One day when I was about 8 years old my friend and I were in the library. We decided we wanted to try to make a baseball website because we both likes baseball (this was around 1998). We picked up a book on HTML and my dad took it out for us. My dad was also a programmer so he said he would help us learn. We went home that afternoon and made a little website!

I knew right then that I really enjoyed programming and creating things with code, but I realized I wanted to be a programmer in middle school and high school. One of my friends and I started building Flash games. To see if people were playing them, I added in a call to each game that hit a PHP script on our server. I'll never forget the days/weeks that one of our most popular games caused our sever to get hammered and our shared host said they were going to boot us.

It was an awesome feeling knowing people were enjoying these games that we worked really hard on, and that's one of the main reasons I always wanted to be coding/creating things that people enjoy using.

My 6 year old has been learning about trees at school, and had questions for me. Needless to say, she now has the best understanding of data structures in her class, and I expect parents evening will be "interesting"

Old school Lan parties

Best prank I did to a office must be that one I did when I was 7 years old:

> Sat at a schoolcomputer and explored stuff
> Found alot of network printers
> Found one called "city hall front desk"
> Created a word-document with the biggest font possible
> Wrote "Dick"
> 2000 pages of the word "dick"
> Print 2000 copies

> Did the same to a kindergarten and a "rival school"
> Never got caught because I used my teachers novell account ( the password was his name)

I miss novell

People are posting their setups so I thought I'd post this.

It's a 2012 MacBook Pro, 13 inch. I put 16GB ram and some solid state in there just so it gets the job done.

When I was a freshman in high school, my dad saw something in me that he believed in (and I didn't). He decided to put his money where his heart was. He told me that he would go out and buy me a computer, and I wouldn't have to pay him back, if I would work hard at programming to pay for my own college.

His investment payed off. I just graduated high school and started a job last week that will get me through college debt-free through the gap year that I'm taking. This machine's getting a little old, but it means a lot to me. It reminds me that my dad believed in me even when I didn't. 🖖🏼

TL;DR: Teacher wants to invest in my company 😲

So, just this morning as I headed to class (still in school, 17 years old, from Germany) someone tapped me from behind - a female teacher whom I've only seen a few times (She is a really nice and friendly teacher who teaches economics)
She asked me: Aren't you the young businessman? I've seen your interview, fantastic! (Background info: I recently founded my second firm (Webdevelopment, Design and Marketing) and was quite often in the media (local newspaper, television, radio))
Quite unsure, I responded: "yeah, right".
Promptly she asked: "Is there some way I can invest in your company? Perhaps in stocks?" (Of course we can't offer stocks, we're just a small local company lol)
Me: "There always is a way I guess?" (I was extremely grateful but didn't know how to respond)
Her: "Great! Would you mind sending me an email with your contact info?"

What the fuck just happened. 😂

I spent a day teaching my 3 year old nephew to count from 0 and he argued with his teachers the following day that he has 9 fingers. His parents have been called to school 😂

Today at school I borrowed an oscilloscope and a few capacitors and used a circuit I made at home to just demonstrate the discharge of a capacitor, since my physics teacher asked me to teach the class about this on Friday
So it's one of those old analogue scopes, so to get a nice line I turned the speed right down and did a long exposure shot with my phone and it turned out brilliantly!

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

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

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

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

So THE FUN began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bought a tiny tablet so I can more easily do server management on the road/in bed.

I'm playing old school minesweeper on it now 😓

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Trying to explain to my 6 year old daughter why she has to wear school uniform and why mummy has to wear a work uniform, yet I work in jeans and at shirt

My five-year-old daughter asked me to program her Android tablet today.

Daughter: Daddy, can you make my tablet do something?

Me: What do you want to make it do?

Daughter: I want it to get games for me. I want it to pick games I like and get the different games so I can play them after I get home from school.

My daughter asked me to implement:

1. At the least, a predictive algorithm to choose new games for her based on her likes and dislikes.

2. At the most, an adaptive artificial intelligence that will learn what games she likes to play.

Current specifications are unclear. Need revision.

A couple of weeks back, I met some of the kids from my old school. They had joined together to form a small team and were designing and deploying websites for local businesses.

Turns out that they were mailing each other and using Dropbox to manage the source code. This had been going on nearly for an year.

I spent a couple of hours showing them how to use git and gitlab. Basics on committing, pushing, pulling, branching and merging.

I will never forget the look on their faces! They had seen God and its name is Git.

Wooohooo! I've finally bought myself an old school CRT TV. Now I can play my retro games like a human being.

If you're happy and you know it, syntax error!

You always need to remind yourself that where you began :)

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.

I've been doing programming as a hobby since I was 10 years old, I've always found my teachers are good at IT but not that good in Computer Science and programming, this year a new teacher joined the IT department who has actual experience in programming etc.
Our school uses two services, a rewards system which for some reason can also show our timetable, and another service for displaying our homework. In my spare time I made a project which combined these two services and showed it to him. As the first teacher with actual programming experience he was impressed and now I get to 'pitch' my project to the teachers higher up.

TLDR; It's good to have a good teacher

I'm old school. These are the only emojis I use.

:)
:(
:\

And I don't select them I use text...Sometimes I throw in a Kirby flicking people off for good measure.

<('.')^

So today I had a client come in and give me a free "broken" laptop that wouldnt turn on and was covered in grease and what appeared to be dog hair everywhere. So i go through my every day troubleshooting, found the problem and fixed it. Next i disassemble the entire laptop and just start air dusting and cleaning connections like crazy. Now I'm a proud owner of a really old school laptop that I can probably keep alive for another 10 years :) This will be a perfect machine to test arch linux on 😃

Searching for "Node.js Jobs"
Result:
- PHP
- PHP
- BPO
- PHP
- Call Centre
- PHP
- PHP
- Node.js with PHP (wtf?)
- .NET
- Call Centre
- PHP

When I was 10 years old, all kids at my school got access to school emails. The email address book contained everything in my city, like fire department, all pupils of all schools etc. So I decided to "test" the system by sending out a mass email to everyone in the address book (about 3k) with the question "Hi, how are you?".

The sys admins apparently didn't think very far as I got some responses saying like "You have crashed a server in the capital city" and "I have contacted your local IT admin".

So I went to the IT admin and told him the situation. His face turned red of anger and I remember him almost screaming at me.

Who the fuck doesn't set up protection for this and gives out access to 10 year olds? This was 15 years ago, I really hope sys admins are smarter today!

