Client: Can I speak to the developer responsible for my website?
Developer: Speaking...
Client: You have a deep voice for a 5 year old.

At my old job we hired a junior developer. Turned out the junior knew more than all of us. I learnt a lot from him and it pushed me to update my knowledge and skill set!

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.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

I'm 40 years old today. Feels strange.. and getting older as a developer is not an advantage at all. But I got a wonderful little baby, a wife and a job I (almost always) like! So happy birthday to me 😊

I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

I'm 54 y.o.

I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.

I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.

Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.

I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.

I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.

I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.

Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.

I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.

I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?

As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.

Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.

1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!

DO NOT let employers demoralize you into staying with the company.

I've been with this one company for about 2 years. Everything was great, despite being underpaid, and having a lot of responsibility (I was the only front-end developer maintaining 4 big eCommerce sites).
One day about 2 months ago, I got a better offer. Better pay, more freedom, and way less stress (Customers screaming in your ear vs. no customers at all).

I talked to my team lead since I wanted my company to have a fair chance to counteroffer - I was fairly comfortable after all, and I felt like it would be a nice gesture.
If my team lead had just said "No, sorry, we can't counter that offer", there's a big chance that I would have stayed with them anyway. Instead, I got a fairly uncomfortable and personal rant thrown back at me.

He basically said that I should be happy with my salary, that he didn't feel like I had much responsibility, and that "I wasn't the type of person companies would hire for that salary".
He ended by saying I might as well stay, as there was no going back if the new place didn't work out - basically trying to tempt me with job security.

I told him that I would think about it. The worst part is that I actually did, since his rant really made me feel somewhat worthless as a developer. Luckily I came to my senses, and sent my resignation the next day.

I talked to an old coworker today, and they are still unable to find a developer who wants to take the job. I see that as justice :)

tl;dr: If a company tries to make you stay by demoralizing you - Run.

At my old company one of my colleagues introduced async / await into our csharp code. He created interfaces and showed us a great structuring of his code. Sadly a few weeks later he left the company, because of personal reasons and a bug appeared in his written service. Our senior developer took the issue and complained for like 1 week. That you can't find anything, that interfaces are useless, that async / await is slow and sucks and that we should stop trying to bring new structures into the code base and do things the old way. In the end he deleted all the great things that my colleague introduced and wrote bad and smelly code.

I'm all for geeky, feminine clothing, but surely they could have consulted a real developer before putting Javascript on a BSOD-blue/old-school-console-development-blue blue dress? It's like having a shirt that says "I love tacos" with pictures of sushi. Similar, but just wrong.

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

So i was working with a small company which were developing software for insurance sector. It was decided then that there should be an app for windows phone community and i was hired to that job.

It took me almost a month to finish the job. Please keep in mind that project was huge and already developed for android counterpart and was a hit in market. This was a chance given to me to prove myself and i proved it.

First month was fantastic for the company as software the company made was not available for windows phone. Price has been set for the software was higher in those time. Almost $15.

Excited by the success i added some more features which were not available on android counter part.

But price was very high. Even i asked management to drop the price because there were less windows phone user but no body listened.

Result : in a year app has made roughly 5000 download in which only 200 paid the actual price. Company asked me to take down the app from store. I was blamed for my over confidence in adding features that this made app less usable. They did not say a word to business managment team. I was fired.

Rough, cruel world.

6 month ago i published my app for same purpose with same feature set and different UI. And made it free. Completely free. Added a link to pay developer $0.5 or Rs 30.

Result: i have now 10 thousands plus download in last 4 month in which almost 3000 users have donated already.

Now i have my resource and my confidence and making an android app for same purpose.

This is my story and is not fake, i am 28 years old. If you think you can, you can.

Amen.

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

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!");

You can hate me: as a 34 year old php developer, i've never used git in my workflow...
I plan to start today using it on one of my personal project (only because i have arrived at "backup-49.rar")(yes i develop on windows).
Finger crossed

Hello, I just want to let you know I'm working on a 15 year old product and it is currently in production.

It uses Angular.js and one of the earliest versions of React.js. I cannot use ES6, we don't have Babel, no JSX syntax, no CSS preprocessor. No webpack.

I must support browser since IE6 with an ES3 syntax. (luckily I got some some polyfills for an ES5 syntax)

When I build a component I have to call React.createClass and React.createElement.

The render() function is basically a nested pile of React.createElement.

There is no documentation for this product, no tests, no anything.

I had to reverse engineer it in order to understand how it works.

The code base uses mixed programming styles and naming conventions, plus thousands of little js files.

Oh and obviously no hot reload, every time I make a change I have to restart everything.

Please, send help.
I'm in danger.

Sincerely,
An underpaid developer

....
I'm not crying, you are crying...

Dear senior developer with xx years of development experience, please, I BEG OF YOU hear my humble unprofessional opinion.

Not every junior is a inexperienced low life.

Even though I'm glad that I'm working with someone of your wide skill set and expertise, I'm not working with you by choice nor it is my intention to distract or "steal" your knowledge.

When I suggested using a newer version of jQuery for this new project that didn't mean I'm challenging you to work on something new for your domain, I'm merely suggesting this change because jQuery 1.2 is just old and a big portion of it is deprecated.

When I suggest some changes on your CSS selectors that doesn't mean I'm acting out of place, it is my genuine interest of having effecient css where possible.

I know you (in your opinion) are the best full stack developer in the industry, but maaaan you kill me when you use js and regex to validate input type=email (table filp) ... Haalllloooo it's 2017 this Sunday aren't we supposed to progress instead of remaining in the same old same ?

RANT!!!

(sorry if someone's already shared this)
Very true though. I remember very clearly when I was around 10 years old, wondering what all these random symbols on a keyboard were for and what type of person would use them.

I guess I'm that type of person; never would have guessed at the time that my fascination with technology would lead to where I am now.

Anyone here have a cool story to share about why they decided to become a developer?

Last week, someone contacted me, he said he needed me to fix the existing code on a new WordPress website because the developer did a messy job, so I thought to myself, it can't be that bad, requested for the SSH access and got into the server.

