You know things just got serious when you reach for pen and paper.

Shit just got real.

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Once Ashish was travelling by train in A/c class. He was traveling from Mumbai to Bangalore!

He was traveling alone!

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

Ashish was pleasantly Happy!

The lady kept smiling at him! This made Ashish even more Happy!

Then she went and sat next to him!

Ashish was bubbling with Joy!

She then leant towards him and whispered in his ear " Hand over all your valuables, cash, cards, mobile phone to me
else I will shout and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me"

Ashish stared blankly at her!

He took out a paper and a pen from his bag and wrote " I can not hear or speak. You write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to him!

Ashish took her note, kept it in his pocket!

He got up and told her in clear tones..."Now shout & scream!!"

MORAL OF THE STORY : *DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT*

😄😀😄

Anybody else had to do their programming exams using only pen and paper?

Most of the code I write nowadays is for GPUs using a dialect of C. Anyways, due to the hardware of GPUs there is no convenient debugger and you can't just print to console neither.
Most bugs are solved staring at the code and using pen and paper.

I guess one could call that a quirk.

Interviewer:

Here is a pen and paper. Now code in front of me your answer from the preliminary exam.

Not that i mean any disrespect but fuck you. Fuck you and all that you stand for. No seriously, just go hit a train and die.
You are a DBMS teacher in an Engineering college and teaching to the Computer Science students in the year 2017, where computers are fully capable of playing sports and simulating human brain.
And you want your students to write down all the sql queries along with their monolithic tabular output on paper..... With pen?
And you wont accept my printed out output?
Fuck you from the depths of my heart.
Go ahead and dont accept my project.
I dont need your fucking credits.

Once IT Engineer was travelling by train in A/c class.

He was traveling alone!

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

IT Engineer was pleasantly Happy!

The lady kept smiling at him! This made IT Engineer even more Happy!

Then she went and sat next to him!

IT Engineer was bubbling with Joy!

She then leant towards him and whispered in his ear " Hand over all your valuables, cash, cards, mobile phone to me
else I will shout and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me"

IT Engineer stared blankly at her!

He took out a paper and a pen from his bag and wrote " I can not hear or speak. You write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to him!

IT Engineer took her note, kept it in his pocket!

He got up and told her in clear tones..."Now shout & scream!!"

MORAL OF THE STORY : DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT

😄😀😄

Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.

I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.

But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.

Education I think.

I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.

I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"

"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"

Having to do all programming exams with pen and paper.

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.**

First post.

Went for an interview today. Guy asked me to write chess and gave me a pen and a single blank page. Wondering what does he mean by that, he said start and we will see. Still confused what i am suppose to write, told him it will require way more than one paper to write chess. His response you are not interested in coding. I was like what the hell is going on. After 5 minutes, HR came and told me I can leave for the day.

Had an interview with a potential customer last week, and he started questioning my technical capability in the middle of the discussion on the basis that I’m taking notes with pen and paper...

Yes, I can type. At 90+ WPM, I can darn near produce a transcript of everything we say. But I won’t remember any of it afterward, because it passes straight from the ears to the hands without any processing.

“You see, that’s what we have something called ’search’ for...”

...Yeah. Except that doesn’t help with picking out the most important points from a wall of text, organizing it in a way that allows visualizing relationships between concepts, and other non-linear things that are hard to do on the fly in a word processor.

“Well, how about we get you a tablet with a pen and you can just write on that, then?”

How about no.

Ended up turning him down because of other concerns that were raised that were, suffice to say, about as ornerous as you might expect from that exchange.

Could you imagine a guy who takes A4 paper with encrypted text using modern algorithms and decrypts it in 20 minutes which pen and his mind?

The state of informatics education is just saddening.
You study "Software Development" and then you get to do exams asking you to do some basic linux commands - with full internet access on a computer. People are allowed to fail this and study on. On the other hand you have to do real coding with pen and paper, have to calculate from hex to bin to dec and stuff and most Importantly - know about all kinds of math stuff completely unreleated to cs.
Graph Theory absolutely makes sense in my eyes, but not if it's plain fucken math without even mentioning computers or applications of it. But if you fail that everyone looks weird at you.

I know about coding. I got A's and B's in all the coding exams _without even doing much for them_ but then fail all the fucken math exams. Makes no sense. FML.

