Catalyst one.
Three hours of non-stop barrage. Long papers of NATO specifications on security standards. Subliminal threats on security compromises. God, I never knew I would have to stoop so low. How little did I know that after that...
Came the horrors of user support.
Moral of the story: an old greek saying says "even a saint needs terrorizing". Keep that in mind.

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

Just went to the new cafe next to me (all over the top fancy as usual around here), thought after a long time I could and should enjoy a nice drink, snack and a great view while coding.

Got two babies screaming out their internals right when I've paid and sat down, then an old guy started asking me to leave multiple times, threatening to call the police and trying to drag me off my chair, because I "shouldn't be breaking other peoples computers" - most likely because I was pulling+compiling evince via yay and he caught a glimpse of it when I checked if it finished or not.

One of the employees saw that happening and kicked the old guy out, then gave me a fresh donut as a "sorry", was for sure the best donut I've ate, not because of the taste, but because I saw the old guy then hovering across the street and occasionally giving me a look, as if he's waiting for the FBI to finally show up and he could tell where I escaped to.

tbh when the employee was approaching, I've seen this turn into a completely different rant, positively surprised there's still some sane people out there.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

A lite story about how i was hired at 16 years old.
Me at 11. Modifying HTML templates to create a sign up page for a game. Me at 14. Created some worthless websites in the past (at a training), barely knowing the structure of HTML.
Me at 15. Made my first website for a customer (using WordPress for the first time, didn't know how to use it before). The website was selling apartments, it was looking very good and went on the first place on SEO. Got my first money (100E).
Me at 16. Made some other WordPress websites for other customers (one of them still haven't paid, the website was made way back in 2015), so i shut down the website and replaced it with a text saying "This website is currently down until the customers pays the developer".
Me still at 16. A friend of my mom sent my CV to multiple companies, to work as a intern to learn more, and one of them accepted me for a interview (a well known and one of the best company with 30~ people)
Went to the interview, asked me about what i realized, what i can do, about my knowledges in others languages etc (forgot to mention that i love the computers from young age, so i was very good in them, specially at the age of 11), so they were happy about it and asked called me for another interview with the boss. Went to it, the boss asked me some tricky questions, i answered them immediately, he was very surprised about my knowledge at that age and accepted me immediately. After working for 2 weeks, instead of hiring me as a intern for 4-6 months, they instead hired me as a normal person, as a front end developer, for an undefined date, making 250 E / Month (6 hours per day in summer)
Now, I'm in the 11 grade, working for them about 9 months, making 315 E / Month, working for 4 hours per day after school, the place is cool, my entire team (family) is very funny and very cool, and they asked me many times to help them with different problems they had and i fixed them immediately (they really didn't know some stuff which i knew). Worked on big projects and worked on some from scratch by myself and they were very happy about how it went.

TLDR: was talented in computers (software), I'm a fast learner, barely knew about making websites, hired as a front end developer at 16 yr.

Btw, I'm in love with DevRant, I'm feeling like home everytime i visit this community :').

P.S. Sorry for my bad English and the mistakes i made.

alert("Thanks for reading my first rant!");

So, I sign up for devrant and read all about the school devops fuckery everyone seems to have.

The only problem is, computers at my school's lab has no internet access and only a pirated copy of.... Visual Studio *6*. Hell, that's 5 years older than I am.

No python, no git, nothing. The best part, you ask? They use VS6 just for teaching 9th graders Visual Basic, and for C and C++, they use TurboC++ in DOSBox. 25-year old software. They teach us Pre-ANSI C++.

No fucking wonder people from here re-learn everything on the job. I jumped the gun and started messing with basic C++ in 7th grade, and then had to go back and remember that 25 years ago, they used <iostream.h> instead of just <iostream>.

Everyone just saves their code in the TC/BIN folder in DOS too, making it more of a chaotic mess than anything ever imaginable.

Bringing your own device? Too bad that's against the school rules.

The fact that they went out of their damn way to make me use TurboC in DOSBox on Windows 7 instead of giving me a sane Linux install with an editor and GCC is just... ugh.

My classmates all think I work magic, while all I really do is simple logic. Schools here in India are almost universally terrible.

Well, it's a good thing I started learning it on my own, because if I thought programming was in any way similar to how they try to teach it to us, I would've given up a long time ago.

Use SSDs.

It's not hard. They've been around for a while, small ones are cheap now and are more than enough for at least 90% of developers. The rest can probably afford 2TB NVMe.

Why waste 60$ on a worthless 500GB HDD that will load the OS in the time that's enough for you to make scrambled eggs?
Instead, use 60$ on a 128GB SSD. Sure, it's smaller, but if speed is important for you, you can forget a bit about saving all of the porn you see online, or about installing every free game from Steam.

SSDs are cheap already. And the performance advantage they give is ENORMOUS. You can have a core i9, 64GB of fastest RAM bla bla bla, but if you don't have an SSD, a Celeron with an SSD will seem faster.

Get one, and NEVER again cry about long loading times of IDEs, unless you feel like 30 seconds for the longest load time is too much. If your time is THAT valuable, then you can afford NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 (which can be done easily in software with btrfs if you're on Linux).

Seriously!
Every day I see posts like "Visual Studio is crap because it installs for 6 hours", or "Android studio starts in 30 minutes", or "Visual Studio Code sucks because it loads for too long compared to vim".
It's as if you only have access to budget 10 year old computers.

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

!rant

I've had two different old coworkers that liked to yell at their computers. The first was a grayed biker who always wore a spiked leather jacket and could never understand what you say the first time do to his massive concerts in his youth. He used to swear some of the worst obscenities and slam his keyboard. He was actually a really nice guy.

The second used to make up obscenities. Myself and another coworker would keep mental logs of the things he said. The best was "fuckbats", we had many long talks about what a "fuckbat" would be and it's general elusiveness. He was also a nice guy, really one of the nicest devs I've ever worked with, he just got really intense under pressure.

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

Old boy said to put my brother's old laptop to use for him because Windows is too slow. He just wants basic usage like news and checking his favorite sites. So, you know there's only one way to take care of this...install Ubuntu. He tried it, loved and now doing full install for him. Ubuntu saving old computers since..well since forever 😁

When you laugh at a devRant post and the non-tech 50 year-old woman next to you finds out your good with computers. And then she asks you to delete her porn history... Awkward

'your good with computers right'?

Me: I work with one every day so I guess...

Can you fix a problem I have with my pc? (relatively old man, and I feel bad for him so I agreed)

Next day he had me fix 4 laptops (from his kids) and a Macbook of his own almost all had shady malware and were WAY behind of their windows updates... Like sub wannacry level...

Rip one of day of my vacation 😠

Old but gold.

How are computers like men?
In order to get it's attention, you have to turn it on.

Me : For the last time, I am not a window cleaner!
Old Friend : Oh, so what do you do ?
Me: I work at IT.
Old Friend : With computers and stuff ?
Me : YES.
Old Friend : Woah like with apple computers ?
Me : Nah, I work with Windows.

Pun intended.

Airports. Please stop using decade old Windows computers. Regards.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

I wasn't the brightest when I started with computers...
I had one in my room for homework and such (an old one that mom had for work and then upgraded to a laptop).

It ran SO FREAKING SLOW and didn't have Internet (I was maybe 6, no need to pay AOL anymore than we already did).

I had a floppy disk that said" Quicken" on it... Brilliant little 6 year old me thought that JUST BY INSERTING the floppy, I could speed my computer up. Not by installing THE FINANCIAL SOFTWARE, just by putting the floppy in the drive...

I've come a little ways since then...

Note: I accidentally installed it and thought I was going to break my computer because I couldn't uninstall it (pulling the floppy out obviously didn't uninstall it)... All my experience prior to this was watching my teacher use Mac at school

devRanters, especially the linuxers, unusual request/question, especially coming from @linuxxx!

