I am working on my passion project, on my own vacation days because my advisor did not approve it and I can't take no for an answer.
But I had 3 amazing days working with my friend and research partner, full of stupid bugs, moody hardware and a lot of nutella-covered food.
I think I am going to document some of the progress on Twitter, because it supports uploading videos. If anyone is interested in failing robots, I can share the link/handle :)

I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Best
- got sick of computers, lost all my passion for this field

Worst:
- got sick of computers, lost all my passion for this field

I hope I'm just tired.

Do you think being a great software engineer is simply hard work and passion?
Or there is also a component of natural affinity, certain personality traits, etc.

Sometimes it feels like I'm not as passionate towards coding as I was before. Seeing bright-eyed juniors with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge makes me wish I could feel the same again. I mean I still like it and all, but it's just not the same.

Sweet lord jesus I fucking hate React! I hate whatever those idiots at facebook or whoever decided to change how everything works 15 fucking times in the span of 4 versions. For fuck sakes, the errors are shit. The documentation is shit, the answers to questions are useless!

I hate this fucking framework with a burning passion, I want nothing more than to shove the entirety of the populous that developed this garbage up zuckerburgs ass and then drown him in a vat of boiling piss and motor oil.

Fuck react.

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

I am a person who never lies. And when I see/hear others lie, be it for the benefit of mine or not, it gets my blood boiling. I disrespect liers with passion.

And I particularly hate magic fixes at work. You know the ones, when smth is not working for a few weeks, you involve 3 other teams responsible for their tiers, and then one day suddenly everything starts working. When you ask all the 3 tiers what has been done - everyone says "nothing".

If you do this bullshit to me, just know that everytime I remember you, before remembering your name/face/role I very vividly visualize pissing on your toothbrush right before you wake up.

Or did I do that for real..? Idk, it's too vivid to distinguish

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

I hate servers that only support EFI boot with a passion. Yes, legacy / BIOS boot is old, but it was so simple. I've been spending hours trying to get EFI boot working on servers with swraid-ed disks and *nothing* works without ugly hackish patches all over!

Anyone successfully got an EFI partition (/boot/efi) on an MDRaid device? D':

Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.

man i see another group i'm a part of talking about "is it worth it to get degrees" and just, ugh. since this is a place to rant. here is why degrees are fuking useless.

first off, simple, like my friend said before, "if we all have degrees, none of us have degrees"

and let me tell you about some of the people i've had to work with who have degrees...

many dont know what "cd ; ls" is, okay. 4 fukin years, what did these people do?

some people have masters, multiple even, and can't read a for loop that jumps/skips(continue) around certain conditions in their 'favorite' language

looked through my favorite rants on here and there was someone who had a college hire who wrote a "for loop in HTML" L_O_L

degree != skill, ever, period, nada

the best people i have worked with? all degree-less

how is that? why would that have a correlation? degree!=skill but !degree==skill ? initiative? passion? giving a fuk? not droning on in classes that have piss all to do with your desired trade.

sure recruiters and companies will supposedly look at the degree like some special badge or say it's important. but if they've been around, they're savvy that a degree only means you're willing to go in debt and be obedient

i know there are those who don't learn well on their own, or prefer face time or structure, that's fine. but the lie that degrees are required and mean more than they do has only put half of my friends in debt. there's no magical "this person now gives a shit" or knowledge transfer that happens. you have to do that on your own.

This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)

I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.

And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.

One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.

What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".

I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!

I love JS but I hate JS Frameworks. All of them, but react by passion. I used a bit vue with Laravel but meh... Angular i did not tried.

I haven't written a line of code in over a month ever since I stopped working due to health issues...

And I have no desire or ideas to create any new apps...

Sorta feels like I'm throwing away 20+ years of work/experience/passion.

Maybe I should just solve algo problems for fun?

Or should I finally try doing some (Java) open source...

Where to find projects?