We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Being a sysadmin, it's pretty difficult to get around the whole development of front-end stuff.. positioning, scaling, and everything... I hate it. So many ideas but only the ability to make the back-end and if it involves electronics that as well as networking. But building a pretty UI is beyond me... I love hating on all the frameworks and Node, but in all honesty.. front-end people, I kind of envy you 😅

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

1. Bullshit coding challenges that you wouldn't be any good at unless you were doing the same stuff like yesterday. For an entry level job.

2. Stupid tech leads, who can't see people smarter than them so they bring you down in an interview to feel better about themselves. They'll ask you stuff they know is outside of your scope. Mine often ends up being about networking.

3. Stupid HR questions, that basically ask you to ass-kiss the company.

4. When you're actually better than the interviewer at just about anything, including maths, so you have to tiptoe around their ego and not call them out on being slow.

5. When they don't even give you a chance. You enter the interview and by question 3 you know they're gonna reject you and you never had a chance to begin with, so internally you start screaming for the money you spent on the new coat to impress these fuckers.

6. Salary negotiation when you're broke and you'll work for anything that covers your bills and food, basically.

7. Explaining the gaps in resume or radical changes. Like why I was a barista for six months after six months of being out of work.

Okay so this is just a rant about my personal life because if I post it any where else no one will really care.

So I graduated from a vocational high school where I learned about basic IT and networking skills but I mostly focused on my programming. and I LOVED that school honestly the environment was so amazing and everyone and everything about it was amazing. then I started college recently hoping for the same thing and its just depressing me, and my depression is coming back and I cant stop it because I cant distract myself from it. My friends are always off playing Monster Hunter Ultimate and Im just wishing theyd hop back on Warframe so we can play again.. They say they will but they really wont so im usually just playing alone or going online which is sometimes fun if you have people that talk back.

so i took myself to the official warframe discord to find people that would help but everytime I ask I just get ignored. So Im stuck playing alone.

while thats happening Im not really getting any messages from anyone besides my girlfriend which is nice but she isnt able to really keep up a conversation and shes often busy with school as well. when I try to talk to any of my friends they arent really interested to talk or just send short replies that obviously tell me to go away. one friend in particular she and I used to talk everyday not even in a romantic way just straight up besties for life, but after one of my relationships ended she basically took her side and never talks to me now. Ive just been really lonely and wanting to just have my friends talk to me again or just have some programming friends I can chill in a discord server while we code but I cant bring myself to ask anyone on the specific server im in for programming..

Honestly idk if anyone on devrant really looks at my posts and thinks "oh look Bubbles posted again". I feel like im not good enough to be here because Im not nearly as good as all of you, Im mostly just here asking questions or posting extremely fucking long posts no one wants to read. and yet this is still where most of my interactions are and I love that this devRant community makes me laugh or feel better about myself sometimes. and I thank all of you for that and I remember your @ 's all the time.

honestly the only real highlight of my week was when my teacher of my vocational class asked me to come back as an unpaid intern to help teach his new programming class and It made me happy but other than that I havent been too happy.

if anyone actually got through this holy shit youre awesome and thank you a lot its appreciated.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, finally!

After months of searching for a damn bug I've finally found it in a 5h session. People increasingly started to worry whether this bug has been introduced because of a recent update of the programming language, but I finally found the bug in a dependency. Nobody thought it would be the dependency, because it wasn't updated in 9 months, but it seems like the update improved the networking a tiny bit, whiche caused a buffer to load a second mesage sooner than expected.

I can finally work on my side project again!
Fucking finally!

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

Classroom fuckery: I'm in a Computer Information Technology program and I usually spend the last hour of class working on code. Most of the people in this program are going into networking or security. This kid looks over and freaks out, starts yelling that I'm breaking into the school's network. I was on freecodecamp.com.

The new mobile app codebase i'm working with, was clearly written by someone who just read a book on generics and encapsulation.

I need to pull out 2 screens into a separate library to have it shared around. The 1 networking request used is wrapped up in a 'WebServiceFactory' and `WebServiceObjectMapper`, used by a `NetworkingManager` which exposes a generic `request` method taking in a `TopLevelResponse` type (Which has imported every model) which uses a factory method to get the real response type.

This is needed by the `Router` which takes a generic `Action` which they've subclassed for each and every use case needing server communication.

Then the networking request function is part of a chain of 4 near identical functions spread across 4 different files, each one doing a tiny bit more than the last and casting everything to a new god damn protocol, because fuck concrete types.

Its not even used in that many places, theres like 6 networking calls. Why are people so god damn fucking stupid and insist on over engineering the shit out of their apps. I'm fed the fuck up with these useless skidmarks.

Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?

I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.

They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.

"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."

The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.

Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.