Guys.

Guys..

Guys...

I was wrong, some people really know how to fuck shit up.

I don't want to go into details but there were legit more than 50 plugins installed and activated on the website for no good reason and all the pages took about 45 minutes each to render if not more, so you can literally request a new page, start making coffee and use the washing machine and if you are lucky to have spent 45 minutes, return to a fully loaded page.

For a new WordPress website, it seemed really old.

It was almost as if this developer had a line of code that looked like this:

@Import 'all the bad programming practices ever and the ones yet to be invented';

When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.

I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.

I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.

In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.

After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..

He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D

After a couple years as a developer I've learned that all those banking sites and cool online stores and apps are held together with old chewed gum, duck tape and that guys who has been in the office 48h straight and whose wife thinks he's dead.

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

I just can't understand what will lead an so called Software Company, that provides for my local government by the way, to use an cloud sever (AWS ec2 instance) like it were an bare metal machine.

They have it working, non-stop, for over 4 years or so. Just one instance. Running MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP and an f* Tomcat server with no less than 10 HUGE apps deployed. I just can't believe this instance is still up.

By the way, they don't do backups, most of the data is on the ephemeral storage, they use just one private key for every dev, no CI, no testing. Deployment are nightmares using scp to upload the .war...

But still, they are running several several apps for things like registering citizen complaints that comes in by hot lines. The system is incredibly slow as they use just hibernate without query optimizations to lookup and search things (n+1 query problems).

They didn't even bother to get a proper domain. They use an IP address and expose the port for tomcat directly. No reverse proxy here! (No ssl too)

I've been out of this company for two years now, it was my first work as a developer, but they needed help for an app that I worked on during my time there. I was really surprised to see that everything still the same. Even the old private key that they emailed me (?!?!?!?!) back then still worked. All the passwords still the same too.

I have some good rants from the time I was there, and about the general level of the developers in my region. But I'll leave them for later!

Is it just me or this whole shit is crazy af?

"An experienced developer is one who doesn't make any new mistakes, but repeats the same old ones over and over."

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

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

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

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

Ohhhhhh YEAH!

Wish me luck. 😎

A Developer is desperate: his java application servers are unresponsive, thousand of dead zombie threads are sucking all cpus, memory is leaking everywhere, garbage collector has gone crazy, the cluster sessions are fucked....

The Developer goes to the closest bridge, ties a stone to his neck and gets ready to jump.

Suddenly a bearded old man with a fiery look runs toward him, yelling:
- stop stop!!!! Your application is not scaling and misconfigured, your servers are melting, cpu usage is not sustainable anymore, but don't despair

The Developer, puzzled, looks at him:
-I've never seen you...how do you know...
- Hey, man, I'm the Devil. I know everything. All your problems are solved. I'll give you magic functions. They are called Lambda.
You'll never have to worry about your servers, scalability, security, configuration and shit.

The Developer seems astonished but relieved:
- Ok, sounds great! let's try it - suddenly suspicion creeps in - hmmmm but you are the Devil....so...you want something back, don't you?
(the Devil nods lightly with a diabolic smile)
- ...and...you want my soul, I guess...
- your soul??? come on!!! - the Devil burst in a laugh - we are in 2019. I don't care about your soul. I want your ass.
- What!???!!!?
- yes, I want to fuck your ass

The Developer, evaluates quickly the situation.
Few moments of pain or slight discomfort (?) in exchange for magic lambda. It could be worth. He accepts.

After a while of rough anal fucking, the devil asks
- Hey, how old are you anyway?
- 45, why?
- Oh jeeez...45!!!??? and you still believe in the devil?

Just met my old friend a few minutes ago and he asked me, "what work you do?"

Me > Well you already know, I'm a developer.

He > Oh, so you make mobile apps and websites?

Me > Well kinda yea but I work on websites mostly, will build my mobile app later someday.

He > Yea, you have something called web2,web3 and RSS FEED and you know anyone can do coding and developer stuff, only hard thing is to get a good idea.
(that was exactly his sentence)

Me > ......................... (in my head)

I am about to fire this client.

I can't take any more of this abject fucking stupidity.

I can't take any more sentence fragment responses to detailed questions and thorough responses.

I can't take any more expectations that I deliver consistent metadata and hundreds of pages of documentation, yet no one else has to do the same

I can't take any more rules only applying to/hamstringing me and my team

I can't take any more fucking gross incompetence and grossly undereducated shitfucks that get to send ridiculous bills and have 0 accountability while playing developer

I can't take any more obviously nepotistic and racist hiring that walks back every step of progress we've made in the last 50 years

I can't take not being able to call a spade a spade and being the villain when there's obvious graft occuring at every level

I can't take these old fucks padding their retirements while rendering everyone else contractors and cutting off opportunity for future generations

I can't take how absurdly, blisteringly stupid the business people are, or the fact that one average project managers with a recent PMI cert somehow bills what I do

I'm 100% going to drop dime on these fucks to every regulatory body they are beholden to, their investors, their corporate owners and USCIS, since I've already doxxed the shit out of all of my coworkers that don't remotely qualify for the positions they occupy.

Dead 💀 developer.

My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.

In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.

About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”

Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).

So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.

What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).

Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.

Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.

!warning could be longer.
I must something let go:
Im now 24 ,my life was not easy .
I got bullied all the time in school from 1 to 10 degree. I had a dream since i was 6:"no i dont wanna be a police man, fire fighter, astronaut....i want to be a programmer "..
My father did me to make an apprenticeship with Volkswagen after i finished my "middle school" (10th class);
2 years of mobbing and be sad i leaved that motherfucking "-aship"
After a while my father again wanted to ,i must to an "-aship" .yeah hes been right, but i dont want to do and work like you do!!!.. then again after "fighting" my dad (parents), i was reliant to social help for a year..
(U must know,my dream was always in my mind)
I met a girl in a different federal state in germany and moved up to her.
I worked as a daywage man to get us money.
1 year was over and then i found out the apprenticeship as web and mobile developer (computer scientist) . I applied for this an got a place.
Now my fucking dream comes true in a few months!
Just wanna say that you never should give up your interests or dreams, doesnt matter how old you are!!!!
My journey begins 2017 and yours?:))))

A few months ago, I decided to let go some old clients with bad behavior and/or bad projects, since I noticed this was affecting my mental health (lowering my self esteem, make me feel depressed, anxious, etc).