Found this on my old desktop ... Aww!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was 12 years old and it was my first freelance.

I was taking a Web Designer course and my teacher offered me an “opportunity”. He asked me to develop a search engine for a real estate website.

I did it pretty quickly with PHP and MySQL. The amount offered was U$ 20.00 (yeah, I know, it sucks, but it was a good chance to earn experience).

3 months went by, it was the last week of the course and he still hadn’t payed me yet!

End of story: my dad and a couple friends went to the school and had a conversation with him. They said things like: man, you shouldn’t ruin a kid’s dream for twenty dollars. I’m sure he only payed me because he was scared haha

Not bad for a free laptop xD

Old school stuff

This is how you test your website in “old browsers”

All these people talking about learning to code at school makes me feel old. There wasn't even an option to learn programming when I was at school. Had to teach myself!

I am old enough to go to jail.
I am old enough to have my own household.
I am old enough to pay my own bills.
I am old enough to have children.
I am old enough to take responsibility for my hypothetical kids and for my self.
I am old enough to gamble, drink and lease cars.
I am a self confident dude who took responsibility for creating machines that were worth millions.
And so on and so on..

But hey, it is ok if the fucking teacher at technical school treats you like a 16 yo pubescent child. Im glad he is interested whether i do my god damn homework. And yes, it is totally fine for me, that im getting treated like a unworthy dog who needs surveillance.
So, maybe i should suggest that we should ask for permission if we want to go to fucking toilet. Yes. That would be great. Gonna do that.

DevRant doesn't have any friend requests or follow buttons. If you're interested in someone, you need to do fair old school stalking.

The school I went to...

Grade 1:
*GTA and minecraft to let student familiarize with cheating command and console

*Student should find and read the damn documentation him/herself about items, mobs and quests in every game. Be self motivated!

Grade 2:
*Contribute to community for myth hunting, map creation and glitch

*Solve personal networking, graphics problem and understanding hardware limitation.

*Solving game compability problem after Windows update

*Introduction to cracking and hacking

Grade 3:
*Motivation to host a game server

*Custom server scripting => start To really code the first time, Perl, python, etc

*Introduction to Linux server and Debian

Grade 4:
*From DDoS to server security

*Server maintenance and GitHub

*Game Server web development

*Motivation into non-gaming discipline by a random YouTube geek

*Set up mincraft with raspberry pi and Arduino

*Switch to Linux or Mac and just dual boot for gaming

Prepared for the real world.
Congratz for the graduation in the Pre-school of Developers (11-14 yrs old) :)

My teachers rant: "Who invented whiteboard markers? *trying to write some code on the board, but the marker went dry* What every happened to black boards and chalk. Chalk never gets dry.... I going to have to look that up" LOL, man I love him. He is so old that its funny and cute at the same time

!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?:))))

I think I'm doomed when it comes to posting the kinds of rants that get upvotes. The pattern I've noticed is that profanity-laden rants get more love than ones that are more tame. I was raised old-school, so profanity isn't my thing. Guess I'll just sit back and watch.

"Never obsolete"...I am not sure which sticker to callout first. 😄😆

When I was in college, our email was on a Unix server. We would login via serial connection or telnet over the network, and get a korn shell. The server was poorly secured. Everyone's login device was world writable. So people would just see who was online, see the username of someone they wanted to mess with, take note of the pts(network) or tty(serial) device their connection used, and cat ASCII penises to it.

cat animated_dong.txt > /dev/pts/4

It was a simpler time.

Yeah, if my so called "friends" can just stop making me feel guilty for staying in with my son instead of going out having beers in pretentious clubs, with music blasting at a billion decibels that we can't even have a decent conversation.

If you could just stop; that would be great.

I'm sorry I have to work. I'm sorry I can't leave my 6 year old alone in the house on a school night. I'm sorry I don't have an army of maids to look after him. I'm sorry I don't have personal drivers to take him to school. I'm sorry if your family or your wife's family is so fucking rich you're basically a kept man and now bored out of your wits.

Please, just fuck off with this toxic behavior. We are not in our 20s anymore.

Thank you.

I’ve pretty bad ADHD (diagnosed) my entire adult life, so focus has been a huge struggle for me forever. Here’s my strategy:
- Noise-canceling headphones blasting chiptunes (Spotify has some, but YouTube has the best selection of old-school video game music) I’m usually way less distracted if I listen to music without lyrics.
- A chair cushion (I actually use one of those ridiculous donut ones, but I put a normal sized pillowcase on it. SO comfortable, even after many hours.)
- THE POMODORO METHOD. 25 minutes hardcore coding/debugging, followed by 5 minute intervals for breaks, like checking fb, etc. (Breaks are totally optional if you’re in the zone tho 💪) It’s a great way to reward your brain for focusing.
- And if all else fails, the looming threat of unemployment is always there to keep you motivated 🙃 (Sad but true— always crosses my mind when I’m starting to fall behind on a task)

I managed to take down an entire school network with one VPN.

In short, I ran a personal VPN and eventually the System Administrators at my old school managed to pick it up as unknown traffic. For some reason, they managed to block the port but not the IP so I changed the port to 443 and their automatic system blocked port 443 on their entire network essentially rendering HTTPS useless for a few hours.

I never got approached about it but my school invested in a new IT team.

Don't you just wish you can delete things from the internet forever?

I used to be a host on this show, not telling the name tho. It aired every Thursdays at 10 pm. And in case anyone missed it, the television station would post it on their youtube channel.

I was so desperate to remove it that I flagged it a bunch of times, but I knew it wouldn't work.

I'm dying of embarassment because everyone is finding it. It doesn't air on TV anymore, so that youtube channel is the bane of my existance.

I even got the idea to search myself up and delete any social media accounts, because I want to be nearly invisible on the internet.

That worked out. Except for that damn youtube channel.

I was a fucking 14 year old. I looked weird, acted weird, my mom made me dress weirdly. I was so nervous, I licked my freaking lips ON CAMERA. Not to mention, I had acne, and my skin was dark at the time because I was fresh out of middle school, and I did cross country in middle school.

Now I'm curious. Does anyone else have something embarassing on the internet that they can't get rid of?

This meme kinda motivated me...

More than 1.5k lines of code within a function, I love the old school php </3

At an office job I worked at (2018), one day we were told to drop everything we were doing for the day and gather around, because there was a lady (about 70 years old) who had stopped by to give us "Life Advice".

