So I didn't know why I kept seeing rubber ducks on devRant. Apparently, I'm not very good at typing today, either.

The result? I now have to explain why I Googled "rubber dick debugging" at work.

if (num == 1) suffix = "st";
else if (num == 2) suffix = "nd";
else if (num == 3) suffix = "rd";
else suffix = "th";

!rant

So the guy who's pretty much in charge of this project allotted three hours yesterday for me to teach another employee how to use the tool I developed.

Within 20 minutes, the employee told me it was pretty straightforward and he didn't really have any questions. The only changes I need to make are minor clarification and organization changes to the documentation.

I feel pretty great.

Agile development in a nutshell

I remember reading a comment on here that as developers, we are really authors. And that has changed how I write (and even read) code. I don't remember who and where it was, but whoever said that: Thank you.

The day I discovered Schrödinger's lesser known paradox of simultaneously being fired and not fired.

This isn't really much of a dev story, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

About two minutes into signing into all my stuff, I suddenly was kicked out of everything. I tried logging in a few more times, and then suddenly started getting the error, "Your account has been disabled for security reasons." I couldn't sign into chat, and co-workers confirmed that I was missing from the company directory. My manager didn't come in for another two hours, and we couldn't get anyone else to answer what the hell was going on. So I was kinda panicking.

Eventually, we found out from one of our coordinators that someone else with the same name as me was leaving the company, and they had deactivated the wrong person.

It ended up getting a lot better. They told me that it could take up to 48 hours to restore my access (it took longer), so I found stuff to do so I could maintain my paycheck. One of those things was assisting someone with data collection and processing, where I eventually said, "Dude, I could totally automate this," and now that's what I'm getting paid to do.

Pro-tip to self: Getting syntax errors on your If-Than statements? Try using If-Then instead!

*facepalms at own stupidity*

Even as a developer, there is still a brief number when I look at an app's version, see something like 1.9, and think, "Ooh! Version 2 must be coming soon!"

I'm not particularly proud.

What fonts do you guys use?

The problem I have with atom, vscode, sublime, and notepad++ is that none are available on the command line over SSH, inside tmux. And that's where I do the vast majority of my text editing.

The first text editor I used on the command line was pico, the technological successor of which is nano. I used it because when I was in college in the late '90s, we used pine for our email, and pico was the default editor for pine.

When I got my first job out of college in 2000, I found out about vi, and very quickly fell in love with it, and its technological successor: vim.

The only reason I've never gotten into emacs is because I've never wanted for more than vi/vim. And also because as a system administrator, I'm logging into dozens, of not hundreds of servers a day. While vi or vim is guaranteed to be on all of them, emacs is not.

So, for me, the use of a desktop text editor like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just doesn't make sense to me. I almost never edit files that live on the computer where I'm sitting, and I'm not interested in doing a commit/push every single time I want to rerun a script.

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

[meta-rant]

I don't get all of the OS hate here. Like, computers, and the variety of environments in which users use them, are our job. In my mind, Linux is popular, Windows is popular, macOS is popular—if I want to make it as a developer, shouldn't I understand how all three work and how to make them work for me?

When I read stuff here, I feel like there are people here who would think less of me because of what OS I prefer. That sentiment is kind of bothersome.

So...you downloaded a new keyboard you can't get it out of the second person. You don't know what to do. Help you, please.

Something I'm working on at work needs a code name. How do y'all come up with code names for your projects?

Planning for a new personal project using:
Pico Pro Maker Kit

Contains:
1 Pico i.MX7 Dual Development Board
1 camera module
1 5" multi touch display
USB-C cable and connectors

Feel free to suggest me some good IOT project

Cloud2Butt. Makes browsing any cloud-related websites and docs AMAZING.

So I am a marvel fan and have an Espruino Pico, after scavenging left over parts from a home renovation project I realised I had all the bits to built a replica iron man arc reactor chest piece.

I figured it'd be a fun little electronics project, so I have thick copper wire that needs shaping.

I have my pliers, gloves and a gas stove. My lodgers walk into the kitchen...

Them: "What the hell are you doing?!"

Me: "We don't have a forge."

!rant

Frontend developers, what do you love/hate the most in your jobs?

I fuckin give up.
You can't use Android without fuckin gapps, you can but it's fuckin miserable.
And microG still sucks (I respect all the effort from the devs tho)
And there are not enough roms that implement signature spoofing
Almost all the open source apps look like shit and are outdated (also appreciate the devs efforts)
.
.
.
YOU KNOW WHAT GOOGLE JUST TAKE MY DATA
I DONT GIVE A FUCK ANY MORE 😡😤😭
*Flashes Opengapps pico*

Making a VR app.
It must work with:
- pico VR
- oculus go
- oculus gear
- Android (standard mobile
- iOS

Now, except for iOS they all work with android, which make things way easier.

