!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:

Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.

Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.

We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.

We LOVED that computer.

Fuck,

I've been charging everything with the oculus quest 2 charger because it's very powerful but it just blew up my headphones. I did this often before but this time was a whole night.

I hope I can still get this great headphones, it had such good volume & bass. It's the cheapest Fresh & Rebel but the sound quality and battery is great

So I bought 2 dvd packed with old rpg games.

I didn’t know my first quest will be to get those games working.

To make my life more miserable I decided to convert those dvd to iso.

First I needed to find computer with dvd because those I use apparently don’t have dvd anymore.

Found one with windows 7 inside.
Yeah first mission complete.

Now just find dvd to iso software and burn those bastards.

I need to update date / time to be able to use internet over https.
Checked.

Started looking for the dvd to iso software. Microsoft answers giving links to bloatware with detailed instructions how to install desired things without crap. The link to download doesn’t work but at least I have the name ImgBurn.
They have website so I click on first mirror and run setup.
First fail they’re linking to bloatware that downloads another bloatware that installs some search plugin for firefox.
Uninstalling search plugin.
1 hour passed by.
Clicking last link. Success.
Now time to click it smart to omit any unwanted software and get only what I want. Reading trough install instructions and checking out not wanted checkboxes is like great quest.
Finally I have what I want and I can backup my dvd.
What a great evening.

One evening I put on my Quest2 and have some fun with the Climb2. I fell off the cliff a few times. Next morning my 5yo wakes up with shitty mood and tells me he had a dream how he was on a hill and fell off. It wasva bad dream.

A few days later I was watching The Troll on Netflix. I like this king of genre so I was enjoying it. Next morning my kiddo wakes up all excited with 'daddy daddy, I've had a dream of a mountain!'. 'Did you fall off this one too' - I rush to ask. He says: 'no, but the mountain stood up and it was like a man!'

he's been asleep both times. I was with my headphones during the movie and on 1bar of volume during the climb. He's never seen neither the game nor the movie [or any troll, for that matter]. And I'm not making this up.

How... How the hell did he do that. Do we after all float in some wibbly-wobbly ether we can communicate through?

I have desktop pc that I use for gaming on windows from time to time but most of time it stays turned off.

My gaming experience is usually:
1. turn it on
2. wait for windows update
3. turn it off

Doing same quest over and over, how I’m supposed to get to the next level ?

I don’t have so much time for gaming.

I decided I am going to get full into Minecraft modding. It will be an opportunity to learn Java and Kotlin. I want to explore some game ideas in a well defined sandbox.

Some things I want to explore.
1. AI that helps you build and survive. This fascinates me and seems like it could be a good challenge. I like the idea of learning how to separate structures into chunks. I think I will learn a bit about tree data structures here. Maybe learn something about BSP trees (if applicable).
2. The idea of an RPG quest system tacked onto a sandbox. I want to spawn structures and create non-repetitive story lines. Minecraft can be really desolate if you are not playing on a server. Worlds tend to be empty and devoid of story.
3. Maybe try a hand at terrain gen. This could be fun to explore entropy math. It is fun to draw things with math.

I am sure I will come up with other fun things to explore here.

How did your quest into the dev world look like? That's mine:

First time: Age 12, was in a C++ evening class for like 2 weeks, I undetstood nothing.

Second time: Age 16-18
Fiddled with scripts for steam games and jailbroken my iPhone while fiddling with aystem configs. Nothing major.

Third time: Age 19, learned Python in a Cybersecurity course. Failed miserably because the tutors were shit, thought I hated programming.

Fourth time: Age 21, developed a lot of scripts in my sysadmin job, one of them needed a GUI so I leanred C# and WPF. Enjoyed it so much I eventually enrolled in a Java 10 month course.

Fifth time: Now, age 22, learning Android and Fullstack javascript by myself. Enjoying every moment.
I still work as a sysadmin though.

In my quest to ditch iPhone, due to there ridiculous prices, i have been looking at android based alternatives. Never (ever) used android b4. So, as my son is getting to that age that he is pleading for a phone, I decided to buy a Wiley Fox Swift 2. This has been great as my son loves it. From a UI perspective it really makes iPhone seem dated. From a UX perspective, fuck me, it needs work. Comparatively IOS is such a piece of piss to configure and use. I don't envisage that I will switch to android any time soon my wallet is not going to be happy.

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.

So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.

I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.

In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).

I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.

But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.

I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.

Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.

DREAM 1
(my comments look like this)

A kikiland metro system. It's extradimensional and shapeshifting. When you enter it, it adapts to your needs. The people inside (they're probably just vinyl shells), the social circumstances, all generated for you.
When you enter it, it knows where you want to go. It spawns exactly one train just for you. It will be the first, it will be the last. You have to catch it to go where you need. If you miss it, there will be no more trains, and you have to wait till the metro station closes for the night and reopens.
It's always you entering, catching the train that arrives just in time, going to where you need to go and exiting.
Because of its extradimensional nature, you cannot agree to meet someone there — every person has their own personal metro generated just for them every time, with exactly one train going exactly to the station you need.