We should start with demystifying tech...
For most people, modern phones, tablets and pcs are magical rectangles...
The law of Clarke says, that every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And we have to tackle that.
In geography, we should talk about gps and glosnas
In English or foreign language lessons, we should speak about translator bots and language patters/abstractions
In physics, we have to understand the measurement devices
In politics, we have to speak about licenses of use, we have to speak about netneutrality as a political concept, we have to speak about snowden, shadow brokers, the vault, all the laws some shady imperial beauroticians pipe into our life.
Trojans used by the government and so on...
In cs concepts of operating systems, abstractions and networking should be taught, instead of using excel.
That could be done in math...
Well... No one should have to work with excel.
In maths they could use Wolfram alpha, rlang and gnupolt for example

At a networking event. Tired. Not a people person, especially when tired.

Found a secluded empty booth, pretending to do some urgent work. Hoping no-one notices I'm not socialising.

How long can I keep this up is the question! :D

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

I've really struggled to make friends with people who code... and it's been absolutely frustrating. Does everyone in this industry have a god complex or something? Everyone I try to make friends with ends up being super narcissistic and self obsessed it's crazy. One of them wanted to be my mentor a while back, and we still talk occasionally, but after getting to know him I decided I didn't want to learn from him. It turns out he only mentors people to showboat his greatness and claim later that all their success is directly his doing. I decided I wasn't going to be one of those people and I only ever had 2 sessions from him. One of the best choices I've ever made. But I've found a lot of people who are programmers tend to be a lot like him. A lot of them I talk to will hit me up to brag about themselves or what they've done. But none ever ask what's been up with me or how my journey is doing? Is this just a normal thing in this industry or am I just meeting terrible people. It's made me appreciate my slightly dumber friends, cause at least they care about me and it shows.

More a rant than anything, but genuinely curious if anyone else has this issue... I'm starting my bootcamp soon and I'm hoping to make friends but I'm so concerned about this it's kind of giving me anxiety.

!rant
Walked into the networking area to visit my network guys and sys admins.

They just got a whoooole bunch of equipment.

Shit looks intimidating af man. Mad respect for you sys admins and networking people. Seems like a really cool job, difficult and challenging at the same time!

Hello, my name is Adam, I'm from Poland.
As a 16 year old dude I thought it would be a great idea to go to an IT focused highschool so I'd get my degree after finishing school but guess what- I completely fucked up.
First, there were the little things, like the teachers favoring other students that already knew stuff, which was okay and all- the problem began when Poziomka appreared (one of our PC service teachers). That motherfucker almost fluked me because of dumb shit like the PC's we worked on took forever to boot, so he's just go and give people F's, "Why?" you may ask- well because "It was obviously the student that made the PC run so slowely".
There were a few more incidents like when we were disassembling and assembling those dumb HP Compaq's PC's on time- and that fucker gave me an F because it took about 10 minutes to boot by itself.

That shit got me so demotivated its unreal, soon I found myself in a pretty dark spot, with my parents divorcing, my whore mother taking all the money- me not finding any reason to do anything in school and the cycle looped.
I'm not gonna pull the depression card here, but what I'm generally trying to say is that although I'm not "awful" at IT in general, so PC assembly, networking, programming (fuck that, I'm fucking awful at it), HTML, I still find it difficult to do anything right.

I have a question, how do I get myself back up? Any ideas?
There's so much material I've gone through in the last three years- and I just wanna make sure to get good- somehow.

I'm just a talentless dumbass kid who just wants to know how to do linux, programming and such, but I don't know where or how to start anymore.
If anyone has any stories where they turned their life around and managed to do IT right- please, tell me how you did it, I just wanna know is there a proper way of doing it.

- Adam

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

TIL how time-delay relays are used in circuits with a hell lot of power. For example to power and control the motor of a machine that lifts 20 people up to the sky and back to ground again.
FYI this is a simple circuit. We will hopefully start experimenting with SPS/Speicherprogrammierbare Steuerung (Programmable Logic Controllers). I cannot wait to make use of our predesigned circuits with complex logic gates with the new unit we will get to know.
Unfortunately, we will do practical networking (testing cables for the signal strength and speed, building a network of telephones and call each other - guess this is going to be the funniest part lol, etc.) before the SPS and LOGO software phase.

Btw. I am doing an all-nighter rn and repeating everything we did in our recent signal calculation lesson. We have another exam tomorrow.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

One inappropriate experience I can think of is during an internship at a multinational company that made networking and electrical components. My mandate was to do an analysis on the electrical performance of the company's products versus the competitors. It took me something close four months to measure, to compile data, do an analysis and create a report.

Then came the time to show the results to the engineering director. Let's say the news were not good, so I figured people should have their hears opened. Anyways, my supervisor and I made a presentation to abstract the main points so the information was not too difficult to process.

10 minutes into the presentation, the director of engineering just fell asleep and was snoring quite loudly. I asked my supervisor "should we wake him up?" and so we did. When he woke up, he asked us to wrap it up and pretty much gave no fucks about the results or the presentation. Nobody really cared about the results after that. Talk about wasted time lol.

Luckily I don't work at this shithole of a company today.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

well... I decided to build my own network for my home lab and then I head out to go shopping.

