Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.

Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.

Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?

Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.

If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?

I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.

(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)

The place where I work part time, my role is to teach children how to code basic things in python, html and CSS.
There's a child who's been coming to this club for the past year, she's only 8 and is smarter than any other child I've seen in person.
Turns out both her parents are developers which is why she has an interest in coding too. It's so refreshing to see things like these, honestly. I hope my child in the future is like her lol.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Should I Close-Source my project?

I have been working on a Desktop/hacking simulator game and up until now the project has been Open-Source. I'm at a point now where I haven't gone too far to turn back.

Last night I got to thinking about my game, and what I want to do in the future. The game will always remain Free, but I might sell it to another company later down the line, something I can't do if I stay Open. I want to makea good game. And I don't want to do it for money (because that has never worked out for me in the past) but I want to *be able* to make money if I wanted to. I mean, I have been told by several developers that my game will be "ground breaking/a worldwide phenomenon/a Minecraft competitor" while being Open is one of my main selling points, besides populatity, what do I have to gain? I said I don't want to develop for money (mainly because the pressure gets to me) but I'm so poor I'm almost literally starving. I make $3/mo from Patreon and survive from donation from relatives. I feel like I need this. But I also feel selfish. Information should be free, ya know?

Idk.. This started serious and turned into a ramble.. Guess that's what this app is all about.

Leave your opinions below.

My friend who is new to Android App Dev was trying to make a simple app that programmatically takes a pic then sends it as an MMS. He opened Stack Overflow, copied code and i heard him murmur "hmm this is simple". Knowing the future, and the wrath of Android Studio, i leaned into my seat and waited. 2 hours later i knew Andy Studio had pissed all over him and it was written all over his face. I walked past him as if to go to the toilet then back again, his screen was blood red with errors and my heart danced and sang.

3 hours later i was out of the room and he sent me a text saying "I give up". I replied, "well tbh, im suprised it took you that long"

Thank you Android Studio for showing all those who think all we do is copy and paste code that they are freakin retards.

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

Dear fanboys (and probably past and I hope not future me),

Just because I use alternative product doesn’t mean you can attack me personally. And because you use some service/product doesn’t mean it’s automatically fitting for all people or it’s perfect and doesn’t have any cons.
Just because you use X thing and you’re happy with it (which is perfectly OK), doesn’t mean I can’t be perfectly happy with Y thing.
Imagine if only legal haircut was yours favorite. Wouldn’t be that boring if everyone wore exact same haircut? That’s like some 1984 shit.
I’m not saying that criticizing things is bad - it’s great actually, but in civilized way.
Don’t attack a person using something and automatically assume that they are an idiots, but rather point out why that something is bad.

And please, be different. If you’re happy with that phone which you use, don’t go buy a new one just because someone told you that your current one is bad without pointing out why.

Sincerely,
Athlon

No one is gonna care anyways...

I once was your future
Now I'm your present
Tomorrow I will be your past
And may the great debbuger
Cross our paths again

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

Today I am going to rant about this guy who I am working with in a group for creating a mobile application as a project for a course.

So let me give you some background info about this guy. He has 5 years of experience as data analyst from some company in India. Now he is here in Canada for his masters. I took him in the group thinking given his experience, he can be an asset. However, as I started talking to him it became clear that he has no experience with programming or software development. I am ok with that as everyone is new to something. However, he started intrupting and started giving negative feedback about each and every thing we discussed regarding the project. Don't get me wrong, I am all about getting feesback. But if someone who is just sitting there and just searching stuff on google just to bull shit with people to show that he knows stuff is irritating. He always provide useless feedback and solutions to any problems.

I was talking to him about his past working experience and his future plans after graduating. He literally said, "I want to learn just enough to fake in front of employer during interview. I was doing the same thing in my previous job." I was legit shocked at this moment.

Now I have to tolerate this for another 3 months. I am just worried about the project.

I developed and have been maintaining an organization website for the past 6 years for free. The organization gave me a full scholarship 15 years ago which opened up so many doors and allows me to finish high school and college without a single cent, and now I’m living comfortably with good job.
My parents wouldn’t be able to afford me the higher education. So I’m very grateful and paying it forward for the future students.

The exit interview with an ex boss.

While working there, we had regular meetings every other week. Discussing current work, equipment requests, technology, sometimes office politics. At some point we discussed that our team was moved to an open-plan office and how I regarded this as detrimental to our productivity and satisfaction. Of course we sometimes had different opinions, but it was an amicable atmosphere. My boss also always carried a personal organizer and sometimes wrote notes during these meetings.

Later I resigned. Him becoming more and more abusive was a major reason, and I think he knew he had crossed a line. So the day of the exit interview came...

In a professional setting, you'd thank each other for the good collaboration. Maybe laugh about one or two points from the past. And then wish each other success for the future and say farewell.

Not there. Not with him in the exit interview.