At a Magic: the Gathering prerelease tournament (yeah, yeah, stereotypes), on my phone, with a pen and paper copy of the SQL query, as the phone screen was too small to read it properly in full. Managed to fix the bug in the query about 30 seconds before the next game started.

The debugging went well, but the tournament did not; I think I was a bit distracted!!

11 months ago I was tasked to audit 58 computer and 6 servers including network speed analysis. In the meeting with the client & stakeholders, they asked my boss how we will achieve this. He replied... "Pen and Paper. We have interns to capture all info into a spreadsheet ". GEEEEEEEZUS!!!

Pen and paper. I fill notebooks with pseudocode and flow charts before ever touching a keyboard.

Python and java tests in college? Both on paper, so you can only write your code once, using a pen, and you can't debug it or modify it. Awesome right... Smh

Once i was travelling by train from Mumbai to Delhi!

When the train started, I was traveling alone in the AC-I coupe.

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

I was pleasantly Happy

The lady kept smiling at me...
This made me even more Happy☺️

Then she went and sat next to me....
I was bubbling with Joy

She then leant towards me and whispered in my ear...

*"Hand over all your cash, cards and mobile phone to me , else I will shout loudly and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me" *

I stared blankly at her

I took out a paper and a pen from my bag and wrote " I am sorry, I can not hear or speak... Please write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to me!

I took her note, kept it nicely in my pocket...

I got up and told her in clear tones..."

*Now shout & scream !!*

Moral of the story : *DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT*

Day 2 in ComSci class (following my last rant)
"Okay, so! All of the schoolwork and homework will be done on paper and pen, submit and I will grade it. Only once, no second chance"

Okay. Okay. This went over my head. What are you gonna do? OCR the code into the compiler, compile it and run to see if we fucked up to give us an F? What are you, god? Here's a brilliant idea, teach them Assembly! Guaranteed error to give us Fs! FUCK YOU

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

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

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

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

EDIT: typos

because writing over 500 lines of java code using swing framework on a piece of paper with a pen is a perfectly good and healthy way to learn how to write code

Me: Scattering the whole place for paper and pen to jot things down.

After 48 hours of coding in java at a hackathon, I was filling out a feedback form using my pen and suddenly my friend started laughing ridiculously...
After a while thinking wtf I have been doing wrong (which apparently I couldn't find even double checking the form).
.
Friend: You are filling out a feedback form bruh not creating classes
Me: wtf?
Friendb fucking use periods (full stops) instead of the godamn semicolons in the paper
Me: 😑
.
Took a while to shake my head on that but this fucking happens frequently 😂
Fucking can't feel the joy of coding in python cz I drop semicolons and brackets everywhere 😑😑😑

A friend approached me with an "unpopular opinion" regarding the worldwide famous intro to Machine Learning course by Andre Ng.

His opinion: "shit is boring AF and so is the teacher"

Honestly, I loved it, i think it is a really good intro to the actual intuition(pun/reference intended) to the area. I specially like how it cuts down the herd in terms of the people that stick with it and the people that don't, as in "math is too hard. All i want is to create A.I" <---- bye Felicia.

Even then, i think that the idea that Andrew Ng is boring is not too far from reality. I love math, i am by no means a natural, but with pen and paper in front of me and google I feel like i can figure out and remember anything, i do it out of sheer obsession and a knack for mathematical challenges. That is what kept me sane through the course. Other than that I find it hard to disagree, even if it was not boring for me.

Anyone here thinks the course was fucking boring as well? As in, the ones that have taken it.

We have this one professor in a mathematics course.
He sits there having no plan of what he's doing. He literally opens his python Jupiterbook with latex enabled, writes a complex equation and tries to solve it in 10 minutes. Makes mistakes every few steps and deletes his formatted equation that isn't even interpreted yet (we see the cdot etc. instead of * which makes it even harder to read). Every few minutes some student corrects him and he deletes it again.

Why can't you just think first and then write and try to teach us?
Use as much time as you want as long as you don't have to keep reverting back the humanly unreadable latex equation.

Hell, you are also allowed to use a basic pen and paper. Trust me, that shit is more readable, even if you have a bad handwriting, than your squeezed in complex untranslated latex equation in Jupiterbook.

Btw. he also streams with no zooming in I might add.

