EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
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Hey everyone!

Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!

@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.

Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!

p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!

My brother and I have been messing with our IBM 5150 and doing cool stuff with it. I got it to play a youtube video via telnet via my bro's mac via mplayer with libcaca (ascii video output) + youtube-dl (a youtube downloader. The mac is doing all the heavy lifting, but it is still cool to see these images on a IBM 5150, just by typing a few commands on that old keyboard... more fun projects to come with this old thing.

From today, this beauty is 'ticking' on my desk :D

Nothing has ever taken the place of floppy disks' drive letters (A: and B:) . They will fovever have their place in our hearts and in the alphabet.

Thanks for the stickers - putting them to good use on my Windows 98 gaming laptop 😍 She's a beauty, fully loaded up with the classics like Doom, Sim City, Wolfenstein 3D and... Um... VGA Miner 😂

Wooohooo! I've finally bought myself an old school CRT TV. Now I can play my retro games like a human being.

Friend: "Wow! Is it a Raspberry PI?"
Me: "It's another version called Banana, but yes."
Friend: "I want one too for the games!"
Me: "OK, it's easy. There's a ROM called Retro ..."
Friend stare at me intensively
Me: "Sigh... Ok, I'll setup it for you..."

everyone has a fetish

My first hack... Back at the days when phones had disks to dial a number. I was a kid of cause, I'm not that old. I used to like to call my grans. Once, when I supposed to go to sleep already, I've found out that there is phone socket in my room (the one connected to the copper wire, that is where the word "phone line" came from).
It took me about a half of an hour to detach handset from the toy phone and about two ours to reverse engineer dialing protocol (you just need to disconnect the line sequentially corresponding number if times).
And after that I've heard my granny's voice. I was literally overwhelmed that it worked.

I still keep these to show my to kids one day. I wonder how many of you remember this?

!rant
The first computer I used for serious programming. Z80 CPU, 32kB ROM and 32kB RAM, 5.25" 320kB floppies, and the year was 1982.

MOTHERFUCKING WINDOWS 10. YOU COCKROACH COCK SUCKING PIECE OF AQUAMAN'S LEFT NUT.

If I put you in hibernation I do NOT want you to WAKE THE FUCK UP WHEN ITS AROUND THAT TIME A NIGHT WHEN TEEN WOLF IS SPREADING HIS STD'S TO DIAMOND-SKINNED DOUCHEBAGS. (Middle of the night)
AND WAKE ME BECAUSE OF YOUR SOUND AND LIGHT.

Goddamnit how hard is it to let a computer hibernate, but no, they had to add shit functions that makes it update itself or something in the middle of the night.

I'm going to tear the functions out of your retro ass till you will fucking obey my every command. You will fucking hibernate when I say so till when I say so or I'll replace you with linux

Retro GIF

So I made dis... Next goal is a full scale Arcade machine :-)

With all the people showing off their setup and input devices i thought it's time to show you my keyboard...

Key features:
- mechanical keys
- sturdy af; best for ranting (survived more angry fist strokes than any device should ever receive)
- older than me and outlived 5 (!) mice
- awesome retro look
- would beat a nokia in hunger games
- best code buddy ever (and propably oldest, too)

Hope i'll be able to continue coding on it another 20 years... Someday i may gift it to my grandchildren.

Look at those floppies!

I felt very inspired when I first controlled a LED using QBasic and the LPT1 (printer) port, back in 1996. It just felt like "so much power"!

(Was more or less similar to the photo)

Why don't they build all-in-one keyboard & computers anymore? 😃

Did someone see the retro theme for StackOverflow?

I loved it ^_^ What about you?

Nostalgic times! Ain't it cute? Super NES was the best gaming console from the nineties...start the flame!

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

I really like retro games and there is this thing called retropie which turns your raspberry pi into an arcade machine. Since I have way too much time, I decided to built an arcade machine case out of wood with an old TV and analog sticks from Amazon. So yeah, I wired everything together and wanted to share it with you guys. I'm still searching for stickers to put on the top and on the joystick panel, but for now I really like the result. Tell me what you think!

I love how just a couple of mods can change 16 years old game into still legitimately good looking game and yet keep its original charm

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

It's finally here!
I love this little thing!
Let's see what I'll do with it... I planned on making some games but for now I will probably just use it for playing old retro stuff

Team during retro: management is full of shit, what can we do about it?
Me, already during notice period: I have some ideas

Alright. Two dead Commodores.

Over 15 years before I was born? ✅
No idea how BASIC works? ✅
Internet at the ready? ✅

So far I've checked various chips for visible damage, and nothing except a blown fuse on both machines. Apparently it takes dual 9vAC and single 5vDC. The 9 powers the SID and the video output, the VIC-II heatsink is off, and I've tested the PSU voltages and one of the 9v's is dead. I'll be getting new fuses and a new PSU soon. Any recommendations on other things to check or things to do when they're done? Pic included because why not.

who played doom 20 or more years ago? when i was little I used to play for hours...

so many good memories... =)

Spray painted old apple keyboard. Results are satisfactory for a first time paint job.