I went for a router and I told this guy what I wanted

a good router that could allow me access the internet when I want over my phones hotspot or supports USB tethering.

guess what? this blessed guy sells me a router locked to optus. I saw the "yes optus" tag but I was so fucking stupid and clueless.

why? I was just too fucking stupid to trust a fellow Nigerian by telling him I have no idea of networking and how routers work.

the router ? netgear n300 dgn2200

did it have the features I wanted at least ? no

he refused to collect it back and I sold something very dear to me to be able to buy that crap. I thought I could solve all my networking issues at once.

fuck these people, bad government bad people.

I'm done crying over it though.

any ideas on how to go around this?

I've been looking and looking for the past two days, for a less destructive option.

Soo... Let me get this straight... My boss reeeeeeally wants me to reconfigure our database system to sync data between each of our 15 sites... Let me this about this...

Our database is an MS Access database originally written about 17 years ago. It was written as a standalone database that runs a unique instance for each of our sites.The person responsible for the database (still not the original developer) before I took over 6 years ago bragged about how they were "an 80s developer" (w...t...f!). Even with all of the fixes and additions (additions because... F&$#ing of course there are!) It's still basically held together by duct tape and spit.

Hmmm... Ok, still possible. What's the environment I'm working in... I have absolutely ZERO control of our workplace network... That's a whole other department. Due to the nature of the workplace (and it's sites) there is extreme limitation on network access.

Well... If I'm Reeeeeeally nice to the people in charge of the network, maaaaaybe they can give me access to a little server space.

A very long shot, but, doab.... Oh, the boss would really like this handled in the next couple months...

F$#k you! There is no way on God's (still) green earth that I... Alone... Can rewrite a legacy database... written across 4 or 5 different versions of FU$KING MS Access, and give 15 sites, with extremely limited networking, real time data sync in... Oh, a few months.

Now, I do not work with "computer people". I'm usually lucky when my coworkers remember their passwords (which, even if they don't, WHY tell ME! I don't run the network!)

And when I tell my boss basically what I just said... In a nice, pleasant way... They suggest I'm not giving the problem enough thought...

FU#K YOU IGNORANT ASS! Write me a ToDo list in MS Access (no, I'm not going to tell you where to start) in under an hour then, MAYBE, we can talk about... No... Just NO... Can't be done!

*Takes deep breath* so... Lovely weather we're having, right?

Second big school project. Designed for at least 2 people. Quite a lot of work for the given time but not impossible to do, as I thought. Oh boy was I wrong.

My partner and I chose a networking project which included setting up a ESXi-Server, a VM (with Windows Server 2008 R2) and a router. We are both not unknowledged so I thought this would be easy-going.
I quickly recognised that my partner liked to spend his time at home rather than actually doing something so I ended up doing nearly everything.
When it came to documenting everything he tried to write something, but it had so many mistakes i had to correct it over and over again.
I asked him multiple times, if we should split and he denied every time and promised to work harder.
End of that story was him being expelled from school because of to many missed lessons and me finishing the project alone. Got a B+ for it.

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

I'm too young to have taken my last job...

Enough with the jokes. I have been networking with a lot of people through the years of working at companies and that paid off.

When people trust you for your knowledge, then it's normal to attract business offers. Also, you can partner up with people. That's how my last job started and is still going. At a previous company, I interviewed a guy who had the skills and motive to replace me, but he didn't get the job cause my boss was stupid (he was lucky not to work there, for real).

After I left, he called me to offer me a partnership. One year later and we are killing it, became good friends too.

What is the social networking programmers use to communicate.
Hey guys.
So what program do you guys use to communicate? Something that I can drop here and not behing spammed. Time to start creating my own network arround you guys... You know, smart people.

Is just me or being a developer has become a complete nightmare?
I mean, I never expected when I got into it to have a simple life in the first place, it's a fucking problems solving job.
But heck, I'm in the field from more than 12 years and something has definitely changed for the worse. Believe me I am just seeking for a general consensus not approval or anything, but it doesn't feel anything like 10 years ago.

I have worked with .NET mostly in all his sauces from aspx, wpf, up to today .NET 10 and C#13 and in the meanwhile it happened that I needed to do tech assistance, code in exoteric shit, use arduinos and raspberries, use perl, java, turn into full stack with databases, devops and shit.

Each year it's worse, the "developer" word gets more and more blurred word to say "the one who must know everything".
I'm asked to know docker, kubernetes, kafka, CI/CD and devop shit, web dev, to get ertifications, to learn how AI works to the level of learning again matht to do matrix interpolations, to get on data science, python, numpy, pandas, pytorch and shit, to know every OS, to know about networking because APIs now have to use rest, a single verb for every action, because if routers and new communication protocols break you have to know and figure out why.

Not to mention that marketing and sales guy shove up the big customers ass every new tecnology to make our work look like bling-a-ling top notch 1% developer stuff that always use latest bleeding edge technology and you're forced to learn new immature frameworks every 2 months or so (latest being various javascript/typescript diagramming libraries).

