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

I started studying computer science 3 years ago as a challenge for myself, try something new, do something I knew absoluty nothing about.

I was always the girl who didn't know as much as the rest. I took longer than everyone else, made worse solutions. I always felt like a burden.

Yet today, for the first time, I really felt like a real developer at my last week of my summer job. Explaining a five year older collegue (with a lot more (web)dev experience) about design patterns, git, c++, and helping him to understand and use it properly.

Apparently I was smiling like an idiot because he asked me if I was making fun of him, while deep inside I was just so happy to be helpful.. 😊

Started university of applied sciences to become a computer engineer instead of a web developer.

Met a lot of kids that are in the "computer studies = games + YouTube".

They struggle hard, but don't do anything to learn...

Then there's this classmate, the guy is 10 years older than me, is trying really hard, and struggles a lot.

I've been helping him out with assigns by asking questions, and he asks me how to solve a problem in general, not the assignments which is super refreshing to see someone that wants to learn.

Currently trying to help him "translate" the simple stuff into c++:

So, if you want the char at a certain position in a string, how would you tell me to do it?

"well, take the list, look at position x and bam its done"

Try writing it like that!

And instead of "[i]" he writes "stringvar[i]"

He really appreciates the help and I hope he'll get the mindset soon :)

Would hate to lose a motivated guy when there's so many idiots copy pasting everything from tutorials...

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Getting older. I've been needlessly worried about my age as a developer since I was 23, which is hilarious.

People always need good devs. You don't have to become a manager or commit suicide at 30. Just be awesome and someone will pay you.

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's my story in short :)

Did some updates to an older Web Forms website built by a previous SENIOR developer who is a notoriously horrible developer.

Now before I start, you have to understand this guy studied at a University and had been working for at least two years before I even started working. He is supposed to know the basic shit mentioned below.

This also happened a couple of days ago, so I have calmed down since then so I apologise for the relaxed tone. My next rant will contain a lot more swearing.

This fucking guy did the stupidest shit imaginable.

On the details view of a post|page|article|product|anything that would require a details view this jackass would load the data from the DB.

Using an OleDbConnection, OleDbDataAdapter, DataTable and the poorest writter fucking sql statements you have ever seen. All of these declared in the Page_Load method.

There was literally no reason for him to use OleDb instead of Sql, but he simply did not know any better.

He especially liked: "select * from tbl where id = " & Request("T") & ""

ZERO fucking checks to see if the value is even passed or valid, nothing. He did not even check whether the DataTable had any rows.

He then proceeded to use only the Heading column of the returned row to change the page's title.

Stupidly I assumed the aspx page will be in a better state. Fuck NO!

This fucktard went, added server tags to the opening of the asp:Content tag, copied that shit he used to fetch the data and pasted it between the server tags.

He did not know how to access the DataTable mentioned above from the aspx page!

He did this on every fucking project he worked on. Any place that required <%= %> to display data instead of using asp server controls, this cunt copied whatever was written in the code behind and pasted everything between server tags.

Fuck I could go on forever, but I think this is enough for my first rant.

So my story has some little backstory.

I got into computers and technology because of my dad. He was very enthusiastic when I was little and when I grew older and started my apprenticeship as a software developer he was really proud. Note that he never learned anything like that. He just loved computers and games.

Now to the story itself.
I learned more and more, also about networking and came to the conclusion that our slow internet and rare internet problems probably come from stock/weird configurations. But my dads proud probably told him thats a thing he still has to do as the dad. But it annoyed me so much that I booted into kali linux, loaded an exploit to get the web admin passwort and cracked it within a minute. 😎

Finally I was able to configure everything correctly ( channels were spammed from neighbours so I switched to very unused and the disturbions got less ).

TL;DR: Dad didnt want me to configure our router and didnt give me the admin password, so I booted Kali Linux and used an exploit to get it myself 😎😎

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

A guy who had the same nationality as the enterprise we were working for was promoted from JUNIOR js developer to UX/UI coordinator for the entire department just because he was 2 year older than me (26 vs 28). Literally he was a junior dev and went to that.

One day he was accusing me of writing a piece of code which led prod to downtime. I was in the office, he was in another country with our manager and technical director next to him and we were talking over internal conference system. I shown git history + his name + his code and he was saying ‘that’s not true!!!’.

I couldn’t resist and I began to yell something like ‘You fucking fuck piece of shit cocksucker...’ for 5 minutes. Since that day i was the god on my project for UI/UX side.

Even now he is in the same place on the same position...

PS: more stories to come with this guy

I'm back! I deleted my account awhile back, but some of the older members may still remember me. I got fired for using Google Chrome if that jogs your memory.

Anyways I'm actually a developer now! I graduated college in December and started my first dev job in February. I figured I'd sign back up here to be back with the community. Hello friends!