It's used by BLA as a form of control. When they don't want you to go somewhere, the train won't spawn. Or, it might diverge and get you to some other place. It isn't known whether the map can be altered on the fly or not. So far, the consensus is that the map is persistent and is a public knowledge, and it's just the metro itself that is extradimensional. But, no one ever saw the real metro in its real form, and not the top layer that protrudes into the three-dimensional world you can interact with. It might be the case that they can make people disappear by creating ad-hoc stations that don't intersect with the real world, trapping them in places that are nowhere in particular.

(it took seeing BLA once in one dream to make all the following dreams include them. Sigh.)

Kikiland also has a school, and it always had it. I befriended a chemistry teacher there. His classroom is small — exactly as deep as other classrooms, but really narrow. There are no desks there, just his desk and some bookshelves. Chemistry isn't a priority there — his class exists only because it should. No one attends it. This is why he was so pleased to meet me. Despite his classroom being located on a busy floor, its door is overlooked by students, and NO ONE ever enters it. He just sits there, waiting for students to arrive, but they never do.
He has a secret, though, because of course he does. In the game Control, if you complete the main storyline before you complete some side quests, one of the main characters will be sitting in the C-suit hall, doing her things, waiting for you to come and talk to her. But at the same time, she will be waiting for you deep down the oldest house's mines, again, just sitting there, waiting for you to take the quest. This teacher is the same.

If you have a good relationship with him, and you attend his class, the classroom will change to a tunnel entrance, with him being the security guard. He's your friend, he'll let you in. It looks like Fallout's vault entrance. THIS is how you enter the REAL kikiland metro. (Dream 1 ends here.)

Episode 2
Tiny waterborne rat puppies whose mouth is their entire face unfolding like a piece of paper with teeth covering it as a grid. (I wrote about them already, but here they are again.) They are _tiny_, a bit like tadpoles. Also, like tadpoles, they die if you touch them out of water. As I was flying over some mountain resort (I routinely fly in my dreams, but it feels more like a very low gravity falling I can control, like using a parachute in GTA San Andreas), I dumped them to a location that resembled the garden level of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for my cat to eat. It didn't want to.

Any of you in VR/ AR development? Would love to transition to this area, but not sure were I should start. Thought about buying Oculus Quest 2, installing Unity or UE and start hacking around.

What was your path?

Playing Sierra Online games like Kings Quest and Thexdar on an Epson 8088 with duel 5 1/4 floppy drives and no hard drive. I don't miss the days of having to swap disks when moving between different areas in the games.

I remember when my dad got a 486 DX/2 with a 300 MB hard drive and I could fit all my games on it. Prior to that on the 286 that had a 40 MB drive I created a batch file with a menu to select a game that would unzip the game and launch it, then when I exited the game it would zip it back up and delete the directory.

Need advice for buying VR capable PC or laptop.

Basically, I want to start developing VR applications and run VR games through Virtual Desktop or Air link through Oculus Quest 2, which I will buy next month (no, I don’t have money to buy Valve Index and invest in new stationary computer), but I’m not really sure which setup I should buy. I really don’t want to spend more than 800 € for a computer. Can anyone share their experience and computer parts bought or recommended?

Thanks in advance! 😊

Which VR headset is best to develop applications for? HTC Vive or Oculus Quest 2?

Ok so.

You know you have to deal with annoying things when you take on a guard duty role and yes, we signed up for it because of the mullah.

However, you also want to do this with a reliable and robust monitoring and alerting systemthat you can depend on! And no i am not going to advertise a product for this... What i will tell you is which one to avoid.

Meet Quest "Foglight" ... It does EVERYTHING! It monitors, it alerts, it does trend watching it does fancy shmancy graphics, it does reporting, it is very extendable... WAUW, right! right?

Well, if you were stuck somewhere in 2005-2010 maybe... But this fucklight is cutting short on EVERYTHING

Today , i got called up at 3:30 in the morning (i am typing this after the incident) because this shit of a system has "HIgh Availability" by basically letting the FMS server suck each others jaggons and hope it somehow respons. This is a sort of keepalived thing, but on proprietary java tech..

Oh, yes, it's written on java and... yes.. Java 6
This means that, effectively we are running RHEL5 machines (yes, RHEL 5!!!) because something more modern in place? nope.

I have no idea anymore what i am ranting about, i'm tired, i'm tired of this shit, i'm tired of getting called up just because of some dude has been cussing up a sales representative, sucked each others jaggons and pushed the federal goverment with a shit solution for almost a decade now.

Fuck Foglight
Fuck Quest software, because did you really think you would get enterprise level support for an enterprise product which you payed enterprise euro's for it? You are so naive, how cute...
And consequently : Fuck Dell and Good job Dell.. For purchasing quest software, mess around with it, and then dump it back to the market... Srsly Dell , you were like me when i had this hot ass chick as a girlfriend but later seemed to be too crazy to justifiably tolerate compared to her hotness. Dump it like it's trump.

Oh, and, wauw! Foglight graced us with a successful startup process after .. what.. 6 times restarting? In 2 hours... With 12 CPU's and 128 GB ram and .... oh fuck this you don't deserve such resources.

1. Unending relentless quest for learning

2. Linear memory capacity

3. Uninterrupted autohealing capabilities like sleep