I just found two very old netbooks which still contain windows xp (I didn't even know I still had them at all) and I'm obviously going to turn them into Linux netbooks.

Does anyone know any good looking linux distro's that run well on low-end hardware? This is not my specialty since I either deal with servers or higher-end computers :).

Please pass me some suggestions!

!rant

I met my old school friends today. One of them was apparently showing off his programming skills too much(let's call him X). So much that he(friend X) was comparing Linus Torvalds with himself. And he was telling us that Linux is best because there are so many DEs and customisations and blah blah.

So one of my other friend Y(who's not into computers much) asked him to install Ubuntu on his laptop while we were sitting in cafe.(Y wants to play with command line mainly this semester according to him) So he started complaining that he does not have ISO with him and trying to avoid it.

I said I have kubuntu iso he can flash it right away. Then he(X) said "Kubuntu is too complex for him(Y)".(me in mind : " yeah, just because its a. DE, it becomes complex") So I searched in my phone (faked the search, basically renamed kubuntu iso to Ubuntu iso lol) and gave him " Ubuntu " iso

And this "pro developer" installed that on his laptop and after installation was completed he said that "OMG DUUUDE UNITY IS DEAD, EVEN UBUNTU SWITCHED TO KDE AS DEFAULT DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT, ITS COOL".

FFS

I was about 17 years old had tried wood & metal craftsmanship but never liked it, so I spoke with a counsellor and mentioned I like computers as I play a lot of games.

That counsellor laughed at me ( a shut in that rarely says anything ) and told me I'm too stupid..

Since then, I have scored almost pure top grades without any particular job goal.
But eventually met a good friend who wanted to be a Web developer, so I simply followed the same path and kept on reaping top grades lol.. :)

As Ana says in overwatch, "Never stop fighting for what you believe in."

This is what my roommate got handed to him at a lecture. Completely written in Comic Sans, everything is in fucking comic sans and it is not a joke! 🤣

On an afternoon the day before delivery, we discovered a crashing bug. At around 2 AM, we had found the cause and fixed it. A short sleep at home, then back to office at 8 AM because the delivery was 200 devices containing that software, and they had to be updated manually because production had put in the old image.

We seized all available computers, even those from marketing who were... surprised. Half-way in the update, we calculated that we wouldn't have enough time until the freight service would show up.

So we asked the secretary that she should be a bit flirty to the parcel guy, invite him to a coffee and chat around to buy us more time. We closed the last parcel just when he figured that he had to continue with his tour.

Today I visited my best friend. His little son of 6yo also loves computers and technology.

I thought it would be fun to show him some old stuff, like a floppy disk 💾

I almost peed my pants laughing when he said: "Wow cool!! You 3D-printed a save button!!" 😂

That's how computers look in our school (with main focus on science)...

"Windows XP"
"No internet"

I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.

I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.

All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.

For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.

Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.

Heh, so I was working in tech doing the physical side of the department (going and moving computers or hardware fixes etc.)

Anyways since I got that job I noticed some of our recurring systems tickets are time consuming so I wrote some scripts to speed up the parts that I could.
(Like getting us all the useful information for hunting down missing machines or machines that haven't been able to be backed up in a while)

So yeah, made the scripts and some higher ups were like great you should submit them to our repo so they don't just disappear. Do it and get told by one of the like cto kinda guys that, "instead of doing a script to do what the original script should do, maybe go in and fix our original one."

So I told him, I don't get paid enough to fix your guys scripts, I don't know perl(which is what those ones are in) and honestly it's not my department for fixing those scripts, it's yours.

I had made a big post about what my scripts did and gave access to them and what they could have fixed in an hour they argued with me for months about just fixing their originals instead.

So now I've just actually gotten promoted out of that dept and into another where I will finally get paid to do more code, so I was closing my last tickets and the "trying to add my scripts to their repo" was one. The guy had denied my PReq Esso I closed the ticket thinking meh.

This guy re opens and again says just fix the scripts. Luckily I had done a personal repo for the scripts so others in my (now old) dept can keep using them. So I said I'm not in that department anymore, I made them available to the others and I still don't know perl. Not sure what your wanting me to do...

Got a laugh when he replied "oh yeah, just heard about the promotion... Congrats.. Where's the repo?"

I feel like I won finally

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

They want me to be a speaker at this event , I wrote them this

Regarding this statement on the speaker form “Presentation rooms are set up theatre style with a lectern, lectern mic, screen, laptop with Windows XP Office

2007/Vista XP and a projector.” – is it just an old form?

I do have one question what does this mean exactly?  Are you actually using windows xp? it’s not supported by Microsoft anymore, so it’s quite dangerous to have unless it’s not attached to the internet what so ever and never has been. Vista… is not much better. Windows 7 is 2008 you should at least be using that I would of thought? I mainly ask because if I am going to speak about technology and computers I can’t exactly say I’m an expert when I’m using tech as old as that. I mean I’m 20 I was 7 when xp came out, I know how to use it but it’s ancient, in computer terms It’s as old as Aztec times and I’d rather not be sacrificed to a sun god (seriously if anyone who knows tech at all sees me I’ll be embarrassed and taken the piss out of majorly).

Could I just use my laptop? If needs be?

Sorry to be a pain

Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:

Me:

Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files

Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software

Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP

IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files

Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp

Network: No internet access, internal company network only

Web browser: IE 6

Graphical design software: msPaint

Version control: Emails

Team communication: Emails

Software distribution vector: Emails

Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers

Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.

What's the first computer you ever used?

This was the year I became obsessed with computers. I was eleven years-old. My elementary school was gifted a computer lab (1983) with the Commodores seen in the picture (VIC-20s, PETs, C64s).

DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.

Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.

We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".

I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.

When I hear, "master/slave" I don't think about terminology and syntax for a programming language I dislike because of its silly functional indent requirements. I think of jumper settings on IDE hard disks in the '90s. Primary master, secondary master, primary slave, secondary slave.

Its my morning rant time... Me and my team are working on implementing our solution into 20 year old piece of shit POS system which:
1. Uses old piece of shit computers - which is slower than average calculator.
2. Uses .Net 2.0 - and no higher versions could be installed.
3. Has 20 year old documentation - outdated as fuck.
4. Throws unknown and non explainable COMExceptions.
5. Works slow as fuck.

And we have to deal with all its issues as 3rd side integration.. FUCK... FUCK.. FUCK....

!rant
I just dreamed about a 6-year old kid looking for me to ask me what is a pipeline. A CPU pipeline.
I felt so happy to explain (I was that into computers when I was 11 or so) that I couldn't start, I woke up first.

Time to have a son/daughter?

!rant
I can never get over this 😥

We were taught 5-6 subjects of electrical or mechanical engineering in out freshman year 😃 and our course is called "computer science and engineering".
We had ONE subject in the whole fucking year that was related to the course,called "introduction to computer"!!!!
The second semester of the freshman year had no subject remotely close to computers, but yeah we learnt about thermodynamics and beams and Trusses and motors and welding 😒.
They should have also told us what we are supposed to do with that knowledge 😒.

What's the point!!!!
Will is make us a mechanical engineer 😒?
Also have you forgotten we are here to learn about computers and not about the tension in the rope of the pulley 😒?
Also we have no subjects,in the 4 year course about actual development 😃 not even old school web development.
Fucking hate this shit

my dad bought me my first computer at 8, when I was 12 he thought I was always playing video games. at 19 he wouldn't pay for me to go get a bachelor's degree in computer science even though I was dual majoring with computer science and business. but he wonders how I always have money, he's 79 years old so not really unexpected.

my mom never understood what I was doing on computers but knew I was making money when I needed it, she's 61 years old and getting in bad shape so she's living with me and my wife. but she can tell when I'm thinking hard on a project and leaves me alone.

my wife doesn't know what I do and thinks I found a fucking magic money tree and she'll bug me after I spent 30 minutes planing a function out and I have to start over.