Every idiot feels entitled to puke out a new framework or supersets of existing languages. I lost count how many supersets css has that I had to peek and learn lol.

Every fucking simple software I did from scratch and designed by myself, web portals for big pharma were much simple than whatever PM i get assigned to are and guess what, I published it and fixed ofc some bugs, but most bugs are related to customer unstable datasets and well, I never had bugs after the first few weeks, except once every few months and nothing serious.

The fucking things they let me do now are hypercomplicated and I spend days fixing other people bugs and we get some hair pulling structural problems becuase they shove in all they can (mediator patterns are a must): kafka, docker, messagebus, whatever javascript clusterfuck they can, patchworks of html and css blurred out in layers of hierarchical scss or sass, slapped into angular (the most immature and crappy shit in js) that has all of his hidden ways to bury and hide DOM (ng-deep: anyone? :host anyone?).

And it's all like this. Whenever I put hands everyone wants to do his little frankeinstein experiment cooking togheter in a cauldron a shit ton of different stuff, overcomplicated patterns.

it's a challenge at shooting flies with bazookas.

I'm really tired of technology at all, not only for my jobs. This fucking trend is a plague spread everywhere and now, since everyone has to deal with it, everything is unstable.

In my daily usage of a smartphone app crashes a lot or have weird troubles, slowness, websites are pretending to be full blown app with this shitty SPA trend and are filled with bugs and incompatibilites.

Basically every tech tool we use is 100% more prone to bugs than 10 years ago.I'm really thinking to find a simple job like baker or shit and get an old phone that just can call and send SMS.
I need to get out of tech for a few years to get back my sanity.

This is not a problem-solving job anymore.
10 years ago I needed to study too but once I got the tools in my hands the job was fun, you got a magic wrench and sky was the limit.

Now you got to fucking learn a ton of bullshit everyday and it's not like you see a end on it, everyday people push out new unstable and bugged shit waiting for devs to be guinea pigs for them. You gotta learn a ton of stuff of which 3/4 will be useless/obsolete/broken and considered inefficient the next month.

jeeeeeez

Learning programming, networking, robotics, and other technical skills are very important but do not forget that these are future working software developers.

They will need to know a lot more intangibles. Like effective pair programming, performing proper git pull requests and code reviews, estimating work, and general problem-solving skills and more.

These people will be learning technical skills for the rest of their life (if they are smart about it) but what can really get them ahead is the ability to have good foundational skills and then build the technical skills around them over time.

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

is there some trendy definition for "keyboard pattern" that im unaware of?

seriously though... while not always current on whatever scammer\phisher\wannabe hackers\etc are doing... im still one hell of a, beyond capable, cyber security pro... mainly cuz I've been networking professionally since half-duplex existed, know, and thoroughly enjoy data architectures, encryption and things like hardware drivers and low level systems down to the literal, physical\mechanical and digital bits...

basically,i have a rare viewpoint in comprehension; I'm used to nonsensical tactics being enforced as if they were actually valid (basically everything other than a min length (~6+) and *don't use basic words found in a pocket dictionary* is typically a double edged sword).

so wtf do they mean? i mean, technically, everything typed can be a keyboard pattern... itd be like how people say "vps" when they are talking about a proxy.

How the fuck am I supposed to fucking keep working if these fucking clowns add mandatory peer code review and passing build gating on main repositories (which I completely agree with to be fair) but they don't fucking review pull requests at all? For fuck's sake, am I the only one that reviews them seriously and promptly in this shit ass fuck company? I follow all the recommended guidelines so don't bullshit me with "iT iS nOt FuN tO rEvIeW pUlL rEqUeStS", do your job or just remove yourself from the fucking gating process, you worthless admin ass crust.

And don't get me started on fucking builds that fail randomly because some worthless shit bucket added unstable networking tests as unittests somehow, making your pull request get auto-disapproved by peers upon failure.

I got so many pending pull requests and management won't do fuck all about it because they won't force people to do their job by fear of pushing them around and get HR complaints that I am tempted to simply give up and just start playing videogames.

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

I'm a tiny bit happy today.
Recently I've been noticing that I'm developing a tolerance for deeply crowded spaces. I don't know if the AC/DC concert was an effective shock therapy or something.

I'm not at the point where I can comfortably head outside into town by myself yet, but I have a feeling that it's not going to be too long until I can.
Maybe I can even find some joy in "being under people".

Maybe make some contacts, friends, whatever.
The biggest challenge will probably be getting over my, I guess "crippling" isn't the right word, but close-ish to it, self-conscious.
The worst thing is that as of yet, I have no idea why I'm still like that.
I think I know the root cause, but that's not something relevant right now.

Hell, I go out with friends, guys and girls, and eventually it goes like:
>"How come you are not dating someone?"
>"Can't really. Can't go out and fine someone, also I think I'm not good-looking enough."
>"Bullshit, you look awesome."

That's coming from close friends, hence why I don't believe it's just some "oh, he'll feel better if I compliment him" shite.
I somehow am unable to gain self worth from compliments.

[...]