Am I supposed to trying to read your small as shit, focus on what you're teaching while you keep making mistakes or write it down on paper and practice the given tasks?

On top of that, he records the zoom conference but he doesn't share it anywhere on the college forum so that people who have missed it can download it and rewatch it.

Everything he does makes no sense. How did he become a mathematics professor with a PhD?

I was talking to my non-tech gf about how a colleague of mine didn't understand priority queue and show led her an example, during explanation fucked up the example and duplicated priorities of 2 values but they came up in the unexpected order. She wanted to find the logic in it and blamed the computer for being dumb, but it has been ~45 minutes, she has Wikipedia about binary trees & linked list open as well as simple graphs visualising both + armed with pen and paper trying to understand how it all all works..

Achievement Earned?

P.S I am either creating a monstrosity (Frankenstein style) or recruiting a fresh mind to our ranks, either way I am proud af 😢😊😍

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

Best way to avoid procrastination : We tend to avoid commitments or to do large tasks as even visualizing them seems tiring and the longer it takes, the vulnerable we are to distractions

So I use this simple trick
I break my task into numerous sub tasks. For example if I need to finish a feature before day end, I would first list down all the cases I can think of in order and write them down using actual pen and paper.
I then start implementing them step by step.
I mark them checked once done.
It gives me a sense of achievement as I see those checks besides the sub tasks and I can also take breaks between steps.

So all it takes is just first five minutes of planning.
I had to do the above procedure, for this post as well.
Hope it helps fellow developers
:)

QA personal voice assistant that runs locally without cloud, it’s like never ending project. I look at it from time to time and time pass by. Chat bots arrived, some decent voice algorithms appeared. There is less and less stuff to code since people progress in that area a lot.

I want to save notes using voice, search trough them, hear them, find some stuff in public data sources like wikipedia and also hear that stuff without using hands, read news articles and stuff like that.

I want to spend, more time for math and core algorithms related to machine learning and deep learning.

Problem is once I remember how basic network layers, error correction algorithms work or how particular deep learning algorithm is constructed and why is that, it’s already a week passed and I don’t remember where I started.

I did it couple of times already and every time I remember more then before but understanding core requires me sitting down with pen and paper and math problems and I don’t have time for that.

Now when I’m thinking about it - maybe I should write it somewhere in organized way. Get back to blogging and write articles about what I learned. This would require two times the time but maybe it would help to not forget.

I’m mostly interested in nlp, tts, stt. Wavenet, tacotron, bert, roberta, sentiment analysis, graphs and qa stuff. And now crystallography cause crystals are just organized graphs in 3d.

Well maybe if I’m lucky I retire in the next decade or at least take a year or two years off to have plenty of time to finish this project.

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?

I've tried so many ways for that at night or during walk spark of bug solving ideas:

- fluorescent ink on regular paper
- florescent mini whiteboards
- "alexa remind me.."
- writing down in my phone
- recording on my phone
-..

But all of those due to my short term memory made me forget half the things by the time I opened the fucking phone/app, found where to grab the pen or the whole dance for alexa, to remember the exact phrase I have to spell out, when it should remind me, what time,..

Earlier today I remembered how I had a little tape voice recorder I used to use a ton, thankfully that tech advanced by now and found myself a stereo mic setup little voice recorder that can also act as an mp3 player!

Went for a walk today, while listening to some podcasts, then it hit me as usual on how to fix and implement some things that were awkward at best on paper when I left home, pressed the record button, recorded it and went straight back to music mode, which remembered where I left off!

I'm so indescribably happy, I ordered quite a bunch of the same to just throw around everywhere, at the bed, in the bathroom, kitchen, for walking outside, everywhere haha

so, me and my best friend started playing pen and paper and after a wile we decided to create our own system. After a year of improving and testing we thaugth about a new java side project and more improvements for our system. time goes by and now we have three java apps for our own pen and paper and a lot of reusabilly code.

Playing and planing a new session of p&p is now so comfortable and fast 🤗

At the core, alongside repositories and IDEs, the trusty pen + paper is best for seeing bigger picture and fast note taking.
Although my chicken scratch handwriting isn't one to rave about.
It's changed from cursive to curseive over time...

Not being able to write code only using pen and paper :/
I had one job interview where they ask me to iterate a tree using my preferred language. I felt so uncomfortable.
And my problem is only the pen and paper.
I'm able to write working code without any code completion even without highlighting in any shitty editor. But when it comes to write code by hand on paper it feels like my programmer brain side turns off.