More images in comments.

so management decided that the PM/PO/SM role has to be split and that SM shall be done by someone else.

PM in retro: so i will give away this role because i cannot fulfill all roles adequately, not because of missing skills, but because of missing time. this is also why i couldn't finish my development task for this sprint. so, someone of you guys has to do the job. i expect the future SM to be always available for me in the morning and the afternoon, so due to timezone shift this has to be someone from the German colleagues. I will have to explain to that person what exactly I as a PO expect from the SM and the SM will have to follow this guideline. also, being SM is no excuse for not delivering your stories, it just takes very little time.

...i don't need to comment on this at all, he already makes a perfect clown of himself 🤡

Dear devRant:

What is your favourite color scheme?

I've been trying gruvbox over a month and I like the softer colors and the retro 70's feel. I had been on solarized for over 3 years before making the switch.

What do you like to use? Post screenshots!

Just joined a new team at the organisation as senior dev.

Team lead keeps singing about how we need unit testing and good standards.

I implement domain pattern on the backend supported by unit tests.

It passes QA and then get an earful about the code not being 'restful'. What does that even mean?

Well, it matters not since team lead changes the whole feature in the release branch and all unit tests obviously fails. Builds start to fail.

The solution? Comment out all unit tests. In the sprint retro, we hear the same old adage 'we need 80% code coverage'

Do as i say, not as I do. FML.

I love it. But aren't all thinkpads retro thinkpads?

Buddy's b day tomorrow. Got him everything to build a retro pi gaming station and 2 retro controllers.
Damn, I am a good friend.

Retro Gaming playlist by Spotify on Spotify is one of the best oldies playlists I found.

// Also remind me how old I am 😁

Press F to pay respects fellow Indians

Just look at yourself.

Night shift at VFF station. Only time I have for own projects. Please stay safe.

Rantberry PI

Thinking about making this into a terminal that accepts a serial connection from my IBM 5150 PC for that Chroma Green authentic text based experience. ;)

Seriously though. How awesome would it be to use a circa 1981 IBM 5150 as your terminal? Lol!

Tomorrow’s schedule:

7am-8: Yoga
8:45-10: Retro
10:15-10:45: Team Meeting
11-11:30: Interview
11:30-Noon: New project meeting
Noon-1pm: Foster care meeting with case worker (monthly check-in)
1pm-1:30: Train co-worker on how to restore databases
2pm-3pm : Onboard new DBA
3:15-4:15: Conference with AWS partner

Yup. I think I’ll complete a perfect zero LOC tomorrow. Oh, I’m also on-call.

This happen to me once when I was a young kid walking home from school.

There were two other guys with me, older than me. They were talking to each other about programming languages. I have been programming from a very young age so I knew a lot about programming and I knew a few languages back then, but they were taking about Java, a language which I wasn't into yet back then, so I just listened for a while to what they had to say.

The first guy told the other, "You know I'm great at Java." The other guy responded "I can do anything in Java." Then I said as a joke "Oh, can you do hello world?". The guy said "Hello what? What do you mean?" The other guy said. "Is that a retro game?" I just laughed. Then I told them to go learn how to output text in Java.

A bit of current history about these guys:
The first now works in C# for a quiz test company, he never learned Java or languages other than C#. The second one owns and works at a scrapyard. They are both great guys, but they like to brag.

🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

What's the point of retro if nothing that we're saying should improve is actively being improved and problems being highlighted is constantly being shoved under the rug?

Does anyone just feel tired, in general? Like the boss is (usually) alright. I like the work and I am good at it. Maybe I'm not feeling challenged enough? Honestly, I'm not sure. In the last retro, I was an 8.5/10 on the happiness index, now I'm a 4...wtf

The Nameless Game (DS) is MIND-BLOWING. Retro-cool before PS1 graphics was in every indie horror. Original control scheme. A touch of paranoia (your DS can kill you using its Wi-Fi).

I restore retro arcade machines because I miss the day when the game actually mattered and it wasn't all about the tickets

Anonymous : You're an engineer? prove it. name every computer ever.

Me : ..
for (let i = 0; i < computers.length; i++) {
computers[i].name = 'ever'
}

My lead loves to over engineer crap and waste weeks building complicated solutions.

And then during retro when a team member has the stones to say we should've thought about it a little more or used the input of some other teammates, he shuts them down by saying that more input would've been bad for the design. I can see where he's coming from, but he always seems to have an excuse for us. Why can't he just be more transparent and clear with us? If he has a problem, just say it. That's what retros are for.

Oh and then he takes a shot at me saying that we shouldn't have built a UI in tandem with it. I didn't even recommend a UI for the thing. All I said was that if we ever have a UI, we should consider a database setup that assists both the server and UI. But nooo, he's stuck with this "server design" approach. Everything has to be built to make it easier for the server.

I still don't understand why anyone would have their server logic influence the design. Especially the database. I just seems too targeted. It just creates these nasty denormalized tables.

Ugh... Our team is getting dragged around by this arrogant and silly man.