Hi DevRant, the last five years I've been repairing old computers for people who should really upgrade but rather stick to their beloved IE8. I'm sure we'll be friends!

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

It's my second rant about Windows here in two days, but here we go:

Windows used to be a cool OS (and in part it still is). Yes, it's made for the end user, not power users, yes it has many flaws. But it was my gateway to computers and programming. I have fond memories of my first PC, playing around with the old win98 themes (my favorite was the baseball one!).

However, I am very disappointed now. I just had to basically force Windows 10 to stop hogging my bandwidth. It was an actual battle, with the OS simply (I kid you not) running update and other services EVEN AFTER I SPECIFICALLY DISABLED THEM. I just saw the Windows update service running, while its status was disabled. It's absurd.

Sorry Windows, but that's not what I want. I want to choose what happens on my own OS. Linux gives me exactly that, why can't you?

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

So my old friend was in introduction to computers about 5 years ago.

My Teacher: Alright, go to the Desktop and start Photoshop.

My Friend: Where is the Desktop?

My Teacher: It's the Start Screen, like when you log on.

Everyone died laughing and he still hasn't lived it down.

I'm curious, how did you all start to like programming?

Mine was when I was in grade 7 or 8, which is around 13 years old. I watched a movie called "Hackers", Angelina Jolie was in this one (I think, it was a long time). I was curious on how to be a hacker, then I googled and found an article which said something about learning to code.

I wasn't sure I would enjoy it at first but after a while, I started enjoying that thrill you get when you solve that pesky little bug that took you days to get rid of. Haven't stopped learning more about programming and computers since.

Stop teaching people deprecated bulls*it.

I'm taking a "Web Design" course and the teacher wants us to use html attributes and the <font> tag to format pages. He doesn't allow us to use CSS. Says "We'll get to CSS later, right now I'm teaching you HTML". He thought us the <frameset> thing which isn't even supported in HTML5. And of course no <header>, <footer>, <aside> etc.

Same thing in my C++ course. The computers don't even have a C++11 (or newer) compiler. Just an old version of Code::Blocks we're not allowed to update. It does support C++0x so you can still get some of the features, but still.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

I need a folder for unsorted unfinished programs to sort them out of sorted unfinished programs. Also, I have an "old" folder inside of "old" folder. On both computers.

What was your moment of realization that you picked the right profession?

I didn't grow up building computers or loving code... I was a lazy piece of shit until I hit college when I finally got my act together (a late start, if you will).

My moment of realization happened when I was asked to rewrite an old C program to blacklist IPs of "hacked" emails based on email logs. I was the only one in the office who could read C, so it was kind of a spotlight moment for me lol. Anyways, the script I wrote to replace it turned out to catch more cases than the original script. We kicked it back to our email filtering service since they allowed us access to the source code and they were impressed. That was my moment for knowing I'm I'm the right industry 🙃

Network Security at it's best at my school.
So firstly our school has only one wifi AP in the whole building and you can only access Internet from there or their PCs which have just like the AP restricted internet with mc afee Webgateway even though they didn't even restrict shuting down computers remotely with shutdown -i.
The next stupid thing is cmd is disabled but powershell isn't and you can execute cmd commands with batch files.
But back to internet access: the proxy with Mcafee is permanently added in these PCs and you don't havs admin rights to change them.
Although this can be bypassed by basically everone because everyone knows one or two teacher accounts, its still restricted right.
So I thought I could try to get around. My first first few tries failed until I found out that they apparently have a mac adress wthitelist for their lan.
Then I just copied a mac adress of one of their ARM terminals pc and set up a raspberry pi with a mac change at startup.
Finally I got an Ip with normal DHCP and internet but port 80 was blocked in contrast to others like 443. So I set up an tcp openvpn server on port 443 elsewhere on a server to mimic ssl traffic.
Then I set up my raspberry pi to change mac, connect to this vpn at startup and provide a wifi ap with an own ip address range and internet over vpn.
As a little extra feature I also added a script for it to act as Spotify connect speaker.
So basically I now have a raspberry pi which I can plugin into power and Ethernet and an aux cable of the always-on-speakers in every room.
My own portable 10mbit/s unrestricted AP with spotify connect speaker.
Last but not least I learnt very many things about networks, vpns and so on while exploiting my schools security as a 16 year old.

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

Ohh you study something about computers!!

Here's an old Nokia phone and it doesn't have Internet on it, can you make it have Internet?

This is a true story. :(

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

People have been making fun of me for not having WhatsApp. They say that I am 'behind in technology', 'old fashioned' and that I don't know anything about computers and modern technology because I don't use WhatsApp.

They even kinda make fun of my family. One other family who made fun of us owns both Google Home and Amazon Echo.

What the heck is even going on anymore?

Anyway I am gonna put lights on a fez and wear it to school on monday.

*sips tea*

I grew up as internet became a thing, so I had a very early exposure to computers. There's actually a video of me crawling onto an old computer which still had a 5.25" floppy drive. By the age of 4 I actually started using it properly, my mum said I once talked about pressing enter in my sleep 😂 I'm glad I was born in
a time (94) to witness technology evolve at such a crazy scale. Kids these days will never know what kind of privilege it was to have a 128MB pendrive 😛

The IT guy my parents had often at their home.

This guy thought me how to manage our network, how to create mobile apps. How to debug problems and so on. He sparked so much interest for computers in me and now i can't stop fiddleing around with computers.

Also this "electrician" who worked for my parents.
Basically he fixxed old keyboards, loudspeakers and stuff like that. He thought me about resistors, transistors, blue prints and how to solder stuff.

"Lötzinn blödsinn"

They both started my journey into the rabbit hole of technology.

"Non-devs never call Steven Spielberg to have their TVs fixed."
But sure they MUST call a dev to update their Android, iPhone, Windows, installation of Anti-virus, data recovery, malware removal, to shortlist 20 laptops from market, ask for what printer to buy, why is there a weird animation in Android sometimes, come borrow my WiFi, have their phones and computers fixed, RIP old audio CDs (yes!), fix Bluray, fix anything electronic, repair their bike, teach them science, politics...
This While True loop never escape.

When you set up a process and find out a co-worker has been ignoring said process for weeks resulting in a lot of the wrong computers being replaced with new ones and leaving a lot of old computers out in the wild.

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

I don't know what to do with my life anymore, as a self taught web developer, I started like anybody doing HTML, CSS and js, and then I met PHP and WordPress.
why the fuck PHP is ugly ? and why WordPress is uglier ? I tried to learn how to build a simple plugin in WordPress but the hooks system make me want to kill my self, how the fuck PHP powers 80% of the web ? every time I write PHP I wish I was never born, the problem is that I can't change job because I am old and I live in a fucking country who is technologically primitive, they fucking know only PHP and JAVA, no Node, No Ruby, No Python, only fucking PHP.
I learned React, I learned Node but you know what I did this last year ? I raped a themeforest theme for about dozen plus websites, A SINGLE THEME FOR MORE THAN DOZEN CLIENTS, my boss does not care, only me who is not sleeping at night because a tried to customize a Prestashop theme and it gave me cramps in the stomach, I feel depressed and useless, I want to quite my job but I can't, I have mouths to feed, WHY THE FUCK DID I FELL IN LOVE WITH PROGRAMMING, I was happy fixing computers, what can I do if the only project that I have are WordPress and Prestashop?
how did you do to stay sane when working with wordpress and prestashop ? are you not human ?I can't take it anymore.
I need a new road map, fuck it I will focus only on JS and Node and fuck PHP.

TL;DR My parents should have known that I was made for computers
Note: I am pretty young. Most of you were probably at least as old as I am now when it happened.
My parents told me about the first time I used a PC. They left me and my older siblings home alone with a movie on and returned later than they wanted to. We were still watching the movie, and when they asked how that was possible we told them that I restarted the DVD twice. I had never touched a computer before.