))| THE BEST AND WORST WAY|((
))| TO DELETE A LINE IN BASH |((

(Think you can do better? Vote
now on your phones!)

WORST: Hold backspace until satisfied
BEST: Using a pen or other pointing device capable of causing semi or permanent damage to your screen, count how many characters the line in question consists of. Write this down on a piece of paper (after all, your terminal is occupied) and using long division, or any other means, divide this number by two, rounding as you please. Press the "right arrow" key as many times as necessary to reach the end of the line. This might be 0 - if so, congratulations, you may skip this step! Once complete, refer to your piece of paper, and taking your newly calculated number, press the "left arrow" key exactly that many times. If you have a short attention span or are worried you will lose count, take a tally or use some other primitive count recording method. Once the key has been pressed the correct number of times, hold down either control key on your keyboard and take a deep breath - there's no going back now (!) - press the "k" key (you should still be holding a control key!) and take a sigh of relief. You're halfway there! If you need a break, take one. When you're ready to finish the task, hold a control key again and take another deep breath. When you are ready to complete the task (don't hold your breath too long!) press the "w" key. Congratulations!! Your line has been deleted!! Some may call you a fucking idiot for not just pressing ctrl-w at the start, but don't listen to those people! They probably delete stuff by accident all the time! Now, take a lie down, and give a moment's silence for the poor poor line you just brutally dissected and murdered.

Think you can do better? Vote now on your phones!

So after a few struggles on my current uni assignment I’ve come to the realisation I need to change the way I write code, or at least the way I think about the code before I start.

I have a tendency to rush into coding something before I’ve planned it out properly, and over the last couple of days stupid mistakes on my part caused hours of stressing.

Are there any good methods for sitting down and planning stuff like this out, or is it just a case of getting some paper and a pen and writing out the logic etc in whatever way makes sense to you (me)?

So this Just happened, we were in a Meeting when Manager Tells us about "Time Management" and asked us Whatsapp we could Code for him,
I suggested that we use those Chips to track us and the employees, because we always use them to unlock Doors and Stuff,
Another Suggestion from another Person was:
To use Paper...
I was Like "WTF dude Pen and Paper? Didn't you listen?"

We now use Pen and Paper to weite our working Times Down...

Not a part of the test, but the test itself.

Imagine having to write in a language you don't really know with a pen and paper.

Glad I didn't get the job there because holy moly was that a pain in the ass.

Dont you just love spending like 2 hours playing around with a library and doing some math, on real pen and paper, only to find out the library had a function for what you need already there and available

:)

My C# teacher. From all the beginning CS classes that I have taken she is the only that I really respect. She took the time to teach us how operators work, took the time to teach us Pseudo code, and made us code using just a pen and paper. I bought my laptop (instead of a desktop) to code along her in classes. She would ask us how to solve something. Gave us like 5 min to think about it, and then we would answer it, and she would translate our solution to code making comments for us to fully understand what was going on.

You know what's hard...

Fixing a bug which occurred in production without having any logs because you log that useful info at debug level. 😧

Now take pen and paper, do calculation on your own and speculate what would have happened in production.

How do you guy (think of) prototype UI?

I have used the pen and paper approach but when you add the interactions such as clicks and animation on the paper,it become messy.

I feel that coding up a full blown front end for prototyping is overkill. Because when you want to prototype the list , you also need to insert the dummy data in order for you see probably clicks and drag animation.

"All the magic, be it in code or design, starts with a clear mind, pen and a blank paper." - Brian Wangila

An 'older' client, who is a respected doctor, needed a web site to sell a book he authored about cycling trips.

Simple... I thought... Until he literally sent me all the content.. hand written... on pen and paper... via snail mail... Along with barely legible Hand-drawn maps... fml

So I was wondering, in this era of technology, with so many tools and options to take and share notes, who does still prefer to take notes on paper?