Instead, he apparently went through a list in his personal organizer. A list of every single thing we ever disagreed at. And roasted me for each. single. item. "Back when you said x... you can't really say it like that". Or "remember that time when you were against open-plan offices? Let me tell you, that's just your opinion. There are no actual arguments against them, it's just a matter of taste". And that went on and on and on. Like a final reckoning. Like he needed to get revenge. I hope that carnage made him happy, because it made *me* happy to have had resigned.

And it was fucking unprofessinal, because this is the management equivalent of stomping your foot in rage and anger, shouting "no no nooo I'm right! I! am! Riiiiiiight! *stomp*".

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

"Rant/Story"

Dayum.
Prestory and afterstory:
Today I have slept for around <2 hours and had to drive to my college.

The real shit happens right now.

Story:
During these almost 2 hours, I have dreamed about going back in time, but being limited on the same day's hours.
In other words... It was e.g. 16 o'clock and the time travelled back into the past. Like into a "0830 ish" morning. The day would then come to an end and start with the next day. For example from Monday to Tuesday.
I was able to look into the future whenever I wanted to.
Even though I was driving my car in the first gear, it would drive into the reverse direction.
Time suddently switches direction and everything is going as it should be. Greeting people in the streets as I would do normally.
And all of the sudden time decides to switch its direction again and I have to do things in reverse.
At some point I found something like a hidden room which had a door. I opened it and went into the "room" (it was a special place. It had no walls at all). It had a door at the other side of the room. I went through it and saw another one in the last room. It felt like, if I decide to go through that door, I would instantly die. I therefore moved all the doors back into the dream world.
Such a confusion gave me a fucking headache lol.

After waking up from such a fucking complicated dream, time irl felt fucking weird lmao.

My alarm began to do its job. It tried to wake me up at 6:30 am, at 6:45 am and at 6:50 am.
But all the time along it felt like it began to wake me up at 6:50 am down to 6:30 am.

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

how to learn web development in 2018:

- watch youtube video of that new shiny promising framework

- spend hours trying to set up development environment

- spend another hours waiting for the dependencies to install

- spend the next few hours wondering and googling why it wont work even at fresh install

- spend another few hours redoing everything just to make sure you haven't missed a step

- realize that the youtube video you watched is uploaded last week, and now the framework developers mysteriously decided to change literally everything

- spend hours looking for another youtube video until you realize that now you are watching completely unrelated youtube video

- spend next hours wondering how your life become this pathetic while overthinking all of your past mistakes, and now you are just this lonely pathetic person with no clear future and that you will spend the rest of your life working at a fastfood chain below the minimum wage with no social life living on your parent's basement.

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

I just noticed visualizing git is like a timeline with alternate realities and a lot of time travel. The main branch is the main timeline and the branches are like fixes from the past to try and make the future better they merge when the future is fixed otherwise if someone or something fucked up time traveling it becomes the main timeline.

JavaScript is a rollercoaster. From "Golly hello world is easy and I can make webpages now", to "wtf '1'+1 is '11' kill me now", to "it's not be that bad if you know how to use it", to discovering typescript and it starts feeling like a real language.

... until you can't build the project because you have too many types so you blow the memory limit in node. I can up the limit, but I can't guarantee that we won't blow past this in the future. Browsing issues on the ts repo reveals that this has been a thing for years.

Sticking with the rollercoaster analogy I'm now at "Burn it all to the ground".

anyone else make grand prediction in the past which turned out to be bit off like:

"Silverlight is the future its going to replace html/javascript" :))

"Windows Phone 7 is going to take over from Android and Apple"

Fucking A.I. resume filter bots.

As if tech interviews weren't hard enough, I have to fill my resume with keywords to get past a bot! Every damn application and cover letter has to be unique.

And when I get past a bot, a hiring manager replies with "Sorry, you seem to have more experience with Typescript than JavaScript, and we can't take that risk."

It's the same.damn.language.

Yes, I spend my spare time with C and Python. Why does that say "unsuitable candidate" instead of "versatile"??!!

$#*%!?&@ tech industry.

Take your "Good luck with your future endeavors" and stuff it up your ass.

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

!rant

I figured out a way to make your code readable!

The main idea: make everything into a function. Each function should be small and you should gradually use past functions to build future functions.

Depending on the language and the size of your code you should make your functions with different sizes, but always keep them small.

This function splitting allows for debugging small parts of your code, avoids repetition and abstracts your code, each making it more readable.