In other news, I got a certificate at the FernUni Hagen for a course in IT project management.
Also, my programming and solution finding/problem solving skills are improving noticeable. I think.
I'm not in Uni or anything, but I feel like I'm getting more competent/professional in my development activities at work.

Contrary to what I stated above, I can gain self worth from good work done.
...which worries me, because I am afraid that eventually I'll only be able to feel good after having worked myself to the metaphorical bone.

In job college, I talk to my classmates.
Turns out, everybody is mostly sitting on their ass doing fuck all at work. They are telling me that I'm a workaholic.
I think that I'm either going mad, or that they are lazy fuckers.

From Wednesday to Thursday evening, three colleagues and I went to the CAS Partner Preview Day & CAS Customer Centricity Forum in Karlsruhe. Lots of talks (mostly boasting about themselves), some workshops and a lot of "networking opportunities".
Stuff which I mostly consider bullshit, but I never would've figured how effective it is to put on a smile and feign interest in things.
Some of that feigned interest turned into actual interest and we "networked" for hours.
It was a good training for social interactions outside my direct comfort zone.

Thank you for reading the ramdump of my mind.
$./felix
Segmentation Fault
Core dumped

!dev Has networking with people ever efficiently and effectively helped you getting a job? I have my doubts on the method.

Can someone explain to me what is meant by, "full stack," nowadays? I see posts by people saying they're, "full stack," but don't know anything about Linux, networking, databases, or daemon configs.

How can you possibly call yourself a full stack engineer if you don't know anything about infrastructure?

Honestly guys, I don't like to go to meetups and I'll tell you why:

You just sit there listening to a badly explained piece of the puzzle by some guys who care more about networking credit than the technology itself.
I know there are meetups with real enthusiasts but even then, I find the level of depth very unsatisfactory because they barely scratch the surface on the topic.
You end up leaving the event having wasted your time and your evening, while you could have been out doing something much more fun.

Here's what I do: I look up the meeting details and I see what they're going to talk about. Then, I look up information about that and I study it on my own.

Advantages:

* I get a lot more information than a mere one or two vague words about the topic combined with some silly demo that doesn't really teach anyone anything at all

* I get to digest the information at my processing speed

* I don't have to deal with the stress of trying to make small talk with people I don't know

I'm sure someone has felt like this at one point or another, especially in corporate.

Alright, so, let's say you're me. 16 years old, just started a summer job at a networking company. It's me and three others, and the people who hired us, quite frankly, aren't as prepared as they should be. So we get our first task at around 4, are told it's meant to last the week, and go home. Get back in the morning, find out someone did all the work overnight

Exam in networking in a week. It's a group project with individual presentations. No one but me have done any work until now, so I threatened leaving the group and do everything myself, which I am able to, since I have a lot of experience with this before university.
All people reacted but 1. He hasn't returned any messages nor met at campus in over a week. How should I react to this issue?

ISP's technicians and customer support people who have no clues about networking.

What are your plans for Christmas?!?!!??

I normally won't engage in societal tropes like pointless, generic, smalltalk or those questions people ask for lack of independent thought/societal trope-isms....

Here's my templated answer this year:

Background = ~2k$ in piles of tech... server upgrades components, apparently the only managed switch left in business/non-custom enterprise networking in the country/indexed for sale
(2k in what I would pay.... my tech sourcing is more base level and +4 years pro exp(yea... since age 8... really))

Foreground.... a shiny ✨️ new, wonderfully discounted for dumb reasons that i appreciate... 10Tb LFF HDD! 🥹🥲🤩

I really like raw data... enough raw data and proper context relevant high-level, custom, precise algorithms and i genuinely believe literally any questions or problems can be quantified and solved for

So... I just keep getting data, life, sourcing, stats on human behaviour... i factor everything

Yes i realise im very odd

//initial context plus curiousities
As parsed out to somewhat tangential commentary below... i cant keep making people go away for societally viewed polite engagement. Therefore, when asked again by factory sales rep who enjoys verbosity and apparent finds me extremely worth his intrigue/personal time

// additional context (and my attempt to be more parse and comment conscious)

With a bunch of initial reveals and launches startjng in a week and technically being the "owner/boss"(cringy to me so Ive officially made my title (anywhere with custom input fields) DragonOverlord...dragons being a tied in theme to all sects and no one can say DragonOverlord isn't a position... as it's clearly a class... unless you find a human more style code ignorant, comment inept, and in need of a very multilingual scribe to create a lexicon 2 steps before my code would be even follow-able without a likely, bad, headache and davinci code like adventure including the improbably well placed wise scholars that just happen to have significant unique and vital information they are willing to freely share with strangers.

I been looking over my profile and god it's been a while, programming as still been going on in the background but more for game mods and alikes, kind of been lazy but same time dealing with life.

I really had forgotten my passion for tech and programming it's just become a tool I know and use and I kind of feel bad for doing that. I got in to computers when I was 6 years old built my own PC our of random spare parts at 7, was teaching family members how to repair there own pcs by 9 at the age of 11 was helping with the schools computer department repair and fixing networking problems and my ideas and comments mattered.