While I use tools like Trello to list all the tasks with the team, for my own notes I use paper sheets, as I find easier to check on them.
Besides, if I'm stuck with something, I can doodle a bit (I even use a pencil instead of a pen :p)

I found programming really out my focus. Initially when i was exposed to it, My friend showed me a code of C and C++ and i was like it looks so untidy and annoying like colons and semicolons in between of random text sentences. In my first semester i had this Programming course of C and C++ and i had to deal with it. The lab sessions were totally bouncers for me, i cant understand any anything. During writeup submissions i used to copy someone else’s code (Yeah, i wrote down the whole code with a pen on a paper including every syntax). Writing down codes gave an idea about the flow of code, i didnt knew what was really happening in the alogorithm but atleast i can understand which is used for what. I also used to copy Flow diagrams of code so i used check both of them side by side and try to link. This helped me atleast to begin with and deal with that course. As semesters incremented coding was more of a need in every course. And i started liking it.☺️☺️

Initially i didn’t had wifi at home so i was totally unaware about youtube tutorials and courses. The only typing of code was done in the lab sessions.
This was my first experience regarding coding.

What was yours?

iPad + Apple pencil ONLY for note taking during lectures

Yay or nay?

Got any other combos that arent ms surface with a pen? (Bad experience cause of ssd failures)

Or what about those Wacom tablets? Are they even good in terms of pen to screen response latency?

Educate me if you saw me as an ignorant piece of f but are there any tablet with stylus pen support that are almost input-lag free like the apple pencil with iPad? I once tried it in the store and boi did it truly impress me, also I haven't seen anything else close to it, I tried the Samsung ones, they didn't look to me as fast as the apple pencils

Do you have like out-of-the-box ideas that are not pen and paper? Do write them down

First exam this year, about database optimisation. I have been there just a week and I really enjoy this school

BUT. THIS. CAN'T. BE. TOLERATED.

I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to write SQL on paper goddamnit!!!!

(Yeah I didn't have any other pen that this red one, at least it was erasable)

I have an internship at some research company. My point is making face recognition apps with prog lang I know. This place is awesome. Well, compsci it's not my background, but I met many people. And they are great at math ....
.....

... Like they do 29 gray-scale images as a vector for PCA algorithm with size 64x64 pixel and COUNT A COVARIANCE MATRIXES WITHOUT TOUCHING ANY CALCULATOR OR PEN AND PAPER AND GET THE RIGHT NUMBER!

Man, this is insane. I don't even know 64x64. I love compsci

Best way for me to get unstuck is the good old pen and paper. It helps organize my train of thought(s). It's amazingly effective lol

!rant
I tend to do a lot of sketching and note taking and like to use pen on paper. But sick of tearing out notes and accumulating bits if paper that contain notes here and there. I was thinking of going digital with this specific task (for cheap) i don't own an ipad so was thinking of getting a Fire HD 8" and a Boxwave EverTouch stylus. Im all Apple so don't know android, would this hardware do the trick and what would be a decent note taking and organising app for it? Appreciate any advice comments. Other uses for it are irrelevant.

I recently got reminded: The new snipping tool for windows is great! But what the hell is the deal with that ruler? The vast majority of the time when I draw lines or highlight stuff on a snipped picture I want to draw straight lines. But this is only possible by clicking the ruler button, aligning the "physical" ruler that appears and then drawing the line along it. It's like someone really wanted the snipping tool to convey the feeling of sitting by your desk with pen, paper and scissors. Am I missing something?

When planning how to design some piece of software, specifically when it's object orientated, what "tools" do you use for taking notes?

I mostly prefer a white board or the ol' reliable (pen and paper)

Why do we take tests on paper? No offense professor, but if all I have is a sheet of paper to program on I'm out of a job!

So once again, I'm planning for a new website I'm developing, a little side project. I tend to put pen to paper and map out what features I want to include and see where that goes.

It's got me thinking how everyone else likes to plan for their personal projects and if I'm missing a trick?

I'm learning a new lang. Read all of the introductory guide. Have an algp to implement.

Suddenly I realize I suck at designing the implementation. Then I grab pen and paper and obssessively try to solve it all theoretically.

Or maybe I suck at this new lang? Who knows.

OOP class, professor finishes a basic example with inheritance (some car/cabriolet/suv idea) and says: I don't know more java, if you have any questions please ask others. The exam was on pen and paper.

A pen and a couple of paper sheets.

!rant

Well not really a CS teacher but it did happen to me during my uni days.

I had joined a marketing class as an elective since my Information Systems degree did have some business related stuff thrown in there.

One day the lecturer strutted in all smug and told us to take out a sheet of paper and we were gonna have a surprise test.