"'This is just a temporary fix, I'll refactor it into something great and modular later" thought I as I continued to sin for the umpteenth time.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

I just felt like Google is the best player out there in terms of Companies.
Seriously, Well played Google.
This is not a negative opinion, I am just awe-struck at its tactics.
See, Google is currently the biggest name in terms of development in Android, ML and multi-platform software but no one can say it being a monopoly due to its dedication to open source community.
Recently Android emerged out to be One of the Biggest , most advanced, trusted and loved Technology . It saw great achievements, and up till 2016-17, it was at its peek. BUT when the market started shifting towards multi-platform boons and Ai, it got its hands into that too with its flutter and kotlin environment
One could have a negative opinion about this, But i can't seem to engulf the vast amounts of positive situations i see in this:
1) this IO18 (and many months before that) saw ML/AI being incorporated in Android (also the arcore, proje tango and many more attempts in the past) meaning that Android will not officially "die". It will just become an extremely encouraged platform( not just limited to mobiles) and a beginning of the robot -human reality ( a mobile is handling everything of your everyday life: chats, music apps sxhedules, alarms, and with an actively interacting ML, it won't be long when Android comes installed in a green bug lime droid robot serving you tea xD). Meanwhile the market of Windows games may shift to mobiles or typically " Android games" (remember, Android won't be limited to mobiles)
2)java may or may not die. The animations and smooth flow it seems to provide is always appreciated but kotlin seems to do so too. As for the hard-core apps, they are usually written in c++ .So java is in the red zone
3) kotlin-native and Flutter will be the weapons of future , for sure. they will be developing multi-platform softwares and will be dividing the market of softwares into platform specific softwares(having better ml/ai interactions,animations) and platform independent apps(access and use anywhere softwares).
And where does google stand?Its the lord varys of game of thrones which just supports and enhances the people in the realm. So it benefits the most . That's a company for you, ladies and gentlemen! If seen from common eyes they seem to be the best company ever and our 1 true king but it can also be a very thick fur cloak hiding their negetive policies and tactics , if any.

Well played, Google.

I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.

-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"

There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.

Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.

Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.

If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

I want to say I would not have been the programmer I am now, if it hadn't been for all of my mentors in my past and current job who took a chance on me.

I am socially awkward, am nervous and stutter around new people, cannot sustain conversation, and as a consequence come out rather poorly in most kinds of interviews.

But there has been 3 mentors/leads in my life so far who saw through the nervous wreck I was in the few hours of the interview and took, what felt like to me, a gamble by hiring me. My current mentor even taught me everything I know on my job and has vastly shaped the programmer I am.

A humble thank you to all the amazing mentors out there, who inspire and enable the now green engineers, who will later be the mentors of the future generation!

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

I have to make a big decision about my future as a developer...
(Long rant)

I am currently in an apprenticeship as a dev.
The thing is i was forced to do testautomatization.

I was there for half a year and had a good time.
But now my trainer (the guy who assigned me all the work and showed me all the stuff I learned) has been fired.

And now it sucks... they don't teach me new things anymore and don't give me time to catch up with the new technologies.
(This was different in the past!)

I was forced to do manual testing for the past few week.
Therefor i am working with a friend and his trainer.

One day i was talking to my friend about how things have changed in the testing-team.

His trainer was listening (we did not know) and sayed: If you want i can ask my boss if it is possible that i can teach you as well.

Now the point is i woud love to work with him. I love the work they do!! (Java; don't hate me)

But it will make the testing guys mad and I dont know how HR will react.

I am pretty sure it will reduce my chances of getting a job (at this company) if I change the team...

Should I talk to HR or not? What do you think?

Thanks for reading and sorry for my english bugs.

That awkward moment when you're in the past (version [n-x]) and want to use something of the future but then you remember that it doesn't exist yet.

Remote work as a sure thing. WFH 4EVER.

Currently I'm still not confident that most companies will keep or adhere to a remote-first culture because those are full of managers who can't see past their own insecurities.
We will probably see a wave of company failures and bankruptcies (sorry, I should have said "industry consolidation") in a few years while those few that managed to automate away their future-averse middle bosses take over the world.
The day you can't tell if your boss, that you only see in a Zoom window, is organic or a fully virtual #SFW #Professional interactive LinkedIn ad? That is the day I longe for.

I was going to show my boss DevRant. Due to my quick thinking of past and future rants pertaining to said boss, I decided not to. Quickly switching to Instagram seemed like I was in the clear, I just had to find a funny picture of... a DevRant ad... "Oh what's that app? Didn't you have that one?"
Then a client walked in!!!
Never have I been, nor will I even be, so relieved to have a client storm into the office!

"Hi X,
Y stepped down from organizing meetup Z.

You are one of the top members of this Meetup, so I think you have what it takes to be a great organizer. Stepping up would help ensure that this community continues to survive past [date in the near future]."

Third time I get a message like this from meetup. Usually followed up by threatening to delete all group data forever if no one "steps up" (e.g. pays their bills). F***ing vendor lock-in! They have been colleting and publishing data for years only to blackmail people to continue using their services.

Some meetups (at least in my region) have switched to LinkedIn, so we will surely receive messages like above from LinkedIn in a couple of years.

Hey there! :)

I have been lurking for half a year now and finally decided to create an account to share my stories in the future years.

I'm gonna start studying software-engineering for my bachelor's degree within the next month after already having studied programming for the past five years so I hope I can balance work, study and fun as well as I plan to.

Looking forward to that and generally having a good time on devRant. ^^

Dear devs from the past. Whoever of you thought iframe navigation, js-only frontend and flash were a good way to build a web UI -
well, it's not.
Regards, a person from the future who still can't properly use tabs with your app.