Now I am an adult ... Sadly it seems the enjoyment of any idea is shot down with some rude remarks from another Dev, but isn't the point we all see a problem different so we all can contribute?

Like I said I never worked away from computers or programming but now I more like your little side computer repair shop I can do it, I get the job done but the passion isn't there and the end result reflects it.

I believe it's the human part what put me off not just others but myself, I used to put my heart in to my projects and when someone comes alone and rips them apart for let's say a spelling mistake what I state everywhere I am dyslexic but seems to be over looks alot. I became more stale in what I was willing to take on. My own websites now reflect this I am using crappy reinstalled software over me doing it myself.

But the passion for the idea what tech and programming never left I just hope one day soon I am enjoy it again, the wow factor is still there, god there is some talent out there and some of them people I meet before they became big but my aim was never to be come big I would be happy to be on a small project what only as a few eyes on it as long as it makes a difference and that's my problem tech like everything as become so commercial.

Even small projects are ran like a company and the wow factor is gone or the risk factor of trying a unknown way is dismissed for trying to keep face.

If I was born 20 years before right now I would be glad to slow down but I am 30+ and seen the world change so much in this last 10 years where I can do it but .... Why would I do it, when most cases it goes out of my moral ideals

I still mess around with teck, I still have Pi's kicking about and you bet your bottom Dollar I will be trying to get a Pi 5 lol

The love of tech hasn't gone but the communities I enjoyed have, I know this is a me not adapting but I don't need to adapted, I want what we do to matter to someone to make a difference, and I mean with there life's and wellbeing not there bottom line.

If you have any communities to look in to please comment below and of you was able to read this then OMG I am so sorry, I didn't proof read this or anything it was just a little rant about how I become disconnected from the world I have always found enjoyment.

I slipped away to game at late but this last few months I seen myself wanting to be apart of a project or community for tech/programming and even just be a voice helping even someone else get the answer.

I do still have hope for the geeky nerds of yester years even if we are now just a relic of the past lol

Well sorry to put anyone's eyes though this lol enjoy your rants guys and keep up what ever projects your working on.

Walking past a conversation with people and over hearing the term CNN, thinking its about Convolution Neural Networking. Long story short. Im standing here between people discussing news resources. Fml

Okay so anyone experienced working with networking or VOIP applications are welcome to try to help me figure out a few questions I have.

1.) How do VOIP applications like Discord and Skype not have to require you to port forward before use?

2.) If I wanted to do stuff with sockets over the internet the user of the application would have to configure a static IP Address. but when Im using Discord, or a multiplayer game, or literally anything that requires connecting to people I dont have to configure a static IP for those applications but I do for mine?!?

3.) Is there any additional information I should learn about whilst trying to make my networking application (File Transferring application) work? or any links/PDF's I should check out?

These are kinda just things I haven't found answers to, and I didn't know where to ask.

I was ten years old. At this point, despite being in my early 20's, I've officially been programming more than half of my life. From the first moment I knew that this was possible, that we, as software engineers, can do what we do... I've been quite literally obsessed with the idea.

I don't like to give other people credit for the events in my own life, but there is one thing that, more than anything else at the time that lead me down the path of computer science, directly lead me to where I'm at today. If you're at all interested in film and cinema (not to mention programming) then you've undoubtedly heard of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Amazing film, I'd recommend it to anyone based off of the film alone, but for me that movie holds a special place in my heart.

My mom took me to see it that movie in theaters when it came out, I would not stop bugging her to take me, there was just something about the founding of Facebook that... Sparked my young imagination. I swear to you that I didn't blink for the entire time I was in the theater watching it. It blew my mind, not only that you could do that kind of stuff with computers, but that you could actually make a lot of money working with computers as well... Ten year old me had different priorities in regards to programming 😂 Starting the moment I got home from the theater, I dedicated my life to learning everything I could about computers. Originally my goal was to, shock of all shocks, create a social networking site for me and my friends to use. I still like to brag about it to this day, but that project eventually became my groups final project in our computer class in Middle School. It was funny, middle school computer class, I had already been programming a few years by that point and was rather proficient in PHP. There were kids submitting literal spreadsheets in Excel as their final project, a few static HTML pages, that sorta jazz. My group and I submitted a full fledged twitter clone, with complete functionality. We got 100% on the project 😂😂

My reasons and interests have changed over the years. For example, I'm not particularly interested in creating a social media application these days, and I don't program because I think it'll make me rich one day (though the hopes always there) but the one thing that hasn't changed since that night I sat enraptured in the beautiful cinematography of David Fincher and facepaced dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, is the complete and total fascination with computers and technology. For that reason The Social Network will forever be my favorite movie.

Note to self: keep not trusting online tutorials and ALWAYS, A.L.W.A.Y.S take them with a grain of salt.

