My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

Slack.

A product which I hated in the beginning, is something that I have started admiring now.

Like Telegram, things just kept improving without bloating the shit out of the product.

What's interesting is that they came up with Huddle, an instant call and connect feature where they support Audio and Screen sharing.

Totally a game changer and a Zoom killer because Zoom could be even better in terms of UX.

Functionally, hands down, Zoom is flawless but slowly it's becoming an overkill.

I am excitedly waiting to see how both of these compete because Slack surely has an upper hand in this game.

After this weekend's work with React and Material UI, I started thinking about the downsides to going that route (particularly social media sharing & SEO). The obvious solution is to render server-side, but then you have to ask yourself...is there really a benefit to all of this, or are we just coming full-circle and pretending this is better? I'm all for something that improves maintainability, performance, and reliability, but I feel the more I try to keep up with the latest fads, the slower I work, the more compiling and caching b.s. I have to deal with, and the less I trust the final product to "just work". Anyone else feel this way?

Bought a product using Apple Pay at the grocery store, by the time I got home Facebook was advertising to me the same product. Really? Is there a Facebook+ApplePay link sharing my purchasing data?

Why are clients so brain dead?

I've had a client insist for the last two weeks that I provide them with a high level technical specification for fucking OneDrive because our product is able to embed HTML inputted into the CMS.

I've literally had hours of meetings with over a dozen people where I'm trying to explain that just because they're embedding some PowerPoint HTML into our CMS doesn't mean we need to or even can provide technical documents.

This is a huge company with an equity of over £50 billion by the way. I swear the bigger the company the more incompetent the employees get.

Their whole issue stems from one guy not understanding how basic logins and file sharing permissions work + their IT doing security fuckery to screw up which machines can login or access what. So I made and sent them a flow diagram explaining it, out of some naive hope that they'll now leave me alone.

I still don't understand how any of this is my responsibility just because these idiots don't understand that our product is separate from the HTML they've decided to put into the CMS. I don't think any of these people know what they're asking me for when they keep insisting I send them technical documents for a Microsoft owned product that we have nothing to do with.

I'm sure I'll be stuck telling them to talk to their own IT team over and over again as they schedule meetings every few days until the heat death of the universe. Then I'll finally have peace. Either that or somehow one of them finds this post and I get fired.

How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?

My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).

What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.

My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.

So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.

I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.

Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.

So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Researching a new communication platform (Twilio, Vonage, etc), I started with Plivo. Created an account, they offer from free credits to try out the platform, so I set up a phone number and attempt to use their API, didn't quite work. I contact their support through their online portal (being very detailed about what I'm trying to do and the issue I'm having)
A day later they reply asking "Could you tell us how you are using Plivo and the issue you are having?"
That would be OK, but my question from the online portal was in the body of the email message. My first reply started with "You not reading the <bleep>ing message is my issue right now.", but I copied and pasted the same message. I even included a screenshot of the API I was having a problem with (so they could see what I see).
Next day I'm trying out a different area of their API and there is a banner "Incoming and Outgoing phone calls are disabled on this account. Contact Support blah blah blah"
I thought, OK, its a trial account, they probably want some additional validation before allowing anyone to make phone calls. I jump thru the hoops, next day I receive an email "Thanks for sharing the details with us. I have reached out to the Product Team to assist us with this and I'll share more details with you as soon as they revert."
Revert what? The block? Waited until next day, banner still there, so I replied again. Not another reply until the next day.
"Our internal team analyzed the account details and unfortunately, we would not be able to remove the restrictions from your account."
WTF!? Plivo, we are going to give you *money* and you can't answer my question! I'm not asking for free stuff, not asking for help finding the 'any key', your API is supposed to support XYZ feature and it's not working...OK. We're done.
I try to close the account (has too much of my personal info I don't want these clowns to have) and I get an error 'Unable to close the account'. WTF!

Client wants to see his project so he can provide its content.

The product where this is based upon should be a monthly edition of grouped articles.

I've yet to see content for their concept or even legal text that makes sense.

Same person has no idea of the full concept of what he's asking, imho ending up in a Ponzi (which I've switched to a somewhat more logical system, which just might work, but just isn't a get rich quick scheme anymore as he likes to portray it).

Should I just put on a blank page and be done with it, either way?
- Either he gets it, that he needs to fill up the website's content himself
- or he's mad, that I didn't finish the job (while he's the one needing to provide at this point)

Product Owner (PO) the problem with this sharing widget it loads slow and people might scroll past it.
Me: ok. Let's make it fixed on the side of the page so that it's always seen, but not intrusive.
PO: No. It's not how the brand should look. And it might cover 1% of the skin ad. Let's make our own widget.
Me: that would require to create several apps on social networks and maintain the code internally instead of using a centralised service that many people already provide. You don't have the money for that.
PO: sorry I got distracted by this bird outside the window.

I have this fried that gives me some advice on how to find work, he said i need to come up with a project idea as something to put on my CV and also as a way to learn front-end dev.

Easy enough if not for the fact that this project should be something that's actually useful and has some concept behind it (like, something that might seemingly work for a startup)

I've been raking my brain for a week now, and all i can come up with is small meme projects, neat but sort of inconsequential experiments, or things that might be useful to me but have no reason to be web-based.
I never realized how hard it is for me to come up with professional-sounding project ideas :D

I'm just not that kind of guy, i don't really have the drive or motivation to do anything professional: If people wanna use my rice or whatever spaghetti software i create they are welcome to, i'll even write them some documentation, but its just kinda out there on the internet because i like sharing. I don't really have any grand product ideas, nor do i really care about what other people think or need.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?

I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?

Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out

Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from

I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off

Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well