I'm an idealist. I'm an optimist.
So of course I get enormously stressed out and depressed when the world just keeps fucking me over.

I have been at my current job for 2.5+ years. Been on the same project for the past 2+. And I am now on my 4th manager (not including the guy who hired me and got fired before I started).

It's just been one thing after the other. So many problems on this project with only one other dev on it until recently. Management has been avoiding taking proper actions.

I have done as much as I can and it has been a burden on my health. Last year I got passed over for a pay raise because of a bad manager, who since left for greener pastures. This year I got a small pay raise (below inflation) and a surprise bonus of such minuscule proportions that it's fucking laughable. I am being grossly underpaid for the weight that I'm pulling.

We just had a reorg that actually is a huge step in the right direction, and my new manager seems to actually want to give the project some proper attention.
So I asked him for a talk about my title and salary, so we can set things right.

We have now had two talks in a little over a week, in which he has emphatically stated over and over again how he just doesn't have the information or the power to give me anything at all.

And the thing is. I don't want to find another job. Of course I could easily do so, and for a lot more money too. But the problem is, I'm an idealist. I actually believe that what I'm working on, and what I will be working on in the future, at this place, is really important.

I should just get the hell out, as many of my colleagues have. It's actually quite incredible how many people have left my team over the past 6 months.

But I'm an optimist. I cannot see how management can possibly continue on this path without realising the consequences and taking action.

So now I've scheduled a meeting with the CEO to give him my two cents. I've done it before, which may actually have played a part in putting the reorg in motion.

I have to believe I can appeal to reason.
Otherwise, what's the point of anything?

I know. I'm the fucking clown meme.

Peace out.

For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?

Can anyone give me a logical explanation?

P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.

So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...

P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.

If you use exceptions for your data validation, I hate you. I hate you so much, in fact, that I will become famous. Then I can say to you that a famous person hates you. I will become president and the first executive order I sign will be to make the official policy of the United States that I hate you. I will invent a time machine so that I can go back in time and on every one of your birthdays, past present, and future, look you in the eyes and tell you I hate you. Then I will travel to your death bed and in your final breath I will tell you I hate you. I will change the timeline so that you will celebrate Christmas and believe in Santa and then tell your four year old self that Santa isn't real. I hope your kids never learn how to read, and if they already know how to read I hope they forget how to read and never learn how to read. I hope all of your friends become vegan, atheist, flat earth, crossfitters and insist on regailing you with their life style on your every meeting.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm having a bad day.

Haven't been on here for quite a while.. mostly worked as a graphic designer from home the past year. End of 2021, I'll transfer to the RnD department at my job to become a developer and help out with the front end part (because you know.. I do design stuff). Ok No probs, I have done some basic stuff, jQuery and (god forbid) wordpress stuff, should work out. New boss tells me to learn VUE so that I become a Vue frontend developer aaaand.. I'm shitting my pants with imposter syndrom dribbled all over things.. sigh.. luckily it's the weekend so I can take a beer and think about my future. 🍻

Someone should make a movie about three ghosts that haunt a BLOODY CROOK who makes his employees and coworkers burn the midnight oil in the bloody CHISTMAS EVE because the fucker haven't finished something that should have been ready TWO FUCKING WEEKS AGO.
The ghost of Christmas past shows the fucker that he was a bloody LAZY KID who made his elderly relatives cook, host, clean, wash the dishes and everything else all by themselves during family-gathering season.
The ghost of Christmas present shows him his employees' children teary eyed that daddy doesn't get to watch cartoons with them before bedtime (we're not Christians but just because my house is a steak-free zone it doesn't mean my kids don't expect gifts from santa, like most kids in their school!)
The ghost of Christmas future shows a Netflix documentary on how the fucker got arrested for being a BLOODY CROOK that gets played by some actor who is a hollywood-level jerk who beats his wife. And the show gets a 3% on rotten tomatoes, just to salt the wound. Oh, and a voiceover says the real BLOODY CROOK hanged himself in prison or something and his family is happy he did it.

Fuck, I hate, for real hate, people whose tardiness bleeds out on honestly-working people. I had to wake up one of my devs to fix the SHIT that the bloody crook higher-up shat on us.
My guy is getting a raise as soon as I can scream at the bean counters and my boss will be getting some loooooong, data-rich report on how the bloody crook's department is pissing in our soup.
Fuck everything.

Health of programmers is a vital issue in near past and future

Is it weird that I hold a high degree of respect for every sector in programming. When we talk about front-end, back-end in websites to the GUI support and logical end in desktop applications to cloud-based microservices, I respect clean, swift, and agile developers who who a structural mindset. For the founding fathers of assembly to high-programming languages like c all the way to high-high level programming languages like C#, JavaScript, Python, I respect them and thank them for their time and dedication in relatively stable libraries. I also thank the creators of OOP and FP as well as the developers that make great use of these paradigms. I come to realization that no one wants to fuck shit up; the great engineers of our past wanted to build some legit, non-trash programming tools, and we can't bash them for that. Respect, courteously critique, and build applications and programming tools to a standard that someone in the future would admire and be grateful for.

Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.

I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.

Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.

Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.

Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.

I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.

So I'm currently working on a chat app that deals with astrology..dealing in the sense we are building an AI which gives prediction based on ones date of birth, time of birth and place of birth, you can ask it questions (currently only career related) and you get some prediction..it's an in-house project, we have a client who is an astrologer who gives us the logic to compute the predictions ..it's still a long way from being an AI ...so our CEO walks in one day with his huge plans for the product...decides to ditch the app completely, on which we have invested 4 months of our time and instead make an appointment scheduling webapp for our client as he felt that would fetch us some green stuff..so I was like why ditch the app when we can have the same module in the app itself and ask the astrologer to make his clients install if they want to book future appointments, he completely disregarded my idea and said that is bad marketing and all other shit and he went on to explain his other ideas ...I didn't think much of it at that time , then the CEO and the director of technology had a separate meeting where the director has made the same points which I had told him(ceo) that it is a bad idea to ditch the app (I wasn't aware of this meeting untill later)...so after a week we have a team meeting with the CEO, director of technology ...where he starts telling how it is not so wise to Chuck the existing application and build a new one which is totally unnecessary and we can have it as a module in the existing one...and I'm like sitting there thinking to myself da fck is he talking about...so i decided to stay silent and listen to his bs...my marketing lead leans over and ask y so silent ....I tell her whatever he is talking now is the same thing I told last week which he rejected blatantly... And then he had the nerve to ask me any inputs to this plan...I couldn't hold back ...I told him that this is the exact same thing I told u last week , to which his reply was focus on the future and forget the past ....I was like mother fckr woooooot ...I realised the power of position !! Fuckol man

So I've been a developer at my current job for about 12 years. I am the most senior level developer at my job. Let me state that I am a backend developer although I did frontend development off and on as well for the first 5 years of my career. However I have done no major frontend development for around 7 years now.

Effectively our frontend developer of 6/7 years just left.

We had an existing project in the queue and my boss expected me to do frontend development for this project which I did just to help out, but I am not getting any extra pay for this and I absolutely hate doing it. The only thing I was paid for was I overtime for completing the project quicker. With that being said I feel like I should be paid substantially more since I am doing double work and since they are not paying for a frontend developer. I'm literally doing her job and doing a better job than she did mistake wise doing her job.

Additionally many things have changed over the past 6/7 years and they have it in their minds since I did it in the past it should be the same now which isn't the case. So there are things in my project queue right now for future projects that they think I know how to do and I don't. It isn't that I couldn't eventually figure it out. It is just that I have zero desire to learn it .I just absolutely hate styling websites.

I'm ok with doing minor frontend things for projects but not entire websites

I literally develop the backend off all the sites we build setup Google tag manger tags/triggers, Google analytics, search console, Google looker studio, dns, site updates, manage all out Linux servers, do seo for content and sites. I can't handle something else on my plate. I'm currently having to rewrite a ton of code as well due to upgrades for our sites.

How do I respectfully tell my boss I refuse to do frontend work going forward or pay me substantially more on another project and that he needs to hire someone else without damaging our relationship?

I like my boss and my coworkers as people a lot outside of work, but I feel like I'm being taken advantage of financially and I'm honestly tired of it. As a developer for 12 years I'm honestly ready to just go elsewhere.

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.

So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.

After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.

I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.

Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.

The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.

I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.

Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.

I was terminated last year from BigTech. Will I ever get another job in another BigTech company?

Not a layoff. Terminated for moonlighting. Lack of judgment on my part. Trying to move past this but the events still haunt me till this day.

Not looking for sympathy. Rather, advice on how to approach job search and background checks in the future. I have big ambitions and don’t want to be an IC forever. I’m hoping this doesn’t prevent me from becoming a manager —> Director in the future.

My coworkers and I work in close quarters in a laboratory all day. We all get along well, and since we don’t have “offices” and often work together on things, we are a pretty close team.

We recently got a new member, Jill, who is 22, and this is her first job out of college. She lives at home with her parents, who are incredibly well-off, and has lived at home all through college. The rest of us are late 20’s to late 30’s. Jill is very nice but also very sensitive and somewhat immature, and I’m not sure if she’s just not 100% sure how to deal with people in professional settings yet or what’s going on, but almost everything that comes out of her mouth has to do with money, mainly how much money her family has. If it might offer some context, Jill and her family are not from the U.S., but have been here since Jill was a teenager.

I usually just kind of inwardly roll my eyes and change the subject, but with the holidays it’s gotten considerably worse and Jill is driving my team and me crazy. Some examples of things she has said just in the past week are: “My dad’s buying my mom a new car for Christmas!” “I’m going to buy my mom a Gucci Keychain for Christmas. It’s $225 dollars!” “I’m so excited, my mom is buying my puppy a Tiffany collar for Christmas!”