Now why do you fine lads think `nmcli networking off && nmcli networking on` over ssh is a bad idea? And how to quickly make it suitable for over-ssh-execution? Let's see who knows shell! [HINT: see tags for an almost-answer]

... when people not sure what shell characters mean are writing tutorials... FUCK!

i had a project in a networking class where the provided code was meant to act as a proxy (aka just passing bytes around), but because of the implementation, every byte had to be a valid unicode character

anyway lotta people were frustrated so we asked the course staff and their response was basically "we wanted to support python 2 and 3"

...

Theory should be minimal courses, just something to think about and not something that expands through the entire curriculum as if anyone was to use it. Theory and fundamentals are enough, after that have career paths over what students want to focus on depending on a class that takes them through each different field: web development, db development, micro controller programming, os programming networking programming etc etc etc.

Basically, not :hey! here are some shitty basic programming classes, ok now let us move into calculus 1, 2, 3 etc etc. Most people come out of schools with no knowledge of what happens in the real world.

None of the networking people want to handhold the company VP during the all hands meetings (several thousand people over Webex's high volume broadcast service), so they all fumble around when they get in there.

The company owner rage fired someone in the networking team for screwing up. He has done stupid shit like this all the time.

It's one thing if it was some other time. Right now, firing someone, especially without review or for something so trivial, should be a god damn human rights violation. I've lost total faith in my company's management.

Least favorite enterprise software (so far) is Oracle JD Edwards (but more specifically the integration between systems).
Unfortunately a board member was friends with an employee who recommended JDE. It required full time maintenance and a few years later that employee left and the company wrote off over a million dollars to go back to the old (but slightly updated) system.
Following that, a board member (the same one I think) agreed to have another friend's security business install CCTV across the branches. The project was not scoped and no thought had gone into it, making a real mess for the IT department to sort out (provided hardware was under spec'd, existing networking equipment needed replacing, etc)

Who do these upper management people think they are that they can make decisions based on little fact or research and expect the people beneath them to just magically make work.
The huge salaries of those people is not justified. We're the real workers who actually get stuff done so the pay and appreciation should be spread accordingy.

Rant over.

I've been wondering for a while about something...why do so many devs complain sooo much when they have to to stuff not related to their main area of expertise.
I like learning and trying everything if I have the opportunity...backend, fronted, database, dev-ops, crypto, networking, virtualization...I stuck my nose in everything...but I see a lot of people moaning and despairing when they are thrown out of their comfort zone.
Like why...it's interesting... it's not always sunshine and rainbows but knowing something new in IT is never gonna hurt you...who knows maybe someday it's gonna help you get out a tight spot or land that awesome job you wanted.
Ok I'm done 😁

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

Looking for potential clients on Upwork is like finding a holy grail these days.

Cheap clients with laughable budgets and high expectations on the right.

"Devs" and "Designers" with questionable skills who will work for the lowest rate possible on the left.

And don't forget the ever growing service fees and absurd measures like turning your profile private if you don't make any income in 30 days. Suuure, that's totally going to help anyone who isn't willing to work with low rates.

I am getting done with Upwork. Back on Elance I managed to get a couple of really good clients for long term projects and good commissions. Here it's impossible, even with lower rates.

You're competing against people whose portfolio involves changing a few colors for a envato template or logos made of stock graphics, and they are still more likely to be hired over you because they are willing to work on a t-shirt design for $4!

Networking is where is at. Getting contacts, talking to people, force yourself to introduce to companies as a potential asset.

That's how you get the good projects, right?

... Right, folks?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

Writing open source can be so sad sometimes.

I would like to think of the internet as a place where people can find people, where everyone counts, but that can't be farther from the truth.

When I check a user's profile in devrant and see that they have a github profile, that's an immediate click for me.

But it usually comes with the sad realization that they have dozens of starless projects.

Many stars are not a guarantee of a good project, but 0-3 stars definitely means no one gives two shit about that (except maybe a couple of friends).

I'm totally ignorant when it comes to networking, and presenting a project you've done to communities of said language.

In fact, I tend to dislike communities because there's a lot of assholes in a lot of them, and sometimes, assholes that have more time in a community tend to be taken more seriously when disputes happen.

So I tried to stay away of them so far, but maybe I should engage and just call people on their shit regardless of the danger of getting banned, until I find that community where people are the least assholish.

Even then, I distrust the success rate of that, because I imagine there's a lot of devs out there, so when you join a community, what you notice is that there's a lot of noise so you end up becoming invisible because of that noise.

I'm not even sure of any of the things I'm saying here...

Sometimes....

There are easy things.

Like networking / routing / vlans / subnetting / loadbalancing and simple DNS (as in name <-> IP resolution, not the "other" stuff).

And somehow... People manage to turn it into something so complicated and insane that you cannot even use technical terms to describe it.

Simply because a lot of it was so mutilated that using the technical term to describe what it should do will become the total opposite of what it _actually_ does.

It's somehow terrifying... But might explain my migraine.

We played "Taboo word" for 3 hours straight, all technical terms were forbidden and I think I _might_ know now how it all works.