The lady started her speech with this statement:

"In 1974, I lived in a mansion with 7 servants at my service and 4 cars".

I'm not making this up.

Then she rambled on for 15 mins about how she faced difficulties in her life, starting from studying in a boarding school in Switzerland, then coming back to India to work at the Taj Hotel (Mumbai) under a team of world-renowned chefs who were mean to her, at her internship which paid her about $2500 USD a month in 1985.

But the point she made was, in spite of all her difficulties, she never gave up and kept working.

When she was finally done, NOBODY clapped. She felt awkward as hell and we saw it on her face.

I still chuckle when I think about that incident.

SQL just feels like its screaming at me....

Finally got my new phone (from China) today.
*Opens package all excitedly*
*Backups everything to pc of old phone and gets ready to swap the simcard*
*Notices that the new phone only supports a nano sim*
*Realizes that I only have an old school simcard that you can't cut down to nano size*
*Realizes that I'll have to wait until after the weeked to receive the new simcard*

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

I want to play with it now :(

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

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

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

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

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

Since everyone is posting their system, I'll do it now, too:

- Type: Laptop
- Age: about 5 years
- Weight: 2-3 kg (too much)
- Modifications: Paper below problematic keys; Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD
- Usecase: School-Laptop with every Office-Suite I could find.
- Pros: Wrecks my PC with the boottime (Gnome > KDE); Looks really sick; Really lightweight Arch installed; Quiet when not under load
- Cons: Really heavy; Battery old and unreliable; Bluetooth stops working after closing lid

It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).

// Sorry for the long post!

EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces

My school fucking blocked duckduckgo today.

I'm not surprised, I knew this would happen eventually because this school is a prison and the administrators feel that they have to know your every fucking move.

Honestly I thought it was pretty funny too because I don't know anybody else at school using ddg, which means they probably just saw this one kid getting around being tracked and said "that damn kid." (Imagine I'm waving my finger around condescendingly like an old woman.)

It also could just be that they saw me using an unfamiliar url more than normal and assumed it was malicious or some kind of distraction. But I'm willing to bet money they just didn't like that they couldn't track me.

Been playing a lot of old NES games lately.
Made me think how did they develop and program such amazing games with primitive 80'-90's technologies, assembly/c and no internet.

Now with all the tech we have most games are crap and based on webshit or mobile.

One year for Christmas, my dad got me an old tower and installed Windows 98 on it. He also got two old-school PCI WiFi cards so that my "new" computer could access the Internet via his.

I started learning basic web development. I would convince my mom (an English teacher) to buy me books on programming all the time when she was getting her own books at the store.

Eventually, I got a book on Blitz Basic and started making my own video games.

Then GameMaker, Java, C/C++, and more web development and design happened until all the sudden, out of nowhere, I'm a computer scientist 😁

It's crazy how much we owe to our parents. And neither us nor them even realized what they were doing at the time!

One of the biggest reality checks you will run into when starting your first dev related job - and which they don't teach you about in school - is that a lot of the time will be spent working with other people's code, and rewriting it into "your own" is rarely an option.

You might be super into making things, but not everyone manages to maintain that same spark while taking over a 15 year old project with fundamental issues that have to be triaged "for now" because you need a hotfix on this other specific thing out in prod before lunch.

There are no gods now. They left the company years ago and nobody knows why they used the windows registry as a user repo.

If you happy and you know it, old but gold :D

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

I’m older than C++

I feel old, given how fast our industry moves.

Did someone see the retro theme for StackOverflow?

I loved it ^_^ What about you?

A kid that went to my daughter's preschool class died (they are in the 3-4 years old range)

The parents still don't know what their kid died from some virus.

They said the kid became braindead so I'm guessing meningitis?

Meanwhile we're pretty scared, and unsure if we should keep sending our kid.

I'm very disappointed in the way the school handled this, like no quarantine, no fucking notice on our kid's book about how they're going to deal with this.

Fucking piece of shit school.

Everyone on the whatsapp group is sad, saying religious shit. Hello!!!! Can I know what this kid died from so my kids don't die too????

I feel sad for the parents and the kid but... everyone is reacting in a very stupid way to this.

Like no one's gonna even fucking ask if this kid went to class this week and potentially passed it to other kids?

Fuck this dumbass mediocre country.

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

"Windows XP"
"No internet"

Coolest project : I revamped classic old school "Rogue" game ☺️
(while I was learning C programming)

My TEN YEAR OLD twin girls came to me with a TIMESHEET and PIE CHARTS to explain to me why "Our household would benefiter (sic) a Nintendo Switch".

They... actually did what for an intern would be a passable data storytelling job (orthographic errors aside).
They explained how they would share the videogame between themselves (because it is not allowed at their school, not that we would let them bring it there anyway) in a colorful timesheet spanning four days a week.
They even put a pie chart showing how most of the time nobody will be using it.

I feel at the same time immensely proud, scared, and a wee bit freaked out that they came with all that to me but with their mother they just talked. Do I seem so distant that they feel they can't convince me without data? I gotta watch out for using work jargon at home.

Anyway, first "interns" that I have ever seen using a pie chart with the appropriate number of classes (even if highly biased).

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: ...

!rant
So the other day, my mother came to visit me after a while of not seeing each other. And one thing we used to do together was go searching through old weird junk stores. We go searching through one, and there was a box of floppy discs. I was excited, because I haven't seen one since I was a little kid. I brought it to her attention, and she said, "Wow. A floppy disc!" I laughed and read the disc aloud, "Oh man. Only 1MB." Then proceeded to laugh even more. And she said "I remember thinking 'theres no way anyone would ever take up that much space!'"
That just absolutely blows my mind haha.

Imagine if you will, a fictional world outside our own.

In this world, the requirement for getting a drivers licenses is 4 years of research into quantum mechanics.

- Was it interesting? Yeah.

- Did I learn it because I had to? Yup.

- Will I use the harmonic oscillation calculations of a particle when driving my car. Fuck no!

- Did it cost me an ungodly amount of money? It sure did!

- Will some dumb people still say it was useful because it is the minimum (fictional) barrier to entry for driving a car. You bet your sweet ass they will!!!

It was about as useful as any made up requirement, make-work, self-funding, circle-jerking, waste or time and money to feed the pockets of people who are too scared to do actual work so they teach, can be.

I paid all that money to be taught technology that was old when my mother was in school.

In the first year out of school, with only a $300 subscription to PluralSight some uDemy courses and hard work, I learned 100X as much as everything they put in front of me in school.