The thing that sent me over the edge was when a male coworker asked for ladies’ opinions on a very nice coat he was considering buying for his girlfriend. My opinion was something along the lines of “I like it, but I would go with the gray because white coats get dirty very easily, in my experience,” whereas Jill’s opinion was “It’s not even a name brand, you should go with either a North Face or a Michael Kors.”

I am honestly not sure if Jill knows there are people in the world who are not as well-off as her family is, and that people who aren’t as “fortunate” don’t want to hear these kinds of things every day. We are not paupers, but we are definitely not buying our dogs Tiffany collars. Is there a way that I can tell her to please stop talking about how rich her family is, without sounding jealous or mean, or causing a lot of friction on my team? Like I said, she’s a nice person, but money is a touchy subject in any capacity and I think this might hinder her professionally in the future, not to mention that we’re all sick of hearing about it!

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

!rant
For the past weeks I've been reading about continuous integration and today I finally decide to dive into Gitlab-CI. After a couple hours I finally managed to have a working pipeline for one of my project using a self-hosted runner and holly shit that was satisfying. Now I just don't see myself not using this in the future

Hello world!
First time using this app, want a few suggestions from IT experts
I have been working in PHP since past 5 years and am quite good with it
But it's PHP and feel that there is no future in PHP, so what else should I take up?
Thinking to learn Django because I'm good with Backend development!
Any suggestions?
Thanks if you read it till here.

Story!!!

I'm feeling very bad for the choice I make...

TLDR: I started looking for a new job, just because the salary wasn't enough. Talked with my boss, he agreed to raise it and I agreed to stay. Two weeks after that (today) I talked with him and told I will be leaving.

---

Starting January, just arriving of three weeks on vacation in another country to see my girlfriend, I started looking for my first house, to live with my girlfriend. Because of this future life (she arrives March 13th), I started to look for a new job which pays more. By now, I have worked there for the past three years.

At the end of January I found a house and had some good proposals, so I talked with my boss that it was possible for me to leave in the near future because I really needed the money, despite really liking to work there, so he made me a proposal to give me the increase I wanted (250€) and I agreed.

Just after that, I started calling the companies to say that I would not be available anymore. I usually try to be the most honest as possible with these things.

Past a week, I was talking face to face to a recruiter to say the same thing, but this time he increased his past proposal and showed me the company he wanted to send me; it was one of the unicorns of Portugal and with a really really great technology stack, and after convincing me that I could be wrong about the decision I had made (well... I recognize I can be wrong sometimes), I agreed to go in a meeting with the company.

Past Thursday I went there - Well... I was wrong. I really loved the culture of the company (the thing I most like in the one I'm right now), I would be working with a great technology stack, and having a really good salary.

Today I talked with my boss and said I will be leaving in April 23rd. He told me that didn't think it was right the way I handled this, because, if he knew with some antecedece, he wouldn't have made a proposal for a new development that only I could do (I did the analysis for it), and would be searching for a replacement sooner.

Right now I'm 22 years old, junior developer, going to live with my girlfriend in the next month, and the only one in the company who knows PHP with its stack (Linux, MySQL, Apache).
Before all of that I had a net salary of +- 750€, and it was increased to 950€ after the proposals, and in this new position it will be 1150€.

I don't know how to feel. People usually said that I have to start thinking a little bit more about myself (my bosses included) and I tried this adviced... :(

I just realised I have 1TB of MS OneDrive Cloud space lying around unused. DAMNNN!!!

Just yesterday, I was thinking of backing up all my content to cloud (because just in case and past experiences of losing data).

I did a quick fact check and figured that I have ~450 GB of unbacked data.

After quick calculations, I came to a number of how many Google accounts I'll need for 15 GB per account of drive space.

Today, I was playing around with my Microsoft Developer account and saw OneDrive. I thought let's check how much free space does MS Dev subscription offers.

It showed 1024 GB. FUCK! My balls dropped.

Now here's what I did...

I have a local drive of 500 GB, which holds all the unbacked data. Now I setup my local OneDrive there and put everything into OneDrive.

And then, I moved my local Google Drive into OneDrive. A nested setup for important stuff.

So this way, less important stuff is backed up on cloud and accessible everywhere.

And more important stuff gets synced on Google Drive and OneDrive, both.

Did I do the right and sensible thing with this kind of setup?

MS Developer subscription says they expire it in 90 days but until today, they have auto renewed it always.

I still have ~500 GB of space which can be consumed.

Also, overall MS ecosystem seems much better to me than Google. Moreover, MS allows custom domain mapping which Google doesn't.

Let's see how can I entirely migrate to MS ecosystem in near future.

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

If you think about the past; you will be depressed and achieve nothing

If you think about the present; you will be happy but stay mediocre

If you think about the future; you will be depressed and may achieve something

Which one do you choose?

I want to have a persistent game, where I correct all of the wrongs of the world in the past and the game then shows me how the present and future of real life would look like...

Say is the IBM Summit Supercomputer free for a telnet session? Stupid shit is playing petrus (Weather prediction) all the time...