The first thing I actually remember is me playing Age of Empires II on a PC our family got for free somewhere. Although AoE3 was already out by that time, it ran slow af, but it was the most fun I had in my life up to that point. I was and still am pretty bad in both AoE3 and AoE2, but that was the first step into my preference for RTS games.

Went through changing Apple ID email. I have 💻,📱and⌚️.

Felt like that horror movie moment when protagonist tries to be stealthy but makes a noise and a huge mob of zombies turn heads all at once. For what I love apple, the simplicity, in the email changing process there is none of that.

They forced me to enter my 60 arbitrary obscure characters password on Apple Watch screen.

On the other hand I felt nostalgic. When I was using Linux this all was my day to day experience no matter the distro, and I got a Linux Foundation certificate, I contributed to Elementary. Can’t imagine the experience of a user who just switched to Linux.

Windows? I don’t want to think about that, let alone talking. You only need to know that I successfully configured a SoE setup AND active directory in ad-hoc unstable network of literally rusty old computers. And I still switched to Linux back then.

Got a strange thing today in class, as a teacher in programming. We have a lab where the computers haven't yet their final configuration ended, so the user used by the students is the administrator of the computer. And today, a student calls me and tell "sir, the password isn't the one you gave to us" (temporary the same for each machine until we fix the configuration).
Go to student's place, password incorrect with a hint "you know the code : up, up, down, down... oh, you don't know, huh? Too old! Too bad!"
Password was - off course - "konami".

But... how a student born in 1997 can think he can troll me with the konami code?!
He wasn't even born when I played on the NES as kid!

Sometimes I'd like to teach my students how to fly by tossing them by the windows...

Context: Madre recently got a new laptop to replace her old HP, but since she doesn't know much about computers, I picked it out for her. I went a little overboard on the specs because I new it was a "family laptop" and I would end up using it more than she would.

Mum: *yelps after typing on computer*
Me: "What's wrong"
Mum: "This computer is too fast!"
Me: 😐
Me: ... "What?"
Mum: "It loads things too fast"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Mum: "When I click on the apps they open almost immediately"
Me: "That's a good thing"
Mum: "No it's not, it startled me!"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: ...
*goes back to reading book*

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

How many computers do you have in your room (currently in use or old ones)?
Mine are,
2 Desktops
3 Laptops
And one RaspPi

New favourite quote...

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Joseph Campbell

I just set up my 8 year old nephews new (very old) laptop with elementary OS. Took the chance to explain a bit about operating systems and how computers and programs are made and how they work. He is very interested. I'm excited to have a new apprentice!

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

First exposure...
When I was a kid, my parents would put on Tom & Jerry and other cartoons on an old family computer (you know - yellowed plastic, big, bulky tower, and an even bigger CRT monitor) for me to watch (Windows 95 didn't cut it, so they booted up Geexbox from CD)... Sometimes the playback would stop / the volume would be too quite - so I had to figure out how to control it by myself, without the help of my parents... Slowly, I was able to boot up Windows, and use my father's CD collection of All-In-One CDs (utilities and games). Later we were able to afford connecting to the internet through our phone landline - it was all downhill since then. Nowadays I'm helping my dad when it comes to computers (he's currently learning how to use Excel properly). :-)

This is a sad story of bad recruitment in my school.

One day I had my computer class in school and my teacher was on leave so the substitution department sent another teacher to our class.

I have 3 computer teachers in my institution, let us assume their names for this rant as A, B and C.

A - The most learned teacher who has a lot of experience and also writes books. This teacher is the head of the department and wants students to explore coding.

B - A teacher who sticks to books and writes books on Excel and Powerpoint for small children.

C - The youngest teacher who has almost no experience at all.

What happened was that during the substitution, teacher C was sitting and doing her own work. I thought she might know java and other fundamentals of computers. One of my friends asked her about some bug in his program. She went to his seat and said that teacher A would come and help you out. To this, the student said ok.

I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.

A few months later teacher B and A were talking about some coding competition and I was alone in the lab cause I am the only one in 11th with computer science.

The problem here was that C came to the room and quietly asked what is an object and class in java. I was shocked! I mean how could that happen, she is supposed to know everything in the comp sci syllabus. This was a disaster, teacher A was explaining to her about classes and objects. It was clear to me that she didn't know anything about programming in Java.

This is the fault of our school.

My school wants a good rank in the lists and for that they cut down the budget of teachers and remove old, experienced teachers for cheap, newer teachers.

This was shocking as a person who doesn't know much about something can't answer the doubts of children, this is a wrong way of teaching.

Hope you have a good day :)

Modern technology is absolutely bullshit

I can't even

Now my keyboard on my phone is even too broken to complain about it

I wanted to look at someone's post history on a forum

To do so the forum wants an account. Ok. So I gave it my old junk Hotmail account during sign up for it to send me an email confirm so I can make the account so I can search. Well I'm refreshing this account for this confirm account email through the Gmail app on my phone because who even checks emails on computers anymore

Turns out, aside from this Hotmail spam email account having a lot of junk emails (it is my junk email account), there's this little pop-up that happens SOMETIMES claiming that it can't sync. I checked inbox and spam and the email isn't in there. So 1 out of 10 times I refresh there's this little "cannot sync" message that pops up and I click it. It claims my storage on my phone is too full to sync. Ok.

So I go try to find storage through the settings in my phone. It doesn't exist as a category anymore apparently. Thankfully phones have a search feature now -- because we can't have sane settings anymore so here's a search feature. First result it gives me is just device info. That's useless. It's just the hardware specs for my phone

Second it shows storage. 90% full apparently. That's odd. I have 132 gb. Thankfully it subdivided it by what's taking up space but it doesn't make much sense and a bunch of the categories don't open to anything

Apparently the fucking android operating system is 32 GB now? Well you're fucked if you wanna remove that. Apparently years of photos and videos is 20 gb, I can back those up and delete them. Similarly I have downloads in folders, and that's about 20 gb

Why are there 20 GB of apps? I literally have no apps!

Part of apps? Wtf is Gboard and why is it a gig

Why is my WEATHER APP using a gig of storage?

And none of the apps can I remove the storage they're using. The cache is like 600kb, and I can delete all data and it's using like 60 MB. So the fucking weather app executable itself is a gig of space? Wtf?

I deleted the data for Gboard and turns out that's the keyboard. So now all my keyboard settings are fucked.

Thankfully I wrote syncing scripts ages ago to sync various folders from my phone to my external HDD. I just had to connect it to the laptop and run the script on the external HDD. Problem? Well turns out no matter what I do I can't get the laptop to connect to the phone if it's USB file transfer mode. I can do photos. But this is gonna be more than photos.

So I do my sync backup script from the laptop to the external HDD. This will sync the camera, since I have sync thing sync my laptop and phone all the time, so I can just sync the laptop to the external HDD and then delete the older photos and get 20gb. Quick fix for now

Why do I need this quick fix?
Well
Get this
I've been having issues with my Gmail client for ages. It just won't display new email notifications which is really annoying because I need to know when emails get sent to me.
Now I'm thinking, maybe I can de-sync older emails and have more storage space maybe? But that's not an option anywhere. Actually, I can't even unconnect an email address from my phone. Gmail doesn't even let you do that

What the flying fuck is the state of modern technology

Now I have to go figure out what my fucking settings were for my stupid phone keyboard

The 90s were much fucking saner than this garbage. I don't need a 32 GB operating system on a phone. Is this fucking windows 8? And let me fucking tell YOU how many fucking emails you should sync to my phone. Holy shit what the fuck is all this

At least my Linux scripts fucking work like I wrote them

The university I used to study CSE, they had some OLD computers with Windows XP in them. Also, all those computers had TWO user accounts. One with the admin access and another one with normal access. Until this, it was fine.
But the browsers installed there were so old, even normal website struggles to load properly. and so many outdated apps, kept bugging us for update, but every time we click on UPDATE, they ask for the admin password, which we didn't have. So, most of the students were frustrated about this, but nobody took any action! :/
So, I hacked one of the computers' admin password. the password was "BRIGHT". I'm like, these people are never gonna set different passwords in different computers and remember them for eternity. Definitely all passwords have to be the same, and they were! Which saved my time.
So, I shared the password with everyone in my class and now they can install any apps they want. Which made me so happy!
But You know, words travel fast! Just one day after the hacking incident, the Seniors ( & the juniors ) came to me with their laptops to find their forgotten password, which made me earn some money & eat some delicious foods, also got to meet some beautiful girls of our campus ^_^
& I used to go to other classes to hack those Admin passwords for fun ^_^ But I never told them the password until they pay me or feed me something delicious! ^_^

I miss those good old days! ^_^

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

Early 1970s, when I was around 8 years old. I read about Artificial Intelligence and it blew me away. I knew nothing about computers, other than I wanted to program them.