-------

School has its place.

Children who don't understand the importance of learning and need their hand help.

Adult children (some of which on on their 3rd or 4th degree) who also need their hand held.

People too afraid to enter the real world.

Doctors.

-------

I would do it again because it is the minimum requirement of entry, but thats nothing more than a bullshit make-work project.

Play their game as long as you need to. Keep your own game in mind. Don't drink the koolaid, just fake a sip. Then when the time is right, play by your own rules.

Peace

I'm soon graduating from a tech/IT school which recently specialized in cybersecurity.
Today when I changed my password on their website, it displayed the old one in clear text.
God damn it people, THIS is the reason why our school's reputation has been slowly but steadily going down.

What's this Snapchat everybody's talking about? Wanna chat on ICQ?

What's the first computer you ever used?

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

Finally Spend two fucking days debugging shit until I figured it it. Freaking stupid shit encoding problems and old data combined isn't fun. Dafuq why can't everybody use UTF-8 or Unicode or something else but PLEASE stop using some old school IBM shit codepages.
Leckt mich doch am arsch mit diesem scheiß man -_-

A good friend of mine turned 38 yesterday. It will be his last birthday. Last month was his last Christmas and New Years. He entered hospice care this month. His doctors have said he's only got a few weeks left, so he's come off the treatment for his brain tumour. His kids are old enough to understand he won't be here much longer. A bunch of us, friends from high school, flew up to see him in the fall. It's hard to believe someone our age won't be with us to see another year. It puts things in perspective.

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

My dad is an old-timer and he just recently started using the computer to browse the Internet. He calls me in because the browser froze (Microsoft Edge for the win) but he initially thought that he had broken something on the computer so he grabs his mechanic tools and a flashlight to see if he could repair it. I had a good chuckle.

My college teaches us Macromedia Flash, in 2018. :|
That too on a cracked version.

School homework for my 7 year old son: "Exercise to learn to copy".

I hope the next step will be "How to use Stackoverflow".

😂😂😂😂

Just double tapped my old school, paper notebook to "wake it" before writing something down. Feel like calling it a week and just go home.

downloading more RAM is so old-school
now you can download more battery!!

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

!rant
I can never get over this 😥

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

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

Yknow what the best part about Unix is? (Not Linux. Like old school Unix. AIX, HPUX, or in this specific case: Solaris)

It never needs to be updated. like ever. Even when new features are added 5 years ago to add features that GNU has had for literally decades. Updates are for the weak. Because why should I be able to type "netstat -natup" when instead you can enjoy several hours of developing the nightmare one-liner that is:

Pfiles /proc/* | awk '/^[0-9]/ {p=$0} /port/ {printf "%.4s %-30s %-8s %s\n", $1,$3,$5,p}' 2>/dev/null

Isn't that just so much more fun?!
Thanks guys. I'm going back to GNU now if you don't mind.

It came to me, a brilliant idea, a simple solution to an everyday problem and easy route to market. Great, starts looking for domains and writes down idea in full in case i forget. Later that day, picks up 12 year old son from school, tells him my great idea. He told me how shit it was and why straight away.

My old phone is dead forever but I'm back :-D

AND I JUST GOT AN INTERNSHIP :-DDDD I GET TO PROGRAM IN AN ACTUAL WORK ENVIRONMENT LIKE A BIG KID

AND KINDA GETTING A HOUSE THIS SUMMER I THINK?! (I have to share with my sister and her boyfriend but that means I get to cook without people interfering MOM JUST LET ME MAKE FRENCH TOAST JEEZ)

(and I'm probably like 99.9% getting kicked out of school but everything is going to be fine I hope :-s )

BUT I MIGHT GO TO *COMMUNITY COLLEGE* SOMEDAY SO EVERYTHING IS FINE :-D

Most pissed off? Must have been the time I created a $10,000 hole in a marketing team's budget after trying to build a Tetris-style Facebook app game (back when FB apps were all the rage). It turned out that Tetris, which was up to that point commonly considered as public domain, had been scooped up by a patent troll who had made a convincing case that he had found and gotten agreement from the originator of the idea (a Russian dude who may or may not have been its original source). I had to scrap the whole project and explain what I did to an old-school manager who didn't even know how to operate a computer. That resulted in my losing credibility as a team member for the next 6 years. I never lived it down. I was pissed mostly at myself for following my assumption and not doing any patent research.

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

School thought me which "cutting-edge" technologies I should avoid at all costs:

"I want to fucking die" - tier:
- JQuery UI
- JSP
- JSF
- Vanilla PHP
- Java 5 and earlier
- Java and Rest
- Old Eclipse

"Mastering the art of headbanging" - tier:
- JPA
- JQuery

You may argue that some of them are not as bad as I think of them but the I was introduced to them made me despise them. We were never introduced to the documentations. Only to the sheets our teacher prepared and I think he completely pissed the point of some of them.

Rest example:
/resource/{resource_id}/action/{action_id}/username/{username}/password/{password}

Got a coffee grinder from my grand parents. Pretty old school, but I like it!! 😍
Just brew a big cup of coffee. It just tast delecious. ❤

Anyone remember this game?

so many good memories... =)

Imagine yourself being a CTO back then.

Brand new Acura NSX. No MacBooks, ThinkPads are hot. Your company has its own skyscraper. CASE tools are just introduced and they’re hotter than blockchain now. You do software architecture in IBM Rational Rose, typing on your Model M and thinking really hard about Java OOP which is very hot right now.

You have Erlang servers at your own data center. You laugh at people writing in COBOL. You excited about aspect-oriented programming.

What a wonderful time.

Me in school: Math? When do I need know those details? I can look them up and just code it.

Me in high school: Computer science is way too math-y. I want to code!

Me coding php: Just make it work.

Me coding typescript: Just make it work.

Me coding scala: Just make it ... what ... how do I make it work!?!

Me asking stackoverflow: How do I do X in scala some functional programming stuff in mind in order to keep immutability.

Somebody way smarter than I: "In scalaz, a function A => A is called an endomorphism and is a Monoid whose associative binary operation is function composition and whose identity is the identity function"

Me now: Fuck my old arrogant self.

We had given my mom a phone recently, I found out that she never used it for the reason we gave it to her, and that is to be accessible whenever she leaves the house, Instead she kept the phone at our house and when in the house be always connected to the WiFi and watch WhatsApp videos and stuff that her old college/School friends sent. I had to give her a lecture for half an hour as to why she wasn't using the phone for what it is intended to do and threatened her to disconnect from the WiFi if she did this again. Damn! This teenage stuff again.