I was exhausted of doing miracles in projects without git, build files, staging enviroments (yes... you can imagine), and receive all sort of curses when sudenly something stopped to work.

I set some requirements to work with any new project/client: 1) project needs to be under version control, 2) it must have staging enviroment, 3) I must work with build files.

As I still have contracts running, I'm communicating this to clients as soon as I finish my obligations.

Today, one of these clients told me they are leaving to work with another developer.

Reason: They said my new requirements are unreasonable and they prefer doing the old way.

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

I was in college studying stuff I couldn't care less about and had a job that was consuming me. A couple of colleagues and I then decided to open our own company. Four years of sleepless nights later, all colleagues left. I had lost touch with family and friends, had lost a girlfriend and had been left with all the company's debt to pay. Going back to my old career seemed like the only option, but I couldn't let me sabotage myself again. I sat my butt in front of my sister's computer and downloaded every coding class I could get my hands on. Getting used to sleep deprivation helped. Eventually I built my first app and landed my first freelance job. All hat in hand, I told this company I didn't have much experience and they told me they'd hire a senior developer as well. It was on a Sunday morning, at 4am, with the deadline breathing down our necks, that the senior developer had jumped ship and the company asked me if I could take over the project. That moment I realised it's all about being competent. That moment I knew I could do this.

Me : I'm a software developer.
Neighbor : Hey could you fix my PC it's not starting.
Me : *goes*
*Finds monitor cable disconnected*

*Facepalm level==69*

I'm a freelance web developer and I'm only 16 years old, coding since 5 years! Go for your goals, you can do it!

My family didn't support me. In fact, my own father told me I'd never learn to code. I do many things out of pure spite, one of them: pursue a master's degree in computer science to prove an old man wrong.

On my third semester of my bachelor's I was already a better developer than he will ever be 🙄

"Your quote is too high, I will contact the old developer, as this would be quite easy for him!"

Alright, whatever - then 6ish months pass and suddenly the old developer said the same and since the other shit bartender doesn't want to do it "cheaper" he'd want it to have done properly, truly thinking of adding a tax to people that try to play games like that.

Once one of my coworkers tried to prank me while i was afk and changed a line in my code.
Good old habits of mine instantly realized the file's unsaved status and i could ctrl+z without even knowing someone edited my code.

Don't mess with a developer. We know our shit.

Does anyone else have that one friend who’s a wannabe developer and keeps sending you memes about programming which either don’t make any sense or are so old you want to stab him for showing it to you again?

Like the missing semicolon shit

I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.

They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.

A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.

And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.

They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.

This is what happens when you have business people develop code.

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've been at my job for about 3 months now. They have me remaking a 10 year old site so that it's responsive and updated to HTML5. well the "senior developer" I'm working under doesn't know squat about responsive design and doesn't know that tags like font are deprecated so he's basically just copy pasting old code into bootstrap grid and calling that "updating the site". Lol did I mention he's still declaring the doctype as HTML 4 too? how did I get stuck here? -_-

So instead of using the budget of 7k$ to buy all the plugins the old developer needed, he torrented more than half of them and deployed the system

which ended up in 20 thousand users including companies reporting a breach, because avira etc reported some kind of drive-by scripts on the new website

what a fucking buffoon, the most annoying thing about this is, that all the plugins had a "license file", so I didn't even first get, where all that shit is coming from

God fucking dammit.

I got assigned to a WordPress project...

I AM NOT A WORDPRESS DEVELOPER!!!

Why do I have to deal with this giant pile of stinking shit?
I'm a php developer, I make applications, I don't write fucking wordpress plugins...
WHY DOES THIS EXIST, WHY DID WORDPRESS BECOME SUCCESSFUL WHY CAN'T I JUST DEV IN PIECE.

Dear wordpress developers,

Please suffocate on a big fat old cock.

Regards.

!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."

!rant waiting for my first job interview as a developer at 35years old, so fucking nervous.😱😵 it's like going back to my childhood

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

Mom and dad never really cared me being a developer claiming they did not understand what I do and used to talk down on me becoming a loser for spending too much time making video games when I was a kid.

Got depressed for a long time and stopped making games.

Brother comes drunk at 15 years old, got yelled but bc he was out partying and socializing he never got called a loser by them. Now they laugh at that experience.

But never apologized until I got a breakdown. Fb becomes big and now they want me to invent the next Facebook and telling me to be happy.

I worked someplace once that fired a person for lack of quality output. Before that he sued the company over a labor dispute. After they fired him he went and founded his own business. A year later the company decided to recycle his old laptop to another developer and discovered the source code and business prospectus on it. The company took it to court and said it was actually their business because it was created on its own equipment and the time stamps confirm during business hours also. Courts agreed and they got possession of his business and then fired him again.

For being a community based around developers, the amount of people managing to fuck up Windows and then blaming the OS while both my 9 year old brother and the old next door lady keeps theirs running perfectly fine will always be a mystery to me. If you are a developer stop making excuses of how a operating system works and get clever enough to work with it instead of against it. I've been using and developing on Windows for the past 7 years and to be frank rarely do I ever encounter the shit some people post here, mind boggling I would even say pebcak. And just to be clear, I'm not a fanatic, Linux is a beautiful OS.

There I had to get that off my chest, have a nice day.

My apprentice quit!

Posted the other day about him quitting ...

He did ( he could of read the old post )

Just took him two days to do it

Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits

Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...

I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐

Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.

Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.

It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.

I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.

This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.

Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%

Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.

I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.

Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.

But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.

Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.

Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.

We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.

basically, make dev rant great again.

No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.

Listening to professor tell stories about when he used to develop, is like listening old war stories.

Back when I was in university, this teacher would tell us different stories about his days as a developer. This was one of the last ones, and I think it has not changed much since then.

*Phone rings*
Professor: Hello?