Have you ever argue with a developer who:
+ have the same level as you
+ on the same position in the company
+ in the same team
+ OLDER than you
+ thinks their code is the best

A few years back, a coworker and I argue about how to implement a feature. I proposed an approach. He proposed a different one. I immediately saw some problems and told him. But hell no, he defended his idea so strongly that I just gave up since I will leave the company soon.

2 weeks later, when the sprint was about to end, the whole team had to work overtime to fix the mess because of his terrible approach.

A connection was looking for a developer in the city my brother-in-law recently moved to (for my sister's career), so I connected them. They exchanged a couple of emails, and he has an on-site interview tomorrow!

He and I are both .Net developers, and I'm older/more experienced, so I offered to rearrange my schedule to help him with some interview prep tonight.

He said no, that he's pretty confident about things, that he'll do some studying and research on his own.

Good for him and his confidence, but I'm kinda salty that he didn't take me up on my offer. I'm pretty damn clever. How dare someone reject my offer for assistance?? I hope the interview goes well of course but if it doesn't I'm very much going to feel some silent "I told you so!"

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like I am getting years older every day in this job..

Could someone help me find a mobile developer position (Android I prefer)..

PHP Developer, older than me, seeking help on how to run nodejs application - "some_alien_english...some_alien_english...some_alien_english...some_alien_english... ' It working, but its not working ' ...some_alien_english...some_alien_english.........

fast forward to last line - "Its working on terminal but not working on localhost"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I first realised I wanted to be a developer, when my older brother told me about The Net (movie) with Sandra Bullock. He told me about the pi sign in the bottom right corner, and all I wanted to do was to make websites with secret sections that only I knew about.

Hello all,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

How do you guys cope with being a junior dev and constantly receiving criticism about your work from your team leader?
I started working as a developer quite late: I did go to college in my early years but I was lazy at the time, so I didn't complete it. So I worked about ten years in a totally different industry, but I always wanted to go back to being a developer.
I've managed to do it when I was 34: I was a web developer in a small company and I was pretty much the only dev, except for an older dude who only knew Visual Basic 6 and kept programming things with it (in 2020ish!). In those years I always felt like a was way ahead of my colleague, and my efforts to apply best practices were not so welcome.
I eventually got tired of that situation, because I was feeling like wasting my time: I was already quite old and stuck in a jurassic environment
Then, I landed in a new company. Completely different environment: they use modern frameworks, TDD, static analysis, code reviews and stuff, and they do one to one meetings every two weeks. From the beginning, I felt like I was the dinosaur there: they were way ahead of me and I struggled to keep the pace. I immediately said that to my manager, but he was like "don't worry, it's just the start. I'm sure you will do great". Except I did not. I started collecting criticism about my work and I keep receiving it. When I tell my manager that constant criticism is not good for my self esteem, he replies "I can understand, but you have to manage it and I cannot avoid to correct you when you make mistakes". But it became really difficult for me to receive constant criticism, I very rarely have a compliment or a good word about what I do.
Is it just me? Should I finally grow up now that I am almost 40 and accept that working always sucks and you cannot be satisfied of what you do? Or am I simply a bad developer and should look for another job?
I am starting to get tired of this situation.

Change haproxy config on the remote machine so that every developer gets rerouted to an older version of the development app.

Ok, today's rant brought to you by Microsoft Visual Studio, once again. The updated version I downloaded yesterday now has a weird problem where upon the first run of the emulator, my changes show, but on subsequent runs, no matter how much I change, save, clear cache, restart the emulator, no changes will show in the emulator until I completely restart visual studio! Currently in the process of uninstalling the updated version to download the older version, but again I can't just refresh my PC, because I have to download a version from the developer account downloads. Because the trial version can't be upgraded. This is Microsoft's Flagship Development product running on their flagship OS on a machine with killer specs and the latest updates. GET IT TOGETHER. I would be fired if I released such buggy updates and had such an arduous user experience.

The contractor/developer sitting next to me asked for a power adapter for the MacBook the company issued him (it's an older MacBook that currently connects to his monitor with one of those 2-in-1 power and display port cables).

They told him it was not company policy to provide power adapters to contractors.

They also wouldn't give him a license for a Windows VM for some Windows specific stuff he needed to work on for an outside vendor, stating it was a "security risk"

They've also talked about taking Linux off my laptop (which I run natively outside a VM cause fuck MacOS).

I hate our IT department. They're the least competent and least helpful bunch I've ever met.

14 years of age, couldnt go with to the beach with my sister the weekend (all older friends and they wanted to have fun) spent the weekend:

1. Waking up
2. Cleaning yard and garage
3. Finding old pc of my fathers
4. Him telling me he will tell me how to install windows 95 (we were not that up to speed with the latests trends at the time)
5. Running in and out installing and asking for commands on how to install things and run things

Fast faward a few years, im now a web developer working from home (recently retrenched) and my sister asking me to get a job where i work.

I recently celebrated a rather significant birthday and it got me to thinking what's changed about me over the years.

Young me: Feared that I wasn't a supremely talented software developer and completely insecure about it.