I still have old computer magazines, starting from around 1978 not long after the microcomputer revolution started.

My first computer had 2K RAM. That's 2048 bytes. I expanded the memory 1K at a time, and it took 2 chips - they were 4 bits by 1024 so you needed 2 chips to have 8 bit wide memory.

2114 static ram, 300ns.

I think they still make them!

How often do we come across IT managers who don't plan their work properly?

I teach software development and programming at a vocational school. Our IT manager said that we got a certain budget influx and that he can procure new computers for our teaching facilities. I happily agreed and hinted that i would really like some new hardware with proper graphics cards so i could do a few small projects with Unreal engine, Unity3d or use adobe products without hardware lag. The new computers arrived about a week ago and then the "fun" started.

He had ordered some PCs with proper graphics cards and processing power and talked about putting them to up in my classroom, so wheres the "fun" i meantioned? He only ordered half a classroom worth of them - i guess the budget didn't allow for more. A week later i was supposed to move to a new room and was waiting for my new computers to be installed and yet the IT manager said that my computers would be moved along with me. I was appalled - what had happened to the new PCs he promised?

Turns out he had put em up in another building without notice, a teacher there wanted to do an extracurricular movie making activity (that included a bit of video editing at some point). That classroom is always in use so me getting more than 1-2 hours a week in there is nigh impossible.

In the end i got no new computers, hardware or software.... he didnt even bother to switch out the 2 "temporary" laptops i had in my classroom since 2 years ago due to a small shortage back then and even these have an old image that didnt include a third of the software i normally use.

PS. He had about another 2-3 classrooms worth of new PCs but those were promised to the other IT teachers back then....

I was inspired to be a programmer when I was 7 yrs old.
I started out using my dad's old Macintosh, it was pretty good at the time when I was 7. I played a game called "On The Run" at miniclip. I thought that one day I want to become a programmer who can do more than this or any other game.
Later when I was 9, my father bought a laptop but then he gave it to me. So I started and learn how computers work. It was a Acer 4376G I think, Windows Vista. (I didnt know vista was bad) I started with how to mod Java on a game called Need for Madness. That was when I learned about all sorts of jargon when looking up stuffs. I was able to somehow understand code but not write it. It was 9 years later, when at the end of 2015, I found khan academy and codecademy thru howtogeek. That was when I understand the most basic function that led me to build my entire knowledge or else I can only write

Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.

For starters, it's JavaScript, so you know this isn't gonna end well. Second, it's still in kinda beta phase for some browsers so you gotta add polyfills. Let's talk compatibility now. During normal days, yeah, I could ask for a couple of computers in the office, each using a different browser. But, covid. One browser mishbehaves and doesn't wanna share the camera with the other browser, so I can't really test a connection with the only 1 computer I have. I can't take my partner's computer all day to debug.

Solution: ask the marketing department or even the execs to video chat with you to test it on a staging server. So I push my changes to the server, wait for them to build, call my lab rat, check all the bugs, clean the code, push the changes back up. No fancy breakpoints. I'm doing the old style like my great uncle did. Oh wait no, he was pretty intelligent, but my lab rat isn't. They probably don't know what a console is. So no baby I'm not only talking about console logging the problems, I'm talking `alert` the heck out of the bugs - okay no, I'll just display the objects in the middle of the screen. The screen is my console.

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

My uncle has definitely been my biggest influence. My parents never understood computers and refused to buy one. Eventually my uncle gave me an old Win95 box with an 8GB HDD, and 512 MB of RAM(most other people in the world were running XP at this point). The thing was completely useless as a computer to do work on when I received it.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet back then, but I managed to figure out how to clean up the OS, as well as taking it a part and figuring out the parts.

He was the one who taught me that with computers, all things are possible.

From there he was always buying me books about programming, and pointing me in the right direction. He was never one to give me the answer, but always told me where to look or what to ask.

Now I'm the main web developer at my company and I love what I do.

Old relatives think you fix computers.
Young relatives think you are a hacker 😑

First thought about programming was in forth class in school, I was 10, and together with a friend we where planing on building a robot.

When we had a basic Idea on how the mechanics would work (theoretically but maybe not really practically sound) we started to consider how to control it. We had heard about computers but had never seen one but we figured out you could not just say, “go shopping” but rather had to break the problem down and doing that we came to the conclusion we would have to start with getting it to take a step.

We never got further as my family moved and I switched schools.

Later the same year I got to play with an actual computer, the Sinclair ZX80, 80 for the year.

A monster with 512 bytes of internal memory ... yes bytes, not kbyte.

And then things got going, after a few curses in Basic I finally got my own Spectra video 128, 14 years old and 2 years later I was teaching basic in ravening classes and I have been working with computers and programming ever since.

There are a couple:

A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)

A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!

A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss

Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P

It could just be me, but I feel lime I have an extreme lack of money to pursue projects. I know java really well, but I want to develop android apps. That's fine until you consider the fact that the only computers I have available to me at my house are very old. A gradle build in android studio on my PC takes <10min. So I just really need a better computer which means I need money which means I need a job which is unlikely because not many people hire 15 year olds. In fact, my parents bought a laptop last year for me to use, but my older sister fried the video out component on the motherboard so it needs a new one which is ~$300

I'm in several FB groups for selling/buying IT material, and from time to time I see someone trying to scam other people by selling those "GAMING PC L33TL4z0rz" with 4GB RAM and an GeForce 700GT GPU, attaching some LED action photos and League of Legends / CS:GO prints.

One of the most recent posts, was a guy who was trying to sell his (really old) macBook.
He said it was great for gaming, had an i5 CPU and 4GB of RAM.

Upon leaving my comment on the pieace of shit he was selling and that 4GB was barely enough to run Chrome, I got a shitload of replies saying that 4GB on a mac are not the same as 4GB on windows... So I immediately forgot everything I knew about computers and just left most (if not all) sales groups because I felt that a tumor of sorts started growing in me, a tumor of rage and awe in human stupidity.

Slowly, I started feeling superior to other people, and would immediately regard them as idiot simpletons. And I don't want to be THAT guy, who rolls his eyes every time someone asks a stupid question...

Now, if any of you could please inform me... What is the RAM conversion rate between a windows and a mac ?

!rant

I was propably 15 years old the first time i saw my friend coding html and and other related stuff i cannot remember! It intriqued me and i really wanted to learn it (i wanted to learn to hack.. xD..) but at the given time i wasn't happy in life and i was pretty much addicted to WoW..

So.. forward 12 years, where i had gone to the military, thought about becoming a physiotherapist, psychiatrist, korean translator and game designer.. oh and countless attempts from another friend to get me interested in c#.. i decided to start studying computers (software/hardware) at DTU (danish university).

That was rougly 8-9 months ago and i am now pretty decent in C, HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and koncepts about networks and OOP designs :).