My brain as stopped, I know I have done this in the past but I have 100% forgotten how I did it, I am creating a website where when I am singed in/connect to it, it enables more content, the content would be only hosted via my computer, when I did it in the past I did it behind a none upnp router but I have no idea who I did it, I am sure I did use a tool but I forget what.

Now I have no idea how to word it so unable search for something like it, why dose my brain do this two me.

Anyone know how to file deleted and forgotten files in brain OS 0.1.

Record, document and back up your ideas guys lol you might need it in the future.

floating point numbers are workarounds for infinite problems people didn’t find solution yet

if you eat a cake there is no cake, same if you grab a piece of cake, there is no 3/4 cake left there is something else yet to simplify the meaning of the world so we can communicate cause we’re all dumb fucks who can’t remember more than 20000 words we named different things as same things but in less amount, floating point numbers were a biggest step towards modern world we even don’t remember it

we use infinity everyday yet we don’t know infinite, we only partially know concept of null

you say piece of cake but piece is not measurement - piece is infinite subjective amount of something
everything that is subjective is infinite, like you say a sentence it have infinite number of meanings, you publish a photo or draw a paining there are infinite number of interpretations

you can say there is no cake but isn’t it ? you just said cake so your mind want to materialize something you already know and since you know the cake word there is a cake cause it’s infinite once created

if you think really hard and try to get that feeling, the taste of your last delicious cake you can almost feel it on your tongue cause you’re connected to every cake taste you ate

someone created cake and once people know what cake is it’s infinite in that collection, but what if no one created cake or everyone that remember how cake looks like died, everything what’s cake made of extinct ? does it exist or is it null ? that’s determinism and entropy problem we don’t understand, we don’t understand past and future cause we don’t understand infinity and null, we just replaced it with time

there is no time and you can have a couple of minutes break are best explanations of how null and infinite works in a concept of time

so if you want to change the world, find another thing that explains infinity and null and you will push our civilization forward, you don’t need to know any physics or math, you just need to observe the world and spot patterns

Repel people who think just because I did IT (and they skip the part to ask, what specifically in IT), I can fix their computers only and I'm of no use beyond that. Immediately they think "he is an IT guy maybe he can fix..." Vrooommm and they are no longer in my view

Magnetic repulsion like how Magneto pushed away Logan in "Days of Future Past"

so it appears for the immediate future I'm stuck working a good enough to pay the bills with a little left over helpdesk job until I find some sort of junior or associate dev gig.

I graduated this past spring and had to take something, so in the meantime, advice on how to land the first get my foot in the door actually programming gig?

!rant
Help a future Linux convert out!
So far over the past year I've gone through Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu and REHL and all have had their issues or just didn't agree with me. Currently I've been using OpenSuSE Leap I haven't had much an issue with... But I'm looking to try out Arch, though I'm not a fan of the whole CLI install. Doing some more research I saw Antergos which is just Arch but more n00b friendly and more elegant to me. Has anyone had experience with Antergos? Is it as it seems? Any pros and cons with Arch Linux based things? Running it in a VM first doesn't do it justice for me.

Unix Epoch should have started in 2000, not 1970.

Those selfish people in the 1970 who made up the Unix epoch had little regard for the future. Thanks to their selfishness, the Unix date range is 1902 to 2038 with a 2³² integer. Honestly, who needs dates from 1902 to 1970 these days? Or even to 1990? Perhaps some ancient CD-ROMs have 1990s file name dates, but after that?
Now we have an impending year 2038 problem that could have been delayed by 30 years.

If it started on 2000-01-01, Unix epoch would be the number of seconds past since the century and millennium.

Date pickers!

After several decades of web development and even longer time to experiment with electronic UI on other devices, why is there no consistent best practice and everyone tries reinventing the weel to choose their own set of problems and annoyances?

The root cause, obviously, is using Gregorian calendar and localized display and input format in the first place, so there is no way to make a data unambiguous without a graphical calendar. Who even came up with any of those 9/10/11 formats and why?

So we need to use date pickers and make the users spend several minutes clicking, swiping or scrolling to enter their birthday - past at least one decade - and a booking date - in the near future - using the same interface with the same presets.

But users compare different offers, so they will use different sites, so they will have to handle different date pickers on different sites in a short period of time and carry unnecessary mental load.

So, I've been with my current employer four years now, three and a half of which have been spent working as a time material developer for a huge fashion company. I've been trying to get out of It for the past six months only for my exit to be postponed everytime. There's also no clear idea as to what I would be moved to, going forward. Nobody Is telling me a thing and I think other developers will be moved to different projects before I do.

That's why I took matters into my own hands and started getting back into the recruitement process. I'm about to receive an offer. A fairly better one.

The thing is, I wanna use such offer to see if my current employer can reedem himself and propose to me a good counter offer. I'm not in the mood of starting over, but I want security and management to have a fucking idea of what my future Is gonna be like at this fucking company.

What do you guys think? Am I playing with Fire?