Older me: I know I'm not a supremely talented software developer... and that's ok.

Y'all can bash me for it, but Python is one language that ought to be banned along with Javascript...

Amount of times that it breaks or have incomplete implementation is absurd. I just had to deal with idiotic developer who just love to break backward compatibility (looking at you numpy), by changing the type or function name by literally one letter which break older software written in Python that were still in use. (They never specify version for dependencies.) The best part is when they intentionally delete older dependency anyway even if the version is specified.

There's a reason why I do things in C language rather than any other languages, one of the big thing about it is that almost every libraries/code have kept backward compatibility in mind.

I was assigned a task to troubleshoot some buggy code. I am a developer and I don’t know how to get started. Does anyone else experience this kind of anxiety? Where you’re asked to apply your skills and suddenly your brain just shuts down and you feel like you know exactly nothing? I’m older than most coders in my field. Onset of some kind of brain disorder?

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

me: Mum, Dad I want to a developer like [my older brother's name]

mum: I don't know what you guys do anyway. just make sure to be the best at it.
dad: Good luck, don't forget to start your own company soon enough.

When one random persons says the following to a developer trying to make fun of his age:

Person: i had no idea you where the same age as me if you saying 20 years that you finished school. I always assumed you were much much older than me

Developer: what do you mean, im 36

Person: No you said 20 years, so you should be 38

Developer: i finished school at 16

Person: Oh..

Developer: *walks away

I'm 37, been a PHP Web Dev for 12 years. I love doing it but am concerned as I get older, I'm falling behind. I'm not exposed to different tech in my job but am doing courses to vary my skill set (AWS with Docker, vue.js etc)

Is anyone else here over 40 and doing dev work? Any obstacles you found? Or younger peeps, what’s your opinion of older devs? Should I be concerned?

Web Developer should not worried much about the older browser and modern browser. If people want to visit today's website without any problem, they should upgrade their browsers.

I am 13 y/o dev, not in college
two years of experience as an ML intern at a startup, a year of experience contracting as a SWE

I go and try to get internships at a larger company, and just get rejected
people say my resume is fake (nothing to say except IT IS NOT)
they cite labor laws (this I get)

the most frustrating thing though is that I see all these devs with much less experience than me, the only difference being that they are older and in college, getting internships at FANG COMPANIES. most of these people have never had an internship or worked as a developer in any way

one of the most frustrating cases came on a contracting project, where there was this other college dev, who was the worst I have ever worked with
he needed help with EVERYTHING
his python env,
"wHerE dO I IntEgrATE my CoDE?",
1.5 months into the project, he had not pushed a single USEFUL line of code that was actually what was needed from him

and guess where he is heading this summer?
jane street

and yet I cant even get a single interview, with internship season coming to an end?

I've been asked to release a project which has been written by someone else, then rewritten by another developer, and both have left the company.

I can't release it yet because there is an inconsistent bug throwing some values out.

We've got it running side by side with an older legacy system which it's going to replace. Before the 2nd developer left they added some logging to our live system to record both values so that they could be monitored to make sure there was no inconsistency.

There are some inconsistencies... however, when I run the same data through the new system and the legacy system in a test environment they both come out correct.

FML

I've considered quitting...

Are there any .Net developer here?

Need help. Our application created in visual studio 2003 using .net framework 1.1 suddenly showing "Failed to load resources from file. Please check setup." error when loading a form using a dll, also created in .net framework 1.1. This is only on windows 10 build 1703. On older builds, it is working fine.

Thanks!

This post is going to be long and it might not be the platform to ask for it's mainly for ranting yet I wanted to ask a non toxic community.
I'm mainly an ABAP programmer working on an SAP system for my living. No matter how people inside the SAP sphere look at it, it's not exactly cutting edge technology in the world of software development. (and in my opinion it's not even a knife)
As I work in an enterprise environment I have trouble about finding gaps where I can learn newer technologies and thus, I've decided to learn in my free time.
I tend to tilt toward web development as do many I know because I see potential in the GUI which HTML and CSS achieve. And I do believe that combining that with languages such as JS, Python, Ruby, Erlang and Elixir can give way to a healthy experience both in Web development and even desktop development.
In order to avoid overwhelming myself I wish to start with learning web development. Time is not of the essence because I plan to continue working with ABAP for close future, around the next 2 years, and I'm young.
I wanted to ask the community, is there any developer in here that was in the same position and can give out some pointers to the path they took? Is it wise to start my path from HTML5 and CSS3 without looking back to the older ways? Any resource you'd share will be welcomed.

Guys I've inherited an older WordPress plug-in that was custom made by a previous developer. I'm refactoring it as it won't work with the latest wp but the previous dev has used sessions to send form variables from one form to another and I don't know why. I'd like it to be stateless in an ideal world but have been checking out the WordPress docs on cookies but they don't reveal a lot. Any ideas what I can do? Can I send the data without sessions using the native WordPress filters, hooks and actions etc. Cheers