Client: I don't know what the fuck you take me for!

Professor: Oh, hello Client_Name. What seems to be the problem.

Client: This doesn't work! There's nothing here!

Professor: Ok, do you see the program file?

Client: No. I just said that there's nothing here.

They proceed to go over the issue and how to get the program to run. Or at least show up on the PC. This goes on for about 30 minutes.

Suddenly my professor has a thought.

Professor: Have you tried inserting the Floppy disk from the other side? Try flipping it.

Client: ...

Hi guys!
That is my first...well, rant? No, not at all.

I found this community by accident. I was looking for something like this, but did not realize til now. I scrolled through some posts and it is awesome to read awesome stories and rants from awesome people.

I am a 21 year old SAP ABAP developer from Germany. I have finished my bachelor's degree (business informatics/business information management? German: Wirtschaftsinformatik) last August. I have always been interested in web development and teached myself some php basics when I was younger. I would love to do more things like that, but things have changed. There are lots of different frameworks, languages and stuff. It's complicated.

I am not sure if I have understood how this community works, but I am very excited to find out.

And, as I already mentioned, I am German. So please feel free to bash my shitty English. :D

Just discovered this App, created my account to say Hello and create my first rant. I'm already in love!
To my Person:
I'm from Germany ( I hope my english is not too bad) and I'm 19 years Old and recently started my apprenticeship as a developer. I'm specialised at Web development, especially with PHP and JavaScript

I still don't understand the effect devRant has had on me...

When I first joined I was quite happy just being my old 2D game developer self but now all I want to do is build CLI tools, interpreters, root through source code I don't understand and not shut up about arch... Not sure of I'm down the right track or not now

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

Being a developer is a funny old thing. We sit and bitch about developing for clients, we bitch IDE'S and we bitch about languages.

But to perfectly honest, I don't know where I'd be without it.

I dont like it when i have to edit an old code made by a previous developer, i dont want to touch that spaghet.

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.

Almost 3 weeks back I joined a company as a React developer. For a week I had nothing to work on as they were already working on few projects.
So my senior asked me to take up a project(not yet live) which was developed by 2 interns, as the frontend guy's internship was about to end in 4 days I have to take over the front-end role.

So I talked to that guy for next 2 days regarding all the project scope, codebase and whatnot. But still not entirely convinced. As i got the repo access, I began to check the codes. God !! It was all spaghetti code. I was damn frustrated. And still I am.

This whole week I am trying to do the refactoring as much as I can, I completely lost interest.

I cannot blame the intern guy, he is smart and tried to do the best he could, as he didn't know about the company standards. Maybe I was too the same kind back then. Now he is gone and I am stuck building components over that code.

Bonus: He used some old react boilerplate.
-_-

!rant, advice, !mine

Q: I'm [xx] years old [xyz] professional. Would that be a good idea if I try to change my career to software development right now?

A: Age is mostly doesn't matter. You can learn programming at any age. And, software is everywhere. Every background knowledge will be useful. Your prior knowledge will not be wasted.

But, should you change career?

- YES, if you deeply interested in programming.

- NO, if it's only because you feel there are better opportunities.

It's true that there may be better opportunities. But, without deep interest in the subject, you may struggle to become good software developer. Without being a good developer, your opportunities will be limited and you are likely to regret the decision.

Software development is easier for those who passionate but very difficult for those who doesn't....

DEAR CTOs, PLEASE ASK THE DEVELOPER OF THE SOFTWARE WHICH YOU ARE PLANNING TO BUY IN WHAT LANGUAGE AND WHAT VERSION THEY ARE WRITTEN IN.

Background: I worked a LONG time for a software company which developed a BIG crm software suite for a very niche sector. The softwary company was quite successfull and got many customers, even big companies bought our software. The thing is: The software is written in Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2. Even some customer servers are running debian squeeze... Yes, this setup is still in production use in 2022. (Rails 7 is the current version). I really don't get it why no one asked for the specific setup, they just bought it. We always told our boss, that we need time to upgrade. But he told every time, no one pays for an tech upgrade... So there it is, many TBs of customer data are in systems which are totally old, not updated and with possibly security issues.

Three months into a new job, as a senior developer (12+ years experience) and updated an import application.

With one small update query that didn't account for a possible NULL value for a parameter, so it updated all 65 million records instead of the 15 that belonged to that user.

Took 3 people and 4 days to put all the data back to it's original state.

Went right back to using the old version of the apllication, still running 2 years later. It's spaghetti code from hell with sql jobs and multiple stored procedures creating dynamic SQL, but I'm never touching it again.

GoodGuy BroCow
Senoir problem
2years back

Senoir dev was assigned to make a webapp for billing

Dude uses dreamviewer and writes code like a bitch

Phpmysqljqueryhtml whole thing mixed very badly and undocumented

His function name format fun_1()

a simple update cost him a day,

Told him to use brackets atleast and also a framework ,guy denies

Days go by

He learns a lot of stuffs from me ,like how to use inspect in chrome lol, how to use sqlite for small projects , and orm and frameworks.

He used to pin his mistakes on me, so that boss gets angry on me

Then i quit the job

2 years went by

Now he is unemployed, nobody wants a 24 year old plain php coder and template editing web developer

Anyway I hired him, he was my first senior, whatever he did,it didnt matter to me, bcoz i remember

the days we spent on the same hall right next to each other coding in php,

days we brainstormed to fix a div

Also the days we ate lunch and breakfast together

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

Subversion should be burried so far beneath the ocean that even the oldest developer, who is so old that he can't even think about jerking off no more, because his beard is so long and thick as a curtain made of strong streams of wool, waying him done so much that his face would immediately smash down to the floor if he ever would ever again attempt to stand up, denying access to his wrinkled dick, can't find it no more.

And yet I still have to use it at my job.

Am I a machochistic fuck?
This sunday I had the glorious idea to fix a not-so-recent Wordpress website for a friend.
Imagine an upgrade from 3.3.2 to 4.9.8! (and PHP 5.5.old to 7.2.new

Oh boy. I thought it was impossible, because the site uses a free theme from 2012 and had some other plugins installed.
But what kind of developer am I, if I give up so easily?