He has the test on a pen drive , apparently it was just 2 open ended type questions he was gonna plug into the class pc and send it to the projector screen.

To this day i have no clue what the hell he did, but that smug bastard managed to delete the test permanently 😂

He popped it in and we saw a few files there he selected them and was about to either drag to desktop or open them , the cursor changed to the wait hourglass , he right clicked and refreshed as if it would
Do anything but .... PooF.... Bye test 👋

He took the pen drive out and plugged it in again, but couldn't find the test file

He scowled then checked the desktop and recycle bin, nope 👎

He took his pen drive and silently walked out....

The other IT students and I were in stitches 😂

Pen and paper ;)

Got a new idea in mind...by the time idea reaches pen and paper and computer ( I hear a voice back of my head...."Is that what you were think of, think of something NEW it's already implemented!")

So I have my little program which originally was written with intention to be useful for academics to deal with old fuck HPLC, but they got new one so I am not sure about it usefulness anymore. Basicly it reads HPLC report and take from it table and dilution number from name.

I spend like 2 hours trying to read all numbers from string which are between two given chars. Probably I could do it easier with regular expression or not being fucking moron or use sheet of paper to figure it out. Eventually I take traditional pen and paper and solve it in 10 minutes...

How to be unproductive 101

Try bullet journaling.

Just set a phone alert to update it before bed and when you wake up (to refresh your memory and jot down things you forgot).

And prioritize tasks. You can mark some tasks for later, even for a different month.

Some people like digital organizers (and I use those too) but I like pen and paper. YMMV

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

Pen and paper rpgs you recommend?

Just finished my finals.
Had to run k-means with pen and paper only. I find this kind of question stupid but why not. BUT WHY THE FUCK DID YOU CHOSE SOME INITIALIZATION THAT TAKES 13(!!!!) FUCKING ITERATIONS TO CONVERGE ? Just in case my first 12 iterations are correct by chance ? Guess what, you fucktard, I GOT IT.
And doing the same calculus by hand 13 FUCKING TIMES is moronic as hell, you retarded piece of shit ! When you train your neural networks, do you also backpropagate your gradient all by yourself, mongoloid baboon? Getting sick of those stupid assignements

I get a paper and a pen and write down what I know I have to do, what I don't know how to do it and I suspect I don't know yet what I'll have to do.

For the parts I know I'll have to work using a new framework or new tools I try to create a proof of concept project I can reuse later.

I tend to write a bit in paper before coding just to wrap up my head on what I'll have to do.

As a (self proclaimed) programmer, feels weird to spend more time with pen and paper than keyboard

I have an exam tomorrow... SQL to be precise... On pen and paper, why God?! Why?

With liquor, a spreadsheet, and a pad of paper/pen...

Emphasis on the liquor...

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

So I've been helping with recruitment at work for a lead developer. Our first stage is pretty standard for all levels and it essentially a technical interview because CVs are useless really. We're a C# house so we have questions on framework internals such as how the dictionary class is implemented, locking and thread synchronization techniques. Then some pen and paper coding excercises, like reverse array.

I'm not a big fan of these and I think they are too constrained to detail implementations and not about concepts.

So I ask what stuff do you do at your company to get an idea of some ones competency?

how do you learn some concept in programming/dev? am not talking about the understanding, but rather the remembrance part, like retaining in memory in a way that you could remember to recognise/use it , the next time you see it or need it?

do you prefer :
- writing on pen and paper(ie creating notes)
- writing a personal/public online blog
- implementing it in a project that depends on it/ some sample project
- or something else?

I love the flexibility and power you get with Wordpress, WooCommerce and its entire plugin ecosystem...

BUT FUCK ME! PHP IS SHIT!!

It's like writing code by hand with pen and paper, putting it through an OCR and then compiling it. Sure, it might work if you're lucky and maybe even look cool, but good luck trying to develop a sulution with any sort of speed!

It's a form of artistic expression for some people (like me) who aren't as great with paper and pen but still have ideas and patterns and concepts and abstractions to express.

Watching the data just flow through the pipelines and pathways you've laid down for it, creating spectacles from what is essentially electricity running through a rock. Being able to create an interface between a human mind and an inanimate dead block of dug out and processed ore, feels like tapping into the metaphysical.

(Yeah I'm pretentious with words)