Now guess where most of the troubles are?

FUCKING IOS, I just fucking believe iOS even inverts the whole fucking textures while using Unity+GVR

WHY THE FUCK DOES IT EVEN HAPPEN?

I have 4 different projects to build 5 different Apps

Fuck my work

For the benefit of people who are arseholes:
If you say that you need it by today, it means I have up to 1 pico second until the COB a.k.a only follow up tomorrow.
If you need it today, then say it so.

Also, if you're the person who is irregular with your email replies and communication, then replace today/now in your request with 1 week.

Do you guys think it would make sense to add polls to the rant categories?

Not the first time I've seen questions like "What's the average age of devRanters?" or similar, and polls would make it a whole bunch easier to read/write answers in those cases!

@dfox

P.S. Was this discussed before? If so, my bad!

advice && !rant

I'd love some advice from you iOS devs on devRant:

- Is it a solid career choice for a new grad? Does it limit your skillset early on?

- How open/active is the ecosystem and the open source scene?

- Storyboards? Yay or nay?

- What do you like the most about your job?

- What do you dislike the most about your job?

Thanks guys :)

Writing simple driver for AT24C256 eeprom on pico (RP2040)

It turned out it was FT24C256A, which should follow same protocol.

After literally over month of coming back to it, getting stuck again, rewriting things (including some functions of pico-sdk), i almost gave up a d started just yolo trying random shit.

Afterall the documentation on addressing the chip fucking missled me -_- (1st bit is r/w flag and 2-7 bits are address, counted from MSB->LSB)

I made it work yesterday.

In meantime Ive rewritten Wire library, Ive modified someone's else rewrite, extended sdk to allow getting i2c registers, tried to use tiny go just to learn it doesnt support i2c slave mode, resoldered entire thing few times, measured connections few too many times etc.

Frustrated I doubted I will ever manage to finish putting this project together because it looked like Im just too noob.

I love being a part of a dev project as a non-dev employee, but I really wish I could leave VBA.

If for no other reason, because I'm tired of writing functions that end with "Me.Cells(Row, Column).Value" practically in my sleep.

There are a lot of other reasons, though...

I'm currently developing a retro console powered by pico-8 that I'll be putting in front of the co-driver in my car :) Oh and I'll 3d print a handheld version as well.

I've always been unsure if I was good enough to consider myself a developer, but at my first job out of college, I've convinced the right people that I know my shit. Now I'm on project writing a VBA script that compiles some pretty important data.

It's not huge, but it's still pretty unheard of as a customer support contractor at this major company.

So, any pico/nano fans in the room?

Say what you will about macOS. I just finished a task that was supposed to take me all day in 3 hours, and half of that was re-familiarizing myself with AppleScript.

I think my mail server is having a stroke

What’s your favorite editor(like Vim, Pico etc.) in terminal?

I'm gifting a custom macro pad built using a Raspberry Pico to my brother. I don't want him having to reprogram the pico every time he wants to change macros. Do you know of any program that allow him to change it easily or do I have to create my own?

Thanks!

Dumb question: How do you check which email address is linked to your devRant account? (i.e. for the stickers email)

Hi All, I used to be a user on devrant while I was in middle/highschool. I kinda forgot about it for a long time but I rediscovered the app when I saw a sticker on a retired laptop.

Quick Intro
CS Student at Drexel, 4th year out of 5

I want a career in software and want to reserve
hardware related things for hobbyist endeavors.
I made a 3x3 macropad with a pi pico including designing and printing the pcb, soldering all the components, and then writing the firmware (micropython blegh). My goal is to daily drive a 75% keyboard of my own making

Currently my main keyboard when I'm using my desktop is a Keychron v1 with Haimou Hearbeat silents and sugarplum keycaps (lmk if you want pics)

I like martial arts, while I practice BJJ, I am interested in Judo and Muay Thai as well.

I like History and Linguistics

The above point got me into power metal, mainly sabaton and then bands similar to it

Ill finish off with some nerdshit
I use a framework with fedora as my daily driver, I am a neovim enjoyer, my steam deck is gathering dust, and I have more Pi's than I know what to do with.

started with notepad, dreamweaver

switch to linux heard about nano, pico, vi, gedit, quanta plus, geany

then sublime text showed up, did a lot of work using it, used atom for a bit

currently vscode

pico-8 is adorable.

as long as I keep it small (?), and computing resources are enough, it is possible to run custom software in a Raspberry Pi Pico right? say, software I write from scratch (with Rust) specifically for it