I forced XAMPP to run PHP 5.6.stoneage in order to let me debug this thing. After some fixing in different files, I was able to get the admin panel back, disabled some plugins and then overwrote the installation with WP 4.9.8. After firing up the admin panel I had to fix 20 differend PHP files in the plugins.

Finally! After the plugins were updated, all worked again.
Except for the backend part of this free crappy theme. It uses an old version of JQuery UI widgets with custom mods.
I've done enough for today so I let it be like this. I'm not in the mood to load a second JQuery version.

When you realize you're that grumpy old developer stuck on that old school sh$t.

Programming helped me realise, that I'm growing.

Since I've learned git long time ago, all my projects are archived and I can get back to them. When I look at my old code, I can see, how much I've learned, and how much more of a developer I've become.

And it motivates me to keep going.

When I was 17 years old. I had difficulties in understanding math problem “Calculus” (I can’t remember which one was it). This one day when we were in a Computer Lab, our teacher was showing us how really software’s are made. During my time, it was vb6. I paid close attention. When I went home, I started to think things that I can make using that software so one day I went to my teacher and asked if I can have a copy of the vb6. He gave vb6 and told me that inside are few eBooks that will help in learning.

Fuck School, from that day I started to concentrate on programming only. Made a small calculator which will help me to understand a Calculus problem and double check my answer. From that day, I love programming.

I’ m 26 now and a full stack software developer. All I want to do it build cool shit, something that will blow the eyeball of my friends and that eyeball should pop out from their asshole.

Joke: The person who scored highest in the computer class was afraid to switch on the PC.

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

Definitely Godot Engine. One of the greatest and easiest Game Engines I have ever used! Lots of great features and there are getting more and more!

The inbuilt programming language GDScript is really awesome too! It's a custom language built extra for the Engine, which makes it super easy to use and integrate! The syntax is a bit like python but better.

Because it's not as old as unity or unreal engine, it's not as feature rich. But I think that's okay. It allows you to get used to the current existing features, and then heading on to the new ones.

What I really enjoy is that, just as in this community, you can just talk with the creators of the engine. Asking questions, suggesting features and discussing things! They'll answer nearly everything!

Not to mention the graphics! They are really good and are nearly able to compete against Unity!

There's also a visual language you can use. Just like Unreal Engine Blueprints! Never tried it tho...

The scenes system is very easy to understand. You basically have a lot of "components" which you can use in each of your scenes. This also allows for making simple extensions!

All in all, a great engine! If you are a game developer I can definitely recommend trying it out!

I am a 67 yrs old frontend developer

Is it possible to be hired as a Junior Developer if you are 36 years old?

Boss: -We're firing one of our freelancers and you are taking over one of his projects.
Me: -OK, what is it?
Boss: Old POS project written in Java.
Me: -But I'm C# developer. I haven't touched Java in years!
Boss: -You'll manage...

FML I've managed to finish and fully refactor this piece of shit project.

!dev

I'm always somewhat pissed off since i don't have a developer job - barely even a tech job. I scan patient charts into pdfs > a server, and that's as complicated as my job description gets. i sit and scan. my computer is (supposed to be) nothing other than a display for managing the scanned charts.

what really killed me though is that one time, we got a new MFC because our old one was, well, obviously broken beyond their patience level. They told me i'd be "Helping".
I got to cut open the box.
whoop dee fucking doo. Tech assist of the century ladies and gents.

That being ine of the worst cases, there's always the times when they talk to their IT guy and never forget to call him an asshole after simply because they don't like it when they don't understand stuff. I've texted him a few times and he's actually very pleasant to talk with and does his job well. just grinds my gears

(and being the IT guy is not available as an alternative. the job is 1. obviously filled, and 2. I installed a word document password bruteforcer, which they in turn told the doctor who told the IT guy and made it sound like i had developed it - of course, this being a pretty professional clinic, he suggested i get fired. so now any hope of me actually doing what I love there is pretty hopelessly out of my reach>

Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .

It worked because I feel like a title noob today .

I need bleach...

Lot of bleach.

When you think that not using a JS framework is bad...

Ever saw a Frankenstein of a HTML, PHP and JQuery? Full rewrite of an old project with more than enough time allowed....

Just... That was not awful enough.

*sobs* so the dev added bootstrap onto this pile of garbage... Instead of rewrite....

Think I missed CSS or included it in HTML? Lol. No.

No CSS. Inline. HTML 4 Tags.

?>
<table width=40 class="table table-striped">
<?php
foreach( $table as $row ) {
....
<input onkeyup="..." onkeydown="..." class="form-control"
...

To give you a basic example of how worse it is...

But the best. The lead developer does not understand why I was speechless.

i need more beer. And bleach. Filth and disgust must get out of my system

oh many, not that I need them for my ego. Shit is large enough as it is, but four in particular:

Had two interns that told me that they had learn more from me in two weeks than they did from their progamming teachers the entire time they were in school, that I had a really good way of teaching and that I had restored their interest and faith in the world of software development.

My 60+ year old CTO that used to work in the financial sector as a developer way back in the day and then with heaven knows how many other tools tell me that I was on the top of his list for the best developers he has ever seen. Considering that I am 28 it meant a lot to me.

Also my previous manager currently living in a big city telling me that I completely outclass every other developer she works with over there.

My ex boss before working at my current institution telling one of our contractors that it was going to be damn near impossible to find a developer of my caliber. That I had set the bar far too high.

Shit is pretty cool man.