High School teachers said I wouldn't be shit. I'm 20 years old and making more than all of them. Times are changing you assholes

Old-school Library for Java and C++

Legit considering quitting my job and going back to my old workplace.

Fucking getting real tired of fucking around with html and css on the daily.

The school is fucking crashing down on our shitty as web services. But my manager (as much as we love her) is forcing everyone to double time on a rather stupid project that keeps constantly changing on the daily.

I am so fucking tired of it

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

I found this old printout of my username and password for my school account from ca 2008. I really like how the password are the same as the username except for some capitalization 😂😅

“sECurItY”

This just came in the mail. Apparently TurboTax was bought by AOL...

I don't even remember the last time I had a computer, work or personal, that had a CD drive in it

Never worked before so I'll talk about one of the former staff at my school.

This guy worked as IT and did some teaching in the high school. Early last year, he suddenly disappears for no reason.

Now, I'm going to go in order of what we (the students) found out, not, chronological order.

Firstly, turns out that in class he would make comments about female students. Nothing explicit, just kinda strange. I forget the examples I heard but think like the overly friendly old guy. Those types of comments from a 40-something IT guy. (Some female students knew about this for a long while but I only heard about it after the investigation)

Next, rumor got out that they found some stuff on his computer. I don't know how, but it turned out to be accurate, and we were accurate at the follow-up assumption that it was porn.

After that, the school made an announcement that we had been arrested. Up until then, we just assumed he had been sacked. He was weird sure, but we didn't think criminal.

Some other students looked into the police records, and it turns out this guy had been arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography.

Pretty sick right? Its worth pointing out now that our school has Pre-K through 12th grade students.

I gained a new level of respect for my female classmates after that. I didn't even know that was going on, really wish I could have helped out.

Look what I found with a bunch of my old stuff. Old school Linux.

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

At a previous company we hired an 18 year old guy and father from a minority and without a high school degree. He could write enough code to get the job. However, he took 3h long lunches, came in late to work and apparently had a problem taking orders from women. At one point all the juniors got an earful because of his attitude and he got let go, not long after. It still saddens me because he could have made a really good career if wasn't for his attitude.

Took me a few hours, but managed to finally run Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 on my old school Toshiba laptop running Arch Linux xD Still needs some work, but super happy I got it running :D

I just started work school doing IT administration and development, I was excited, almost nervously anticipating to see the wondrous things I'd being learning and the kickass programs I'd be creating...

Alas I walked into my first lesson and...

Teacher: Today we're going to be learning how to make a square in Excel using VBR.

I thought, well fuck no - I didn't sign up for this shit. Then today I was on this thing called the internet, have you guys tried it? Amazing stuff, I saw a panda dressed as Chuck Norris... Anyway, I was on the internet and found out about this 73 year old man who makes full-sized artworks made in Excel.

Now I know the meaning to life, to Excel programming... It's official, I'm going to make Picasso in Excel.

*Light sarcasm, actual true story.*

bit of an old one but in school we had a photoshop contest

I came 1st

I used only PowerPoint and Publisher

Shootout to my 2.5GB Maxtor hard drive, that I heavily used between 1997 and 2001. There were no USB drives, and CD burners were too expensive for consumers. So I used to open my PC case, remove the drive (along with Windows and my software), bring it around at my friend's house and have fun while copying hundreds of mp3s, patiently downloaded from filesharing and 56k modems or ripped from CD audio, in and out.

One time it fell out from my desk, hitting hard floor big time. I thought I lost it forever, and basically my whole PC in it. Then I tried plugging again its IDE and power connectors, and it was still working! ... well, half of it. That badass still continued to work with one of its two platters crashed, and got some more mp3s with it.
Maybe I still have it...

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

Found some ancient pdfs.

So I was looking through some old files, looking for some help while I was working on a project and I came across my first codes I wrote in school.
This one time I challenged myself and I tried to write the code a bit.....different. When i ran the code it worked as it should, no problems, then he said:" Show me the code how you did it". I giggled a bit and opened it up. I still remember the expression on his face. He wanted to say something twice but couldn't. Then he just sighed and said, please don't do that again.

Copying a Perler bead craft.

I now understand why ink jet printers are temperamental.

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.

That was straight forward enough I suppose.

Had a laptop on which i learned programming. bought a new convertible for uni, so i passed my laptop to my younger sister.
-> time to move data from old to new device. thought i didn't have that much data, mostly installed programs, so i thought alright i'm fine.
sister doesn't know how to reset so i do it ...
halfway through the reset process i realize i forgot all my programs i had written, including many java, a c#, and some written android apps i was kinda proud of ... plus my neural network i had finally finished with much struggle😥
there goes my history *poof* when i got worse in school 'cause of programming ... smth in me died in that moment 😑

Ok Storytime.
Yesterday I applied for a summerjob as a Software/Webdeveloper at some companies. Today I got a call and they tell me I have the job. When I asked what kind of things I will have to do there the Recruiter didn't really know, so I accepted because fuck it.
Later I got told that somebody from the team will be calling me. So i ask that guy what I'm going to be doing and he tells me they have a old sharepoint application that they need to migrate to a new sharepoint version.

So I read up on sharepoint and find out about the languages ASP.NET supports aaaaaand it's about my least favorite language C#. (Well actually that would be Visual Basic but nevermind) We did some C# in school but I never got fond of it.
But hey learning something new ain't so bad or is it?

What are your thoughts on Sharepoint, ASP.NET and C#?

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

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

What the heck is even going on anymore?

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

*sips tea*

Old days

Sometimes I see my old high school, or a library in my town. And I think of making a workshop to get the next generation excited about CS.

Then I remember I hate people.

Need to go old school again, go back to hosting their own servers and peer to peer mesh networks. Eliminate the shackles of big tech... Eliminate the control and power they have over you. The only reason they are used is the idea of simplicity and low entry cost. But you pay for that later, when they deem you to be a competition, or don’t align with their goals.

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

WOOOP-DE-FUCKING-DO I HATE MY ISP (well actually the company which is reliable for the cable networks which lead to my/our new home).

WhAtEvErYoUmEaN and I moved yesterday to a new flat. Not spectacular at all except that mentioned company cancelled the appointment ON THE SAME FUCKING DAY! "We're so sorry. No internet until Thursday. At least"
Dickheads.