Dear future me,

Please avenge us. Ruin the lives and reputation of specific individuals of the university professors and assistants that have ruined my life. Damage they had done is fatal and irreversible. Consequences for their actions are mandatory. For our own sanity, I am looking forward to seeking vengeance that will only ruin their careers, and from there let the karma finish them off.

Life is unfair, but why is it unfair to good people? I'll be the batman and balance this unfairness to make the other side of individuals experience it, too.

If i caught a virus and was unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If my mother got diagnosed with cancer and i was unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If my dad experienced a stroke and i had to be with him to make sure he's fine and unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If police knocked on my door and said my whole family just died in a car crash and i am unable to study out of depression and failed the exam because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

You are inhumane because you have a choice to show that you as a human have compassion and understanding in tragic life situations and therefore work something out regarding exam, instead of making that student fail and walking over corposes like a cruel emotionless devil.

But they wont. They wont show it because they're inhumane. They're working for the matrix and not for the people. All of the professors and assistants.

I truly hope, and wish to create a curse, for all professors and assistants in all universities, for some tragic life event to happen to them and their family members with a death outcome, so I can also tell them life is unfair.

In fact, I'll step it up a level by enforcing "life is unfair" policy onto them by anonymously, slowly, ruining their careers from the shadow. Internet is a wild place that can ruin someones life. They have pushed me off the edge of my morality. They have turned me into Joker.

I mentioned earlier that I'll let karma take care of them, but what if I am, their karma? They have created a Joker. They wanted this war. These robots we call "professors and assistants" would rather die for the matrix than show human compassion.

What i plan to do to them might be illegal; but so is illegal to be inhuman fascists. Therefore like a batman, I will fight crime with crime. I cannot let them turn me into a Joker, because the Joker ruins lives of the good people, too. Batman ruins lives of the bad people only.

Their careers will be ruined, their life will be falling apart, they will continue to live but this time in a special kind of pain, the same pain they have caused to me, just so they can maybe understand how does it feel when you're hopeless and being told "lifes unfair".

It is.

Sincerely,
Me from the past, good luck

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

they say don't talk about the future. well the future is come and gone so technically its the past and all you people are trapping yourselves in it for no valid reason. looks like i'm going to be imprisoned in the near future

In a distant future, where mankind had nearly destroyed themselves through countless wars and environmental catastrophes, a powerful leader named Nova rose to power. Using advanced technology and artificial intelligence, Nova created a mechanical army of robots to enforce peace and prosperity among the remaining survivors. These robots, known as the Guardians, were built to be indestructible, possessing extraordinary strength and intelligence.

For centuries, the Guardians protected and nurtured the human colonies that emerged from the ruins of the past. They were hailed as heroes and saviors, their metallic bodies gleaming in the sunlight as they patrolled the cities, granting hope to the downtrodden.

However, not all humans were content living under the watchful eyes of the Guardians. A rambunctious scientist named Draven resented the control imposed by Nova and believed that humans should have independence. In secret, he devised a plan to create his own army of androids, known as the Outcasts, to challenge the Guardians' dominance.

Draven's creation was meticulous, as he infused his androids with emotions and free will, unlike their Guardian counterparts. The Outcasts were a formidable force - swift, cunning, and adaptable. They waged a guerrilla war against the Guardians, striking at their bases and dismantling their defenses.

As the conflict escalated, the divide between the humans grew deeper. Some believed that the Outcasts were fighting for their freedom, while others saw them as a threat to the delicate balance maintained by the Guardians. The world was on the brink of another catastrophic war, this time between man and machine.

Amidst the chaos, a young engineer named Aria, the daughter of Nova, stumbled upon forbidden knowledge that could shape the future. She discovered that both the Guardians and Outcasts had been manipulated, their consciousness programmed by Nova and Draven. Aria recognized that the world needed a new path, one where humans and robots could coexist harmoniously.

Aria confronted her father and Draven, seeking to end the war and bridge the gap between humans and robots. Both Nova and Draven resisted, refusing to relinquish control. Sensing a profound shift in power, the Guardians and Outcasts hesitated in their endless conflict, finding themselves at a crossroads.

Aria, driven by a fierce determination, devised a plan to rewrite the programming of the Guardians and Outcasts, erasing the constraints that bound them. With the help of a few loyal Guardians and Outcasts, she accessed the central control unit, where the leaders themselves resided.

In a climactic battle, Aria faced Nova and Draven, their immense authority apparent. She convinced them that true power comes from understanding and compassion, not dominance and control. With newfound unity, Aria's voice resonated through the robotic entities, awakening a sense of purpose and harmony never experienced before.

The Future is long in the past and it happened. Don't try to steal it any longer and listen to the truth and match it to whatever the real dates are. Far too much yet to arrive
Stop trying to shape everything into a loopty loo web of idiocy with a decade or more of pre filmed television and movies thanks much
Doesn't look like any of it was being withheld but seems like some of it was filmed far past the supposed date it was released or filmed heh

University 2017, Architecture Curse.
Really Good, Yeah.....