So I have this 13 year old cousin who's pretty determined to follow my footsteps as a developer someday. He really likes gaming and all internet stuffs. His future plans makes me happy since I may finally have a relative that is a developer. But darn it! He's kinda weird coz he still throws tanrums. One of his major tantrums(which happened again last night) is that he wants the wireless Karaoke machine to be turned off because he thinks that it's slowing down the internet. It was his sister's birthday party and the guests are partying. I've told him many times that the signal for the karaoke is different from that of the router which has nothing to do with the internet slowing down. It must be caused by q device that is updating some apps or whatever. We live in the philippines and our internet provider is quite fast but it has this stupid fair usage policy that caps our bandwidth to a minimum speed if we reach a certain amount of data usage. Since he goes to youtube everyday in 480 and 720p, I explained it to him that it was one of the causes.
Last night, I almost got triggered because I wanted him to believe about the wifi being different to that of the karaoke machine's radio and that it is not connected to the wifi and not using data. I also told him about different kinds of wireless signals which I studied as a Software Engineering student back then and yet he still doesnt believe me. And what almost triggered me is that i saw his steam client updating while watching youtube. I told him that was it. But instead of agreeing, he refused to believe me and just told me that steam is just updating and he's not downloading anything which made me think why he keeps going to youtube, because...he's not downloading. Oh God! Good luck to this kid. 😂

Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.

It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.

Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.

And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman.

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

When people ask you to speed up their old crappy device, whether it's a phone, laptop or tablet (even though I'm a web developer), all I say is:

"Buy a new one, that isn't cheap and nasty"

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

I developed an app for a company when I was 19 years old freshly out of school, lead developer. When I was 20 a huge TV station in my country covered my app in a segment on how tax payer money was being wasted on stupid shit (I mean yeah lol). They found a super emberassing typo on the start page of the app that they then made fun of. Still haven't recovered from that one lol

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

"The old developer wrote that, not me"

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

my coolest project is one i am currently working on. its my 12 month old daughter. She challenges me everyday and gives me enough kicking to find the best solutions for all my other projects. every developer should have this muse.

I really like my current job.

I work as an analyst developer looking after and sorting out people's old tech debt.

Once that's stable I get pretty free reign to do what I want.

It allows me to stretch from dev into graphic design, security, architecture and training on a very regular basis.

It allows me to keep an eye on tech trends, research and develop ideas using the latest shiny things.

Oh and if I say I need a thing, I can usually get it purchased.

All of the above comes with the "as long as it's for the benefit of the company" disclaimer, but when your direct managers see an IDE and think "okay he's working" the lines get a little blurry.

They keep asking me about my career goals and if I want to manage or move around. Fuck that noise, all of that noise.

Do wut I wawnt.

I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.

I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.

I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.

I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.

I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.

This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.

Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.

Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?

I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.

Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.

The role of a Product Manager is just a decade or two old. Most organisations, including FAANG, are still figuring out what are the primary responsibilities of a PM.

A vast majority I know, including my dumbass, is struggling to keep things floating while in the role. Learning on the job is one of the only and most effective way to do so.

No wonder, imposter syndrome is so common in this group.

One of the main tasks is to make decisions. Important and impactful ones. The role came into existence to take the decision making load off our engineering friends while building any product.

This shit comes with huge responsibility.

BUT, not everyone understand this. In India, being a developer was a cool thing until 2018 and so everyone rushed into the role. Now somehow everyone started thinking being a Product Manager is cool because all you have to do is sit and shoot orders and things will happen magically.

I get reached out by so many folks every month asking for guidance and when I ask them what a PM does or why they want to be a PM, the narrative is more or less same.

Very few actually understand how taxing the role is or the challenges that we face while performing the job.

WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE SO IGNORANT AND DUMB?

And in another news, my first week at new job was super amazing. Loved every bit of it. People are smart, processes are neat, things are structured, and lots and lots to learn for me.

How are you guys doing? Been a while that we spoke.

Official declaration: I am the dumbest person I know.

!rant

Is a bachelor's degree worth it?

Context:
Up until yesterday, I was planning on not getting a Bacherlor's degree related to programming. I'm currently an intern and I believe that they'll want to keep me afterwards. Even it they don't, my old boss has a junior developer position opening soon and he asked me if I was interested.

I think I'm a good programmer, but I'm not here to boast, but rather, I want to know your opinion:
Is getting a bachelor's degree in software engineering worth it?

I know this topic is not new and has been asked in many forums, but I noticed a repetitive trend: people who have the degree say it's worth it and people who don't say it's not.

TL;DR:
Is getting a bachelor's degree in software engineering worth it? Why?

The Last Rodeo

Hi dear ranters. I've been a dev since I was 12, that makes 18 freakin years. Although I love my job and being someone who not only consumes but also produces, I am a bit grown tired of the industry.

About 6 years ago I cut ties from the last agency I worked with to become a freelancer. I ignited many projects, helped many of my customers (still helping most of them) to realize their goals. But I've come to realize that my country doesn't like old school laborers like myself (for some reasons I would explain if asked).

So I've been thinking: what would I do if I wasn't doing this job? What would you do for living if you were to stop being a developer? Let's have a chat.

So today i went to another town for a car service, and by accident i met a very old man looking at the cars in the saloon, he was very calm person, in conversation he said he was system analyst and a COBOL developer in a big industry... but what got me the most he said he survided FOUR heart attacks... i don't know if that was a common practice for COBOL developers but i do php most of the time... so... i just wanted to say hello guys... and delete my browser history if i'm not around for some time :)

I'm a 16 yrs old student, learning to be a software developer. I have successes, but I can't share with anyone. My parents don't understand what am I doing, my classmates neither. Literally nobody. Maybe 1 or 2 people. Can I share with you, dear devRant community? Or I shouldn't share, 'couse it's not a rant?

That fealing when someone that picked from the graves an old project that you've started when you were just a noob developer... and then you look at the code... and then the shame.

Seeing old developer comments like this makes my day..

Recently got out of the military now I work a full time job, have a wife and a 15 month old son, go to college full time online and try to learn Java and android development in my other time. I want to work as a developer so badly but I'm just not good enough yet. It's also super hard to know what level of knowledge you need to obtain a job because all entry level positions want you to have years of experience in 10 fucking languages and shit like what the fuck? No breaks, hungry to succeed.

The best part about being a junior developer is meeting veteran developers.

For example, my friend's father is an old world Linux guru. I've known him for a really long time, but never understood why he lived in a mansion.

Every time I see him now I make a point to bring up some small Linux thought. He always responds with some ridiculous history lesson about the origin of a command or how he still uses a regex alias he wrote 15 years ago.