Well, so we are here in the middle of nowhere without internet. Time for old school books i guess😅

when you tell someone you code in php and they automatically think you are old school! 😒

18pm: *starting to work on own project. Listening to classical music for better concentration*
22pm: *no progress*
22:10pm: *putting on some good old death core on max volume coz fuck it.*
22:30pm: *realizing I did more in the past 20mins than in the 4h before*
22:45pm: *super motivated*
2am: *same song again? Quick look on the clock...* "fuuuuuu" *apparently listened to my whole playlist. OK. Let's search for more stuff on my 2TB HDD I dedicated to death core etc*
4am: "lul" *go to sleep*
6am: *wake up, go to school"
*goto 18pm*

I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)

I loved my previous job. It paid shit but I learned so much. Starting from prototyping to production. DevOps, Development etc. I started a new job 1 year ago. It pays great but man, I only do “if-else” nothing else.

My old boss contacted me for some contract job because the dev that he hired after me, not only he didn’t do anything, but broke production and all other systems on a Friday before going on vacation. So the company went old school with excel spreadsheet to keep track of orders.

I accepted the contract job and man. I’ve learned so much these past 2 weeks, working only ~ 10 hrs / week.

Looking around where I work, I'm reminded of when I was young and ambitious, like all the other kids around me at the time, with a dislike for all the older dudes and dudettes in upper management. With the exception of three other guys around my age, everyone, including the CEO, was in high school, middle school, elementary school, or not even born yet when I started my career. Just like them, I was plucky and chatty and (trying to be) funny and social. I didn't know how fast I would go from that set to the old fat guy that they look askance at and wonder how I'm still around with my weird ways and "boomerish", socially retarded behavior. What's really galling is that I'm solidly Gen X, like some of them, but I guess I talk more like a Boomer because my parents were older when I was born and I was kinda raised in that mindset. I'm the office schlub now. A man out of my time. And I've never been in any kind of upper management, even. I am Kevin Malone.

Going on a school camp where all the students in the school go.
2 nights and 3 days, planning to bring my laptop and my phone to make games there. (poor 15yo)

Any ideas not to be seen to the teachers? My loyal friends wont tell it because i promised to bring some old android devices for them to play games.

In my first job I was trained by an old-school typographer who made the transition from lead to DTP.

Now, 20 years later, whenever I see bad kerning I hear his voice saying "You could drive a bus through that!".

Someday I hope to have my voice ringing through the ages 😁

Why would a modern laptop come with a VGA port when it also has an HDMI port? I've managed to get by without VGA for years, with better image quality too. What is the reason for this? Is VGA still so prevalent that you need a backup port just in case the projector you want to use is old school? Don't they make adapters for that?

I know this is inane, but it's literally putting me off a purchase

You know, I kinda wished that my school had really old and crappy PCs with a few KBs of ram... that way people would learn not to use an integer for the age

1. When i was 11 years old i came across a trojan horse program and i sent it to all my school friends to get their messenger password.
(I had a list of passwords of all the people in my class... dont worry, i didnt even used the passwords, i just stored them in my list lol)

2. Took data structures 10 years later, hated it and switched to electrical eng

3. I was working on a manufacturing plant as the lead engineer and one of my prototypes was misbehaving and i was blaming software and software was blaming me...typical stuff... So i said "im going to get a masters is software so i can know wtf you are talking about, and tell you that you are wrong😠!!"

Got in school, started in the masters and quit that place i was working for 🤣.. (they were shitty people and unethical business... fyi)

Now im back to where i was was when i was 11... (minus the hacking email accounts of my classmates)

I'm back. I'm the old itsnameless. I left programming because high school stuff. It was just overwhelming. I, slowly, left programming until the point I forgot everything. A lot of evaluations, high school stuff just for remembering NOTHING. The only thing I did this year on high school was losing a really big part of my time remembering weird stuff.

After all this stuff, I would love to spend my 2 months vacations mostly in the place that I've met lovely, awesome people. That place is called devRant.

So, yeah, hello there.

P.S: Of course after the vacations I'll still be here. lol

So my old school left this like this for a year or two now. Should I tell them that it's not gonna fix by itself magically?

I feel old now . I owned and still own most of these lol.

Nothing like paper and a pen in early States of development :)

It's a toss up between a basic software portal for my old school as a volunteer thing or an old game designed around user content creation.

The portal is more of a personal success but the game was a success in the respect it ended up rolling past a Bethesda employee and he gave me a one on one Skype chat about there design methods.

Well I feel like an idiot thanks to my IT teacher. This guy, this fucking guy thinks that we’re seeing computer for the first time. He’s literally saying “You see this black bar on the bottom? That’s taskbar.”. It’s like he’s teaching 7 years old childs 😤
But the worst part is my class mated don’t know such basics! They don’t know how binary code works, what is motherboard, how to login to school domain on Windows.

But on the flip side, they look at me like at the God 😏

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...

One of my favorite things to do in Secondary School was to go around telling people I had written a program that uses the 'Doomsday Algorithm' which sounded really cool and always scared those who didn't understand it.

Truth is, the 'Doomsday Algorithm' is just an Algorithm that used to determine the Day of the Week of a given date.

I wrote this when I was 13/14 years old and I'm still super proud of it today.... well I mean I probably would be if I could read my own code.

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.

Back when I was younger, I used to do concreting. And our boss was an old school type of prick.

Pissed off one guy so much that the guy literally hurled a shovel at him lol. Then quit.

In a shed in a small Valley in Switzerland. Everyone was stoned. I was drunk.
That’s where I started programming.
Good old elementary school days 😐

Hey Guys
A few Questions I have to decide soon, for tools I never used:

1- How do you guys keep information about several accounts and stuff? Must have some protection to not be easily accessible (started using Google Notepad and Evernote until I find better... don't really like them)

2- Firefox: Is there a way to store groups of open tabs?
Like I have one windows with 6 or 7 tabs for movies (youtube and such), other for general stuff with 5 or 6 tabs, other with Arduino shit, and I'm going to pick Vue soon and another language to build native apps and that will be a lot more tabs, It would be nice to close them all and open them all at will or something.

3 - What Is your favorite browser? I'm using Firefox, but there are so many new good ones... Like Brave browser with Tor incorporated, or Puffin for Android (which uses a VPN with their own server by default)

4 - For windows users, do you have any tools to help with workflow installed? which ones you use and why?