And I guess we'll have to restructure, rename and rework the whole network loadbalancing setup from bottom to top because

"This is sparta".

I wish I could explain it better.... But how? It's ... Interesting....

When you can't even explain stuff to someone else because you would need to invent and explain new words.

Discord server under development for software engineering, cyber security, networking, and IT talk in general. Looking to meet new people and talk :). @ me if you're interested in testing it.

It's finally annoyed me enough, I gotta ask...

Am I the only one getting annoyed at procedurals (the shows about crimes) and their accuracy irl, at least when it comes to timelines and alibis that are deemed as 100% uneditable fact... based on metadata and system log files???

Or is this another case of me assuming other humans must realise things i see as simple, should be common, sense?

If it's the latter... ANY system can be modded, timestamps have sooooo many ways of being altered from multiple angles, a few lines of code in an apk file on a dev mode device can make your gps show as anywhere in the world...

even a basic early 2000s runescape bot creator should know the basic methodology of this... and even OS-innate output of event logs can be set up to effortlessly mod themselves to selectively delete or rewrite upon the system's command to show them.

For anyone thinking im FoS/this isnt a simple concept of reality... or simply never considered the reality of how much less work it'd be to just commit whatever crime that high intellect people plan meticulously for years, often still getting caught... including via their own, or easily hacked timestamps/lack of alibi...

Wanna blow your mind?
...
If you remove all hdds/ssds and even all RAM, any external devices of any kind, cut off all networking, then put brand new, all 0s, storage and RAM in... then only connect directly to a totally direct connection to WAN (aka the internet via ISP... and your ISP has no malware etc)...

Without browsing anything, and a totally fresh, safe, OS newly installed to 0'd new ROM... no one actively finding/targeting you...

Can you already be infected with spyware/viruses/malware/etc?

YUP!

how? Someone who knows what dev u use and concise coding and drivers in binary... they rewrite your bios to turn on basic components, no fans/lights/etc... bios has the clock, u can be asleep, see/hear nothing while bios boots up totally dark, runs a cimmand to pull all the malware to u... youd be oblivious

Is data sciences/ML/AI a subset of web development and networking ? Most of the time i feel people need to know web development tools and languages to be successful in this ML/Ai/datasciences career. Should one go learn web dev first?

Why is perl soo notorious? and why do people hate it. Like I'm a networking guy and sys admin and I like to write scripts and it's really handy. Though it annoys sometimes but it still helps.

I wanted my MySpace and Xanga to look better and function better than everyone else's.

I created a very basic directory on my xanga linking people's real names to their respective xanga for my group of friends. I started getting requests to add people to my directory. All my friends would go to my xanga first so they could easily find our friend's xangas.

I created social networking.

lol jk.

But it felt good knowing that I made the Internet a bit easier to use.

the red haired girl and the blue haired girl.

there was this story about a programmer who spent years studying computer science before finally getting a job.

the dev studied only computer science and was put on blue team after a few days.

a few hours into one of the constant coding sessions, the boss told the devs that red team members and blue team members would be working in pairs.

the person from red team transferred the devs work to their data base without the dev knowing, then locked down the devs computer. the dev could not do anything. later, the dev got fired for not doing any work. after that, the company got millions of dollars, and the dev did not see any of it.

both the dev and the managers made a note not to hire any programmer who cannot secure their work.

it is not ethical to teach people programming without also teaching them cyber security.

computer networking, programming and security should all be the same major.

it is a bad idea to teach people how to build anything without telling them how to secure it.

the story above was just a scenario, but it probably happens way more often than people think.

Schools should teach both things in the same major.

Hey Arch people! Wanna help a newbie get started? I'm very comfortable with sysadmin and are currently using Ubuntu with XMonad for DE.

I'd like to 'build' my own, super minimal system. It should preferably have gtk theming with XMonad as de. I've been looking at suckless and are currently wonder what I actually need to prepare/know in order for networking, VSCode(or learn vim), QT and docker to run on the system. It has a Nvidia graphics card and I'd like to use it for ML too.

Dont worry, I'm also going through the Arch page and are looking for answers to my questions & thoughts.. I just know I haven't thought of everything yet, probably not even all the basics.

Oh and please roast me for my ignorance, as long as you tell me something useful 😝

Firstly give me the skill equivalent to the best in the field. If the rules allow it all of these skills listed and if not any of these :-
1. Computer networking to the point of having the same knowledge as the best in the field. Why? I am curious about that stuff and being able to work as a network engineer if I don't get a good Dev job

2. Cyber security. Why? I enjoy it and being able to make sure my code is not easily exploitable is a cherry on top. Also having a backup job in case I don't get a good dev job

3. Being able to communicate with non dev people about developer or non developer stuff easily and being a really good leader.

4. Being a good developer in whatever language I use and instantly being able to learn new programming languages and frameworks or libraries with ultra in depth information.

Have any of your guys had any success in networking? I feel like if I connected with more technical professionals I could advance so much further but also build meaningful connections with people who already have a lot in common with me.