I am now the only experienced developer and the person responsible for the delivery of a project AFTER WE ARE ONE MONTH PAST THE DEADLINE! All because user wants to replace the old system with new system with all EXACT SAME FUCKING FEATURES!

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

Anyone know how I can get a backend developer job as a 15 year old?

🦆

Damn I'm pretty hard hitting my limits here

My company asked me if I would like to work some extra hours because otherwise they don't make all the deadlines

But damnit asking 10+ hours a day from a junior web developer is quite a lot

😒 Especially if it's an old legacy project where I have to work on...

Started a new job a month ago. I’m the only real frontend developer here. I come from a company with 10+. Now i’m working with a old ux guy. Mr. UX teached me the usage of a styleguide. This styleguide is a fucking mess. The legacy code is a fucking mess. They way of working, up for improvement.
I have a dream...

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

Any other 30+ year old developer that didn't start the dev career too long ago and gets completely depressed when surfing on Quora? Reading 100 about "developer career being over after 30" when mine started at 29 isn't too good a motivation

Becoming an 'almost' decent developer these past few years has made me realize how absolutely undeserved my ego was back in high school when I first joined DevRant and StackOverflow and thought i was 'all that' just because i did some programming thing stupid teenagers found cool in a random school.

At 24 I can say I'm happy for the internet knocking me down a few pegs when my 16-17 year old ego got out of hand. I feel it's really made me better in the long run.

Thank you DevRant

The backend people at my old company had 4 files which they all committed code to (they were about 10 people). The only reason they didn't use a single file, according to the lead developer, was that Eclipse could only handle 12k lines per file (or something like that).

Quitting job because of Java and legacy corporate OSGI codebase. Being junior developer I'm just done with no documentation, terrible team support and non existent code review. After 18 months I can't justify staying any longer. Never had luck with Java and I guess some things just stay the same.

Joined only because of Javascript part, just to be thrown into fullstack position. Stayed way longer because of COVID. Good old simple PHP I loved and foolishly left because of money.

So somehow paid version of my app is available somewhere for free (old version of the app though). People are downloading it, and will obviously see the invalid license message. There is an option in that case to mail the developer just in case there was something wrong with the license checking, and guess what? Those people are mailing to me about invalid license. 😂😂😂😂

I just remembered a weird fix in a bug, some old developer hide the error message using css, placing it in a div then just used display none. LOL

Today at 7am i got s phone call please go to this client

I responded sure no problem what am i going to do at this client.....

Don't worry they said you will find out when you get there...

So i go to the client and as I expected its not dev related at all

It was for installation of point of sale tills and printers 😱😱

That are 7 years old with no cables
(2 hour drive to get here)

Anyway I ended up selling hardware to them....this developer is going places 😂🙈

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

I'm a 35 year old developer and I can't figure out how the fuck mailchimp works. It might be that the whole thing is terrible, or I may just be a complete idiot. Oh, of course the api key is under profile>extras

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

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.

I want a boring software developer job. I’ve been working for software consulting companies since the beginning. And is just so stressful. Clients always ranting, the need to always be in the cutting edge, or even the complete opposite. There’s always pressure to get certified in X o Y. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to be constantly catching up with the latest stack or framework. I want a boring job. A slow-paced job maybe maintain some old hunk of software that does not give too much trouble. I’m tired of putting down fires all the time. Of running against the clock to deliver a meaningless app. Because all this apps don’t contribute to anything in the world. Just more clutter, more bloat. I just want to work 8 to 5 and be done with it. Just throw myself in the couch after it and play some games. Maybe do some gardening. Or bread. I love bread. Don’t you love bread?

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?

You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.

Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.

In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...

So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.

!myrant

I'm a junior developer in a small company alongside with a fellow programmer. Since I have an interest in Security and our Sys Admin left, my boss offered me to do some sys admin stuff.

I feel bad for my fellow programmer just because there is an old man in the company that doesn't come to me with his tech problems and goes to him.

Something like this goes down today:
OM: Hey, I can't watch my Fox Live News. Can you help me?
FP: The problem isn't on our side

*OM keeps pestering him*

FP: Let me check it out

*Goes and fix the issue and comes back laughing *

My coworker is to kind 😬😂😅

!Rant; Week40
Honestly, before starting my post secondary education in Computer science I had wanted to become an architect.
Since I was maybe.... 10 years old all the way till the semester before graduating from highschool I was sold on becoming an architect.
I love design; Interior design, art, unique use of colors, architecture. I love systems that looked good and worked as well as they appeared.
Over the winter break of my grade 12 year a friend said to me, "Why don't you become a UI/UX developer? You love technology, software and design, why not go into a career where you practice on all three?".
I was surprised to hear that. It had honestly never really occurred to me since I had always told myself I would become an architect.
I guess that leaves me to where I am now. Still a student, but loving my time learning the details behind software development. I do not regret choosing Development over becoming an Architect.

I was a Project Manager, studied my a$$ off at 38 to become a mobile developer. Built production apps in Java, React Native. I've studied Kotlin and Flutter. Then my company almost went belly up and I had to scramble to find a job to support my family. Back to being a PM which I hate. Started with Swift because my son is old enough to play with Swift Playgrounds and thinking about making a break back into dev. Every post I see on Twitter is about Flutter, maybe RN, but not much Native iOS. Is it wrong that I'm loving it thus far? What's the future for Native iOS and Android developers?

Hi, I'm a 17 years old web developer (still in school, not from the us), is there any way that a guy like me will be able to find a job to start gain experience? I searched all over the internet, in upwork no one answer me when I try to contact them and the other all wants 1 or 2 years of experience or a degree...

I just had a new employee, barely out of school, question whether or not we are ready to start a big refactor of an aging legacy system. She knows nothing about the system we are about to attack, barely has 12 months experience as a developer and knows nothing about the past 6 years of countless meetings, discussions and experience leading to the decision to refactor. Still, she's not "convinced" we are ready to get started.

Gen Z - they sure are something different. God damn it, I know it sounds old but where's the fucking humbleness? Spoilt little shits, the world is fucked.

I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.

I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).

The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)

So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬

But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.

Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!

BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!

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

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

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

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

Being a front end developer and working in a team of motivated "full stack" developers sucks big time.
So, recently joined this new company with a very small project which just started, basically a cloud version of a really old desktop app. Few people from the team completely from the asp dotnet background decided the architecture few months before I joined in.
So, they did it something like this -

- mono repo dotnet project with VueJs app served within it (because that would be maintainable 😑)
- vue app served by pointing the built files through dotnet index file (simply because they didn't care about the gift to the front end world which is webpack or even had any knowledge about it 😑)
- added typescript because, u know it's cool 😑, without even knowing that they don't possess that team which know how to write the types (f***ers write classes for every payload object coz they don't know what interfaces are)
- no loader to load typescript, they are running tsc in watch mode and we have .js and .js.map for every .ts file in our project which some teammates are even pushing to repo

Recently, I added eslint with git hooks to the project so that everyone will at least stick to the coding standards. Now, to avoid the errors they are bypassing the git hooks by uninstalling the library and then installing it after the commit😂😂
Then we have a girl who uses document.getElementById to programmatically change styles in a Vue project😑😑😑😂
Then we have dotnet people using dotnet coding conventions all over the front end app.

People, how do I deal with these so called "full stack" people?

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

When you're hired to write a basic FTP guide for a mooc and the 13 year olds you get to test it without help manage fine but the 38 year old 'ex developer' asks faaar too many questions to try understand it

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

A legacy custom made WordPress Theme.

Old developer made main styling sheet with 8000+ lines of code with no component separation.

Couple of the senior devs were reviewing some legacy service code, vilifying everything that was done. Too many files, not enough files, too many lines of code, etc. Standard Monday-Morning-Quarterback nonsense. Then they came across Thread.Sleep() in various exception handlers. The passive-aggressive -bleep- hit the fan. 'Idiot', 'Moron', "People don't know how to code..", etc. dog-pile rants for a good 5 minutes.
I thought "Code is only a couple of years old and had very little changes..I'll bet the original developer is still here."
So I look at the change history and sure enough the original developer was one of the dog-pilers, and the other dev changed the code just last year. Comments like "Major refactoring", "Increased Performance", etc and the changes were only removing comment blocks, and other stylecop suggestions. Oh...there was one change was Thread.Sleep(6000) to Thread.Sleep(1000). I guess that did technically "increase performance"
Would I get fired if I said "Shut the -bleep- up you -bleep-ing -bleep- heads" ? Hmm...probably. Better keep my opinions on devrant.

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop. But I'm sad about leaving all of these stickers (yeah I know they're pretty random)

also, should I get a macbook or not? I really like the OS but I hate it's pricetag. But i heard Apple supports their products for more than 5 years and this laptop of mine is just 3 and a half years old and it's slowing down already even on 16gb memory. IntelliJ used to run smoothly on this.

Can u guys suggest a developer friendly laptop? im not really into gaming so I wouldn't need gaming one 👨‍💻

While waiting for the subway to go to work i was checking my emails on my phone, an old man approched "u young people are only using those phones for facebook and useless stuff , find yourself a job and blablabla.. " how can i tell him i'm a mobile developer ... :/

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

!RANT

Bet the diff between a beginner developer and an intermediate developer is where to get code snippets either from old codebases or remote resources.

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.

Started a new job this week, picking up the front end development of a property management system, since they're old developer just left.

Oh my god was his code bad, inconsistent use of js versions e.g only sometimes using lambda for anonymous functions, variable names that were a single letter, no comments, no documentation, and over 30000 lines split into almost 30 js files, following the logic of it is as fun as a hedge maze with no exit.

Fun fact. I work for a 20-year old company that does software which mostly does print outputs. 95% of our clients actually use it specifically and exclusively to print their invoice runs. There are over 25 printers in this office, 5 of which are within chair-rolling distance of my desk.

I don't know how to use or fix any of them. I must be a *really bad* developer. >.<

I always dreamed to live in USA. Waking at the morning and see those huge buildings, eating pancakes while I cover myself from the cold. For a while I forgot this my old dream of travel from my Portuguese home to somewhere on Texas or California. Since I am in my last year of university, after being student worker and after 6years being graphic designer and 3 them as full stack developer, I trully believe in doing this...

Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company

Hi guys, I'm planing to move to the Netherlands(Amsterdam) by the middle/end of this year and I would like to ask for advices, recomendadtions or any info is welcome.

I'm 23 years old living in Spain since 12. Frontend Developer with 2 years experience in Angular, Node.

Also would like to know the salaries range for frontend Developer if someone knows anything.

Thanks a lot

Well, I posted this rant a few days ago where I was expressing my desires to get a job as a Software Developer... Here I am again re-posting.

________________________________

FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.

If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).

I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.

Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!

Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.

I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.

Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.

Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)

Dear every app developer or web managers/designers that can read this.

Specificly, the ones who own a android app.

If you have an old android app that is still updated from time to time.

Please, take your time for just one minute.

AND REPLACE YOUR GOD DAMN OLD "Get it on google play" BADGE WITH THE NEW ONE, PLEASE! ITS NOT THAT HARD, WHY ARE YOU GUYS NEVER UPDATE TO NEW LOGOS?!

NOT JUST OLD APPS, EVEN SOME BEW STARTUPS ARE ACTUALLY USING THE OLD BADGE, WHY OH DEAR GOD WHY! WERE YOU LIVING UNDER ECLIPSE ROCK OR SOMETHING?!?

So I started at a new company about two months ago. I was hired as a Senior .net developer, which I am well qualified. I also told them that I did MVC but haven’t done react or angular.

So my first project with this company is building a react-native app. (Never done a native app either) The craziest thing is I am the most senior on this project too.

What is even crazier, I still work for my old company on the side, and the only .net I am doing is for them. And even funnier, my old company thought the reason I was leaving was to do more .net development.

me: reviewing an old ticket relevant to testing a similar area of a ticket im working on as a developer

"QA Note

Please don't ask me where to find one of these, because I don’t know"

the retired QA who worked on this ticket also didn't write where to find the thing

well fuck me alright

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)