5 - What I'm using: Google Notepad + Evernote to save stuff, Windows 10 and Firefox, (Linux Mint in VM) and I just keep my shortcuts in folders... I don't use the Windows taskbar for a long while since its so full of shit.

6 - How do you do your backups? Right now I'm just putting my code and important stuff in Dropbox.

I'm an old school programmer... Stuck in 1990's Ideas and there is so muchhhh shit these days that I would prefer your opinions then just googling.
Guess that's enough for this post. Thank you guys

old school programmers be like

Anyone still using DOS?

Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:

Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.

Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.

We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.

We LOVED that computer.

In a job that I am WAY over my head. Onboarding is a shitshow like usual the devs did not know I was starting until the day before. My only real expierence is school doing php/laravel. Very honest in my interview only a year of codecamp at a local community college and very small tasks at my old job.

This is a JS app using a bunch of old frameworks/ libraries. I was told it was React in the interview.

How long until they fire me for being i competent?

In the US and working for a defense contractor. Which I was told it was harder to fire people.

3 mos? 6 mos?

Going old school, but...
Does anyone else want to literally reach over and strangle people who move your desk items, including swinging your monitor around, using your pen and paper, moving your fan or bottles, or other things?

The moment when you find your old school books (1998), the orgasmic feeling doing 1st time in programming while doing some script-kiddie Fun with your schoolmate ✌️.

I swear to god "old school" C++ devs are menace to humanity

Why yes let's make this one line long function, that could even be constexpr, and make it a macro.
Why the fuck not, let's make compiler errors worse by foregoing any type checking. Let's throw away namespacing as well, great.

Fuck you.
I shouldn't have to dig through 4 levels of nested macros just cause "muh performance" and "we've always done it like that".
Shit yourself.

Hey seniors:

Let's make a rant and name some old technologies that have been frequently used and now they are obsolete

Last job I was in, dev boss would ask to send him snippets of code through email for review...

...they used no git or source control

I quit after two weeks.

Wondering if I got enough time left in my life just to hear this one:

Using your legs for transportation? That’s so old school.

OK...so not to long ago some guy I know from my old school contacted me regarding a start-up he was planing on doing...first he wanted me to work for free (which, in retrospect should've been the first warning sign) and then offered me shares of his non-existing company as payment. I didn't want that so I told him that I'll only work for real money. After some discussions he agreed (tho for less money than I demanded) and I started investing more time into the project (talking to him and his partner about what they expect, looking into some libraries and evaluating whether they can be used in the project or not...stuff like that). Some weeks later (some days before I would sign the contract) he calls me and tells me that he had found someone else to do it who would accept shares as payment...fuck that fucking self-righteous prick and his fucking start-up...the idea was stupid anyways...

I am the old famous kiddy here, who just came back days before school exam starts^^

Just to say, I want to ask you all, is it ethical(?) to release a hacking/cheating creation tool for games for educational™ purposes?

I have been making a cheat creation tool called Mysterium, but I am not sure where to use it. I made cheats for some big title games, and reported them to the developers, patched, and got some in game items in return....

Long story short, is it okay to release to the public, or should i release this product to game developers?

Sincerely,
A kid who made cheats since he can't play games well and wanted to get some free items

Hi guys, I got some questions for you:
I'm a 17 years old guy from south Italy with 5 years of programming experience, mainly with Java and Kotlin. Since finding a well paid job here is soooo hard (especially when it comes to IT), I will surely go to another country (England, Sweden, Denmark and Norway in my list) once I get my scientific high school diploma. Here are the questions:
1) I have very high skills on JavaFX, both front-end and back-end. Is JavaFX commonly used in companies? Or should I move to other technologies like Android?
2) Will my diploma (plus a good amount of open source projects) be enough to find a job?
3) What certified English level is commonly required in these countries?

I’m almost 49, which is now considered “old” by most tech companies if you’re just a lowly staffer. If I can manage to stay employed until I can afford to retire, my goal is to just push through in whatever job in the industry (or even out of it) I can manage to do. Learning and being proficient with zillions of languages and frameworks like all these job postings want is impossible for me. I’m trying to figure out a way to work in some aspect of the commercial spaceflight industry without having to go back to school for an engineering degree and clawing my way up again. If that means being a janitor at SpaceX or Blue Origin, I’m fine with it. I’m done with ladder climbing and ass kissing.

Why is school such a bullfuck, we've learned SQL basics and I've used SQL a little so I thought I won't have a problem. WELL FUCKING HELL WAS I WRONG. Joining 4 tables together with inner join WTF who the fuck uses that, why the fuck do I need to know this, WHY THE FUCK IN A TEST WHEN WE HAVEN'T LEARNED SUCH BULLSHIT. Well how about adding a foreign key to a table that doesnt need one. Well ok have fun with a key that does absolutely nothing and on top of all those convoluted tasks the texts are a mess, they give unnecessary information with grammar of a 9 year old and the pictures are not even readable. They are fucking hieroglyphs.
Fuck school.
Gonna do it by myself at the end anyway.
Fuck everything.

I love old school design. 1990's and 2000's website has their charm.

Negative side of this: I want to be frontend dev and I can only design these, so I can't make modern website without proper designer

So I am young 14 year old programmer that just started high school yesterday. What are some good things to try and do for a future job? Should I stop coding until hs is over, do I code casually with free time and then after High-school I will know a lot more? Not sure how it all works

So im pretty sure I made the biggest/dumbest fuckup for the year already...
Deleting the majority of our RHEL server's root partition.

Blonde mistake for sure.

Technically i didn't actually delete it... just fucked up the block device so it's no longer recognised as existing.

I could go fishing for data and put it back together... but since i have the boot par and all the uset account configs... plus i actually documented all remarkable server updates cuz im trying to get better at the whole 'having a team' thing... im just gonna play it safe and go through it all like old school video games when you die right before the checkpoint so you need to go through the same paths again and again... but not too fast or youll fuck up somewhere easy and itll drive u nuts when u gotta reiterate again.

@jestdotty here you go. Always saying I just mention positives about myself... cant get much worse than this.

I guess I'll post my first rant, rant.
(Aka rant that wasn't a pun)

The Ipads our school use all have the same code, 0000. Even though about all the features are blocked... They never blocked the ability to change the pass code. No one would know who did it, and there would be 9999 possible choices for the new IPad. Who ever though it was a good idea to let highschoolers (12-18 year old) find this out.

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.

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

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

This is the fault of our school.