I am super grateful to all the trial and errors throughout my life that have brought me to this place :)

Still 27, still has alot to learn, but i am really happy where i am right now. Even so, that i am spending my free time making my own projects :)

I also get super happy whenever i fix a bug of mine :p.

I truly believe that you will skyrocket to succes if you do what you love.

For me, i just discovered that part of myself a little late :)

Not sure what i hope to achieve with this post, but i hope it can give an insight into what people go through and yeah.. go for what you want!

Have a great time everyone!

And first !rant on this app!
I love all your rants! vs !rants

I'm an old school programmer, I remember coding in BASIC, ASP, and such languages, I made a streaming site in PHP, that I could use when going to parties and their music sucked, I phoned BBS computers, I document took forever to download.. Still I'm searching for a job in IT, I wonder how that will go :S

Well it's official...

I've only got Linux on my computers... except one old laptop that I have win7 on that is just perfectly setup and doesn't connect to the internet anymore because it's just a storage dump/ game emulator rig...

Win10 frustrated me for the last time and I don't miss it one bit.

About a month ago I sorted out some old electronic stuff and found my old laptop from 2011. A 2:nd Gen i7 8gb ram. I replaced it due to several bluescreens a day that later turned out to be caused by a faulty RAM module (was 16Gb back then).
Well, back then it became a backup laptop and went on the shelf and almost forgotten.

I went through all the old files on it and copied them to the NAS, replaced the mechanic drive with cheep SSD.
Used the old Win7 license key to upgrade to win 10 , dust off the fan, and it turned out to be usable.

I have much better computers so I would not use it for anything but today I gave it to my 6 year old nephew so he can start using a computer and build his knowledge. Worse case; If he spills soda on it he'll learn not to do that with the more expensive computers he will use in future.
So win win. I got to get rid of some junk that had been gathering dust for many years by giving my nephew an opportunity to get started with computers.

Finally, the timing: Microsoft announced a few days back that any new upgrade from windows 7&8 to 10 is no longer supported, but that computer still has a valid win 10 license as it was updated a month ago.

It was in old days when I was working in java and windows systems.

Java and different log4j versions across dependencies caused system not working only on production server.

Turned out some of libraries got log4j embedded and conflicted with other log4j.

It worked in all computers except production one.

Actually that was my main reason to switch my career to python after that dependency hell.

Another one was windows server 2008 tcp connection limit set to 200 or something.
We needed to change registry to get our servers working. After this case we finally managed to convince people to switch to linux.

Anyway any non standard error when you got multiple layers communicate with each other is hard, practice make it easier to solve those problems as your success moment comes faster.

I want to build some old times computers of note, or at least simulate them in software...

The Apollo guidance computer, Cray supercomputer, Turing's bombe

Might need some FPGA's to do it authentically.

A story from the old days

My father had a fame around he's friends that he understood this nasty business that is computers and in the pre-windows time he was reasonably knowledgeable... But as things evolved he didn't evolve with them so when he's friends asked him to help he would take me to solve the problem...

One day he asked me to see what was the problem with a friend's personal computer. This is a 70+ year old man.

When I get to his computer I do a quick check and see it's too infected with so many viruses to the point it is better to just format and clean install, so I ask him to backup he's files and the next day I picked up the PC and clean installed and setup the all thing...

Not more than 3 months pass and the guy says to my dad the problem was back...

I get there and the antivirus was turned off and the PC was infected... Found it weird but okay, enabled the antivirus, cleaned everything... Back to as new.... This time I instructed him to keep the antivirus always updated and running...

One week later to my surprise: he reports it is all back... Now I am getting tired of this and went to he's browsing history to find out how the hell he is achieving this... Too my surprise the amount of early internet shady porn sites was over the top...

I know had to tell a 70+ year old man how to safely watch porn... But that is not my problem, so I ask him what kind of sites he's going to... He blames he's grandson for using the internet in he's computer... Only problem: he's grandson is 2 years old...

I just set up the bookmarks with some children sites and convinced my father to take a look at that and either instruct the man or the kid on how to watch porn without getting a venereal disease...

Old boss that didn't understand anything on computers but expected me to wear 5 different hats and do tasks that we didn't have a structure for.

My first exposure to computers?

My father had bought this new machine (windows 98 "new" of course) and we put it in a very moist place (some kind of halfway balcony) in our old flat.

...which was pretty stupid.
One day it made a loud nois, started smoking and stopped responding.

I loved the animated paperclip though!

My first exposure to computers was at my dad's factory when I was only a few years old. I remember figuring out how to turn on the computer, open Paint and make a masterpiece.

Over the next couple of years my Paint masterpieces only improved, while I also learned how to connect to the internet and explore other interesting things.

Fast forward 20 ish years and I've graduated with a double bachelors degree and pursuing a career in software engineering.

Woo computers!

Fell in love with it in high school but I had a strong bond with computers and technology early on. Done some C programming there. Had a project in ASP, Access and JavaScript. Old times 😃

Modern hardware is rubbish. I recently donated a load of computers from the 1970s and 1980s to a technology museum, they all worked well and could still be used and set up in the museum's displays. My more recent stuff, from the last few years, I decided to sell on eBay. Some of it just had to be thrown out, mostly due to non-replaceable batteries that would no longer charge. What nonsense is this? Why is it easier to use a 35-year-old computer than a 3-year-old Chromebook or 5-year-old iPad?

Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.

My father is a psyhologist, but he has always been a computer enthusiast. Particularly, he once started learning Excel macros, and then evolved into Visual Basic over Excel, with which he built a fairly large piece of software that is now run in many Spanish schools. I was 14 or so at that time. I always liked computers, and one afternoon my father and I sat down, and we built a simple calculator in vb. That was an amazing afternoon, and I got hooked immediately. From there I transitioned to Python, C#, Java, php... And now, many years later, I am about to graduate in CS, and I am still totally convinced that this is my passion. I owe this to my father, and in fact now I help him maintain and update that old piece of software.

I remember that my granddad and I built a computer with old crappy hardware that we disassembled from other computers.
I mostly used it for playing games like Age of Empires or Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I really don't remember a lot about but I remember I also had internet. Never got any Malware tho haha.

Then sometime my friend came over and he showed me a website named "Scratch". We made a lot of crappy games and a cat that farts when you press a button.

So yeah I instantly fell in love and did a lot of "Scratch"-ing with my brother.

That's was the time I found my love for programming.

I think about 2 years later I got a MacBook (the old from my father) and finally started with real programming!

Now, after 6 years I have an awesome little ZenBook and am programming everyday.
Love it!

Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.

At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!

Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).

The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)

Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.

Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.

Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!

I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95.

There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.

Sainthood in the Church of Emacs requires living a life of purity—but in the Church of Emacs, this does not require celibacy (a sigh of relief is heard). Being holy in our church means exorcizing whatever evil, proprietary operating systems have possessed computers that are under your control, or set up for your regular use; installing a holy (i.e., wholly) free operating system (GNU/Linux is a good choice); and using and installing only free software with and on the system. Note that tablets and mobile phones are computers and this vow includes them.

Join the Church of Emacs, and you too can be a saint!

People sometimes ask if St IGNUcius is wearing an old computer disk platter. That is no computer disk, that is my halo — but it was a disk platter in a former life. No information is available about what kind of computer it came from or what data was stored on it. However, you can rest assured that no non-free software is readable from it today.

TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.

Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.

Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.

My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.

Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.

I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.

Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.

I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers.

Sometimes I wish I wasnt the boss, but if I wasn't I'd have some dumb 40 year old telling me what to do, that's doesn't know shit about computers

I had a relative that used to come to our house to study because her home was kinda far and also because we had a computer .
She was studying computer science at the time and I was only 13-14 years old. One day she came with 3 CDs of red hat. I asked her about it and she told me it's something like windows. My reaction was wow it must be something huge because I knew at the windows XP was only the size of one CD .
My relation with computers was only to play games and some music that's why I couldn't hold myself not to install it. I fucked my computer endless times, It was like playing puzzles let's try this option and then switch to another... It took me like 4 days to install and I was really impressed with it you know seeing the terminal and stuff. Weeks later I switched back to Windows because I couldn't install my games and play mp3 files (require to install some libraries and I had no internet).
Fast forward 8 years later and I was studying linux system for CS degree and guess what? I was the major in class because I knew about many stuff like partition systems (ext2, swap..) and how to install linux on a computer...
This was my feeling 😎 at class.