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

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

Hope you have a good day :)

Old school SUSE Linux sticker

Devs with young kids: how the hell do you do it?

I am a foster parent for my cousin who is 4 months old and I don’t know how in the fuck to make this work. How do you do it? How do you balance code and kid?

For reference I work full time at a tech support place, I go to school full time, and I’m trying to pivot into software development, which means any free time is spent coding/studying code/building a portfolio. Problem is I don’t have free time because of the baby. How in the hell do people do this.

Last week I had to make a presentation with two others before finishing school, to test our "competence while working with other people".

My old MS Office license expired, so I thought I could make a presentation with HTML.

Me and the two others met so we could discuss what each of us did for the presentation so far.
"Dude why are you opening your browser and not PowerPoint"
"You'll see"

I showed them the presentation and then the file behind it so we could edit the content.
"Dude wtf is this"

They ended up just sitting at their phones and I did all the work, one week later we had to present "our" work to the teachers.
"So, who worked exactly on what?" the teachers asked, and while the two others were struggling to tell them what they did, I gave the teachers a small glimpse at the file.

I ended getting the best grade and saving my graduation, while one of the others has to go to school again. :D

I got into programming because I couldn't solve a maths problem I'd been set, so my dad found an emulator for an old language he used to use a bit and managed to brute force it.

From there I went and learnt my first programming language, an unconventional choice of BBC basic 😛

Cant believe this shit happened in my country today

A mass school shooting where a 13 year old kid shot and killed 9 kids, teachers and a security guard. Several other kids wounded and one girl having brain surgery

All of this because he got an F in history class

He was a quiet kid, well behaved, got straight A's and very intelligent. But he was reportedly bullied and no one did shit about it

This the type of shit you see in america daily. But now Serbia marks #1 country in europe with a school shooting

The kid planned all of this attack for 1 whole month. He drew a sketch on the paper of the school's pathway so he can know where to go, from enter door to exit door. Even wrote the names of kids he planned to kill, sorted from high to low priority

Due to Serbia's law, no one under 14 will be held accountable or go to jail for any crime, and this 13 year old kid was so intelligent of knowing this dumbass law that he executed on this plan Now in May because he turns 14 in July this year

Ironically, his dad was a well known doctor, and now the dad is fucked. Dad's gonna go to jail. Because the kid stole his dad's gun with 5-6 clips of magazine

Very bizarre

So in my current workplace we have an IT department of... 7-8 people, with 3 developers (or 2.5, but that's debatable)

The oldest dev is old school, over 65 now came from Visual Basic, of course, and is a father of department's director - this is a story in of itself, but besides the point of this rant

Anywho, this dev is of course in this workplace way longer than me, and historically is in charge of finance and Microsoft CRM systems.

Guess the reason why Microsoft CRM was chosen at all in the company?

Because dev said he is not good with creating web forms from scratch, and apparently with MSCRM you can craft them without much trouble.

Yes, that's it, our MSCRM is used as a web application with custom forms that store data into custom DB tables that dev creates... nothing to do with actual CRM use cases.

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.)

For me it has got to be Retroarch/Libretro (or as I've taken to call it etc.).

Retoarch is a frontend for Libretro which is an API that emulator developers can use so that I as the user don't have to worry about configuring each emulator (and some other stuff).
It's a godsend piece of software that makes it possible for someone like me to really just enjoy my (but but expanding) library of old games (that I can only dream of playing on original hardware)
Also, it's multiplatform!

I also tagged it as wk119 since this is my school setup

alert("Really bad english here");

I need to study.
I want to study.
But I can't.

I am 16 year old and I am in school. When I'm not studying for tests, I am programming something. I'm not finding time to do anything else. Just getting stressed.

Anyone in here started coding early too?
How do you separate time for school and for coding?

Been asked to give a lecture to the freshmen at ye olde alma mater.
They are gonna pay for the air ticket, the shuttle to and from campus and a couple nights at a fairly ok hotel.
Feeling like a fucking rockstar.
...
Gave the lecture. Only half those kids spent the whole time on their phones. My old drinking buddy and now a professor at the school said it was more direct attention than one could expect at a music concert.
...
Feeling kinda scared about how young women dress nowadays, but I do am an old indian dude, so what do I know?
Also, since when is lifting weights and running a half-marathon a requirement for a degree in computer sciences? Turing might have been an Olympian, but I'm pretty sure that since the invention of the integrated circuit my people have spent more time in labs than in gyms. That is not true for those kids.
Maybe it's a freshmen thing, and they will age out of that healthy living nonsense. Maybe the real world will crush it under bills and tuition loan repayments.
...
Tried to ask the university for a refund of the hotel and taxi bills that I've paid out of pocket. Two hours in four different queues and two opposite-sode-of-campus buildings. Suddenly remembered the true meaning of the word "Kafkaesque".
...
Remembering the old uni days with some still-in-grad-school / faculty old friends and getting drunk in the old watering holes? Priceless.

Let me introduce you to sys. admin + network admin + teacher at our school... She gave us "materials" to study for our school-leaving exams (called matura here - wiki that shit) so I looked at it and just had to comment everything that's wrong (and that's only the first paragraph)...

Apart from making utterly useless documents she also likes to think she is the best in the world and what she says is right and everyone is wrong. Networks that she builds crash 8 times a month, she can't install proper drivers and believes that open source and GNU/Linux is evil. (She also lives by herself, is around 48 years old, is a lesbian(not that it is a bad thing - just for context) and got one brilliant teacher who actually knew what she was saying and doing fired because she broke up with her)

Thinking about it - no wonder my classmates are all so confused and stressed... she can't teach and says bullshit like printers work with the RGB color space and when confronted she would shout that there are no printers that use CMYK, she has never seen one so they do not exist. (only to proceed changing CMYK ink cartridges in the printer)... I mean it's good for me because I get to teach pretty girls programming and informatics but I am sorry for the boys... Unfortunately I don't have the patience to teach someone programming and informatics unless they are a girl and I see a chance to evaluate that person's qualities to be a girlfriend.

The moment I knew that I was meant to be a dev was when I was 14 years old and it was computer class during high school. Basic HTML was the lesson and I was hooked by it. My favorite tags were the blink and marquee tags. I was fascinated by it! But learn to love web development when I knew what backend developing was about ;)

I was just in the attic to look for some old school stuff for my sister. But then I found an old carton with old stuff from me. In there I found my very first programming book. "AntMe!" to learn Visual Basic with ants 😄