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

TL;DR: Phone akku is draining, I steal our schools power. And secret plans to become rich.

My phone accumulator (heh, not a battery) DRAINS these days. It's fucking old and the temperatures are so hot that we actually afternoon classes are cancelled 🔥
So anyways, I'm sitting in the library (15 min break) and secretly charging my phone, devRanting on these wrongly configured, distorted monitors of this one computer that is connected with like 20 work stations xD
I'm stealing the schools power but the school owes me time (+2h of more useless sitting at school with my new timetable) - and time is money. And the schools money buys power. So I don't feel bad about it.
Actually a friend and me wanted to develop and install a plugin - when being able to bypass the reset-application in our school network - that uses the schools computers and their power to do crypto mining.
I wouldn't feel bad about it.

I can already imagine in the future:
Remember back in the 10s when there was quantum computers with the size of a room for tens of thousands of dollars? Now everyone has one implanted in their head with 100 times the computing power! With the old hashing algorithms we could mine hundreds of blocks every second just with thinking about it

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

I was at school. Should be around 7 years old. They bought some new computers: XTs with green monitors.

I saw it as asked: how can I use one of there? They answered it was just to mid school to students, so I asked to have some typewriter classes.

A few years after, when I was finishing the typewriter classes, I used a IBM 286 for the first time at a friend's house. I've been using and studying it since that day. I just loved to use MS-DOS and the 5" disks.

When I was 12 i had a Friday afternoon course, as they called it, in QBasic. Nothing fancy but I learned that 'I wanted to work with computers'.
10 years later I got my first programming job. It was with the old Cognos Powerhouse language on OpenVMS. Does anyone remember that?
I had that job for 4 years and it took me another 10 (and several other IT jobs) before I started to learn Java, which I do now for 2 years.

That's my career story in a tiny nutshell 😎

Oh why must reminiscing be such a horrible thing. Going back to when I was a white hat, didn't do a major amount but oh how the times have changed, makes me feel old and I'm only bloody 20, computers have come a long way in the past 5 years...

!rant
Anyone here has installed Ubuntu alongside Windows 10 with UEFI? Did you find any problems?

I have installed other distros on the past, but in computers with the old BIOS so it wasn't much problem.

But now I will be installing it on my laptop, which I use for work so I would like something reliable. Personally I prefer Arch, but on the desktop.

I know there are endless tutorials and videos on internet, but I would like to hear some people's hands on experience.

Thanks :)

In year 2000, I was 10, Tunisian government had made it possible for middle class families to get cheap computers and pay later. So my dad brought one home.
I played with it then I got more interested in what was inside.
Think of it as a 10 years old with no prior experience playing puzzle with computer parts.
It can't end well.
But the thrill I felt while doing it definitely had something to do with my career.
Hint: I don't do hardware :v

When I was about 11 years old I got my my own laptop and got interested in learning about computers. Started learning batch and could make some pretty fun text based games. Then as I got into my teens I stopped paying attention to the computer. But now that I'm older I see a bright future with Java development, with it being so multi-platformed. I'm now restating my passion for code and learning java. :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back when I was a freshman in high school a friend of mine put an emulator on the shared drive, so we could play NES games while in the computer lab. Didn't know better/didn't care. One day I get pulled out of class and walked into the computer guys office. In there is also the principal of the school and the Chief of police.

The computer guy tells me there was an issue last week that caused the school server to crash and it caused damage. I asked what happened and the he said one of the emulators we were playing had a script that crashed the server and caused damage. I asked how much damage and they informed me it was over 3 thousand dollars. At this point I'm very skeptical that the damage was worth about the cost of a new workstation (the old one sitting on his desk, buried in boxes), and afterwards none of the faculty knew of any kind of an outage. I asked for him to show me what broke and what had to be done to fix/replace the damaged equipment but all I got was a simple, "I'm sorry. I can't show you that at this time."

They threatened legal action for a felony of damaging a school property. Myself and the other tech savvy kids talked about it over the next couple of days wondering what would happen. They threatened expulsion for myself and a couple of other kids, but ultimately just got a talking to about keeping personal information safe.

What I got out of it was if they think I'm good with computers I must be doing something right. Now I'm in IT. This is where it went wrong.

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

Iwas exposed to the world of computers when Iwas 6 years old. My dad bought a used C64 and me and my sisters were allowed to play some times. Later my father bought a PC with incredible 166MHz and I was allowed to play on it some times too. Started with tomb raider and when my parents weren't home Delta Force One. Later my father bought a newer model with 450 MHz and I got the old one. At this time he bought a 20GB HDD for me so I can get some more games on my computer. Then the internet came. My father booked ISDN and it was super fast. Since then I loved the world of IT and never stopped to. Later I played around 20000h of Counterstrike Source and came in contact with web development. I started to program with my first love: Java.
Now I love ruby, ts (js), Delphi and sometimes c#

next up is Clojure

Couldn't figure out why I had to make so many cats meow to learn how to program. I wanted to move things on the screen and create sounds. Then, dug up an old c64 and programmed myself a monitor and got into assembler which was a breeze compared to programming dumb text outputting felines.
After learning computers from the ground up, I started realizing that C++, C#, Java etc. actually wasn't at all about constructing and deconstructing cats or its base class animal.
I had one final go and it all just clicked!

I love this weekly group rant, it made me think back when my mom started to work in a kindergarten and she used to take me to work when i was 4-7 years old ('94 - '97).

There was this "TV" and all the kids used to smash the buttons on it. It also played sound, but there was always a lot of kids there so I was shy to ask them if I push the buttons too. But I was the teachers son, so I didn't had to sleep in the afternoon, and then I discovered this computer thing I was amazed, it was like nothing I saw before, you push it and it does what you pushed and, *_* this smiley is exactly me back then. It was probably an old commodore with green text on the black screen. It was the moment when I decided to get more information about this wonder.

In elementary school (around '98) we had this computer room and as I was one of the best students back then I was granted access to it. It was a huge success in a post communist country to get money for new computers to teach us kids to use them back then, so only the chosen ones could use them, and I was one of them, one of the best time time of my life, honestly. At this moment I knew for sure, I want one and when I grow up I gonna work with them. I had no idea what you can do with it but every adult is talking about how well paid are the people who use them at work. :D it sounds funny now

In '89 or '99 we visited our family in a town far away. My grandfathers sisters boyfriend had a computer and he said, look I also have internet. This face again *_* what the hell is internet. So he explained me this internet thing which "makes all computers connected, but you have to pay for it and it kinda works like wired phones you know. Here you put the address and you can open the website"
me: website, whoooa *_*
8-9 year old clever me: "but how do you know what are the addresses, do you have a phonebook for these addresses?"
he showed me google, and a slovak and czech search engine, I remember searching for "funny pictures" on the slovak search engine, because I was thinking If I search google, its english so he would pay too much :D

I didn't had a computer until I was 13 years old, but then I started to messing with Microsoft Front Page 2003, was amazed with the html and css generated by it and started to editing it.

Now Im a front end web dev

A bit long, sorry.

I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.

I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.

Can I get a stress ball? 😅

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

I was ten years old. At this point, despite being in my early 20's, I've officially been programming more than half of my life. From the first moment I knew that this was possible, that we, as software engineers, can do what we do... I've been quite literally obsessed with the idea.

I don't like to give other people credit for the events in my own life, but there is one thing that, more than anything else at the time that lead me down the path of computer science, directly lead me to where I'm at today. If you're at all interested in film and cinema (not to mention programming) then you've undoubtedly heard of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Amazing film, I'd recommend it to anyone based off of the film alone, but for me that movie holds a special place in my heart.

My mom took me to see it that movie in theaters when it came out, I would not stop bugging her to take me, there was just something about the founding of Facebook that... Sparked my young imagination. I swear to you that I didn't blink for the entire time I was in the theater watching it. It blew my mind, not only that you could do that kind of stuff with computers, but that you could actually make a lot of money working with computers as well... Ten year old me had different priorities in regards to programming 😂 Starting the moment I got home from the theater, I dedicated my life to learning everything I could about computers. Originally my goal was to, shock of all shocks, create a social networking site for me and my friends to use. I still like to brag about it to this day, but that project eventually became my groups final project in our computer class in Middle School. It was funny, middle school computer class, I had already been programming a few years by that point and was rather proficient in PHP. There were kids submitting literal spreadsheets in Excel as their final project, a few static HTML pages, that sorta jazz. My group and I submitted a full fledged twitter clone, with complete functionality. We got 100% on the project 😂😂

My reasons and interests have changed over the years. For example, I'm not particularly interested in creating a social media application these days, and I don't program because I think it'll make me rich one day (though the hopes always there) but the one thing that hasn't changed since that night I sat enraptured in the beautiful cinematography of David Fincher and facepaced dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, is the complete and total fascination with computers and technology. For that reason The Social Network will forever be my favorite movie.

Well I used to play games at my Father’s computer, it was an old FPS online game really fun, I played it like everyday when I was 6 yo. Two years later the computer broke and we had to buy a new one, so my father insisted that we buy two computers, one for him to work and one for my own computer and assembled it myself. I thought myself to do it by a book and took me like 2 weeks to figure it out and assemble the whole thing. I love every minute of it.

< The IT guy Fixes it all. A brief story about an old couple I knew >

So... I know a very old man, that keeps a great (young) appearence despite his over 80 yo. He has been a friend of my family also and my neighbour.
He lived with his slightly younger wife. They had suns/ daughters, grandsuns and even a few grand-grand suns. Despite their family keep making visits regularly, most of the time, their main company were the neighbours. And me and my younger brother were like a second grandsuns to them, and we saw them the same way.

Every time there was somethng to fix. A radio, a tv, an old ring telephone. They would call me to fix it.

At a certain age, my parents moved out to a different street, me and my brother started spending more time away from our village, so this very lovable cuple, keept calling to my place like we were still available 24/7.

The most funny request was when the old man calls meand says something like is:
OldMan: - Hello, André! everything is good with you?
Me: - Hi. I'm great! I'm spending a lot of time away now, but despite that, all is good.
OldMan - Nice to hear you! You are still studdying Computers? I think I need you to do me a favor, if you find some time.
Me - If it's nothing too difficult, or time consuming, maybe I can. What is it?

And then he breaks it.
OldMan - I have an electronic heater, but I can 't make it run. But maybe you can fix it. You know all about this electronic stuff...
(after laughing a litle bit)
Me : Well! That is a litle bit out of my league.

BTW. A curious info. The old women couldn't recognize a single letter before her 70's. She basically didn't knew how to use a phone, but then she started a senior class to learned to read, write and basic algebra. And this would become a life saving gift to her.

One time that she injuried herself in the back caused by an hard fall at her place, she was able to drag herself to the phone, and instead of calling the Urgence Team, she called me .
Luckly I was at home, and could get help in time.

i was around 10 year old. That time we used to use ms dos for drawing lines, traingle and stuff using commands that will print on execution . I was having hard time understanding it . I went to my father and asked for help. He taught me how it works and everything is logic only nothing else.That was life changing movement for me. Use to score very good in computers then on . Now a full time web developer

You know what, fuck this. I want a functionality that is supported on browser versions back to 2016 of the major browsers... Besides IE, where it isn't supported.

But honestly fuck IE users, they can have invisible characters. Certainly no other people above me in the management structure will be using old computers enough to lose it, or at least the head honcho should be able to overrule, as from past experience if it works on my machine and my boss' boss' machine, my boss' machine doesn't matter.

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

Even though I am only 19, I got introduced to computers pretty late. We always had an old Win98 machine in our house and when I was 8 my dad introduced me to Command & Conquer on it. And the first contact I had with the internet (which I really didn't care about until then) was when social networks became a thing at school, that was around 2010, when I was 11-12.

I work in a repair shop, I have 300+ sticks of RAM laying around, from DDR to DDR3 (DDR3 of 4+ GB and DDR4 are either good for replacement on new computers or are sold immediately so don't count them as laying).
Also I have 200+ hard drives, IDE, SATA, SAS, 2.5, 3.5, 20 GB to 1 TB. Lots of them.

What can I do with all this crap? Not enough matching CPU and MB to make a working system (unless I make a very obsolete one but there's no point in doing so). I also am using single hard drives for backups (only 500+ GB SATA-3 though) so I'm mostly concerned with all that old ram. What can I do with them??

So I was asked to design a database physical model using an old CASE tool installed on one of my institution computers (which runs windows) and after three hours of work, when I pressed the "print" button, it crashed. Didn't print. Didn't save.
I'm too used to Atom's auto-save function.
I hate windows

Not a rant, just a story.

We never had a computer, maybe one for a few months, and the only thing I remember about it is playing "brick breaker". My next encounter with a computer was when my dad bought a laptop in 2007, but I didn't use it since I was young and had no idea about it. We still have the laptop (Compaq) but it has some battery issues. Then the next and last until now is my first ever proper computer, my XPS 13. As for interaction with computers, we had computer class in 11th and 12th grade in my school, but they had the crappy old computers with pirated Windows XP running on every machine. (This is 2015-16).

So, I never had a proper interaction with computers in my childhood.

The first computer I ever had interaction with is my XPS 13.

I started playing around with computers when I was about 3 years old, than at 12 my "Technology" teacher showed us a programmer he and his colleagues made, a free and open source version of Logo, logoit. You could control a turtle and make it draw lines on a plan. Than I got into c++ and web development.

Thats top notch design.
All actions happening on the page go to one endpoint. Removing old trusted computers, changing the password, changing 2FA, you name it.

Now if you want to remove all old trusted devices, you cannot remove all at once, there is no button for it. So you click one after the other. And then it stops working. Ok, then do the normal password rotation. Hmm, button has a loading spinner and then nothing happens.

Looking into the browser console:
- All requests go to /myaccount/security/graphql
- All requests get a 429 Too many requests
- Even if you just click a panel, it tracks the action to the graphql endpoint. Or at least tries to because even that gets shot down with a 429

Pretty dumb, eh? Must be some small shitty website. It's not. It's fucking paypal.

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

My old school made a youtube channel called:
*SCHOOL NAME* Tech Tips.
With half of the teachers talking about computers. The Teachers are 60/70.

My first exposure to computers was when I was about 5 at least that's what I remember. My dad and his friend built custom rigs for people in their spare time back then (late 90s) I remember playing some racing game. Other than that o eventual got one of their old computers and used it for a really long time, replacing it with a gateway until high school then hitting PC gaming and programming I built my first custom rig with my dad.

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

I fucking hate what Google Feed has become. Is the Google Feed team composed of infinite monkeys on infinite computers trying to churn out the worst possible user experience with each update? Adding to the existing clusterfucking mess of unswipeable cards and unintuitive tabbed design that is inconsistent all over Android, they are now testing fucking Ads on the feed. Fuck Google Feed. I miss the old Google now cards. Listen to your users!

My first interaction with a computer was probably playing Parsec on an old TI-99/A we dug out of the attic. After that there were a lot of troubleshooting sessions with my dad on various computers trying to get some game up and running. I still remember the IRQ/DMA combination needed to get sound in Duke.

It really is no mystery why I ended up working with this stuff.