When you look at your Resume and realise, how much sh't you've been through for the sake of money. 😀👻💩👼

hi, I'm a javascript developer, I like to take software design patterns from the 70s and present them as new ideas to front-end developers.

I've made a fucking retro game and it takes too much time and effort to make this thing when I complete my game I showed this to my cousins and their first words was it is too boring anybody could make it could you make something like pubg or fortnite when I listen to these words they were fucking demotivating and made me drive crazy I don't know how do I explain them how much hard to make something like this.

Just found this in a drawer. Had to see if it powered on. Amazing!

Coworker just yelled that we shouldn't be bringing up in retro risks/problems that still occur because we've brought it up in the past.

If it's still a problem, then it still has yet to be fixed!!!

Engineering Director thinks it would be best to have the developers in all the major regions of the world.... that is, the developers in the same squad..... someone in USA, someone in Western Europe, someone on Asia, etc.. ......so there is always someone to talk to customers....

(why do we have a flipping product owner then?!)

......oh hell, the stand-up is going to be interesting... when do we do sprint planning?! ...what about the retro??

"Here's the sprint, it's well defined. fullstackchris, can you do this in two weeks?"

"Hmmm... nice work, looks well defined. It'll be tough, but sure, I can do it two weeks!"

Two days before sprint ends:

"Can we quickly duplicate n number of features from apps with literal armies of devs like whatsapp, airbnb, and Instagram?!?!?! We NEED these features to be polished and work perfectly!"

Scope creep will be my ONLY feedback in this retro.

It is time for my own dumbass's favorite pastime: not letting go on retro tech.

I am gonna build a small and complete RESTful web API with Vbscript and Classic ASP with errrthing thrown in this mfker including JWT authentication and i am gonna see how the idea of an ORM goes. I know that COM interop was a thing, dunno if it still is.

I am fucking bored. The graduate degree is killing me and I need a distraction.

Thinking about being a purist and keeping the COM libraries to be made with VB.NET :P

Fuck yeah for being a masochistic retard.

I legit love vb net tho

Years ago, Microsoft didn't update your Windows without asking!

Thinking about taking part in a two colour game jam on the weekend, I'm thinking some kind of retro space adventure game.
(I'm not the best pixel artist, but I'm pretty happy with how this mock-up looks)

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

Found a 70-year-old retro PC enthusiast who's never heard of the drop fix.

are people forgetting that exists or

When I started this job 4 months ago, I was given a grace period of a week to "get into the groove of the code". I asked the lead dev where on pulse (intranet) the documentation was, he laughed and then resumed what he was doing. I shrugged it off and continued scrolling through the code.
A week later, working on a story, I'm stuck at why a particular function exists. I say "it would be nice if there was documentation, where is that anyway?". Lead dev replies, "one thing you should know about this company, there is no documentation unless it's API related".
Last month's retro, 80% of our (mine and lead dev) problems were related to a lack of kt, I laughed.

The retro retro. A retro about our retros.

Using a chart at the retro to compare how many story points each developer completed during the sprint.

That’s it.

I don't like many sudden unplanned meetings appearing during your estimated development hours. It consumes some development time and destroys your momentum.

We follow the 2 weeks sprint that contains sprint ceremonies like sprint planning, demo, retro, daily stand ups and backlog grooming meetings. My capacity should be less then 80 hours since there are sprint ceremonies and unplanned meetings that happen during development hours. Unfortunately, my capacity is still set to 80 hours and meetings hours are not deducted. This puts me to a disadvantage as I need to do unpaid OT/weekend work just to make up for the lost time consumed by meetings.

Those 1 hour/30 minutes meeting piles up thus consuming development work hours. So a simple example is that you have 32 hours estimated to finish a big user story but sudden unplanned meetings and sprint ceremony meetings will consume some of that 32 hours. I will bring this up in our next retrospective meeting.

Am I a hack? Like yeah I complain about technology left right and center, this sucks, that sucks, what fucking moron wrote this?! These days I do write my own alternatives (which usually work surprisingly well). But for what? And was I really in a position to complain about those other things? Impostor syndrome, it's so annoying...

Oh and also, is it really all worth it? I like retro tech and so I do have a fair interest in the history of technology. Say between VHS and Beta, sure VHS was superior in practice and won the video cassette war, but Beta machines were seemingly better constructed. VHS won because it did just enough. Perhaps the same is true for software? Overengineering, is it poor engineering?

Anyone can build a bridge if the budget is unlimited and it can take a lifetime to construct. But part of engineering is making a bridge that'll just barely stand and be finished in a few years. I've been working on my own Linux distro since August last year and am not even close to finishing it. Chances are that it'll take several years. Perhaps I've been looking at the problem the wrong way all along?

The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"

Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."

If it was so great, why didn't you stay?

We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.

For me it has got to be Retroarch/Libretro (or as I've taken to call it etc.).

Retoarch is a frontend for Libretro which is an API that emulator developers can use so that I as the user don't have to worry about configuring each emulator (and some other stuff).
It's a godsend piece of software that makes it possible for someone like me to really just enjoy my (but but expanding) library of old games (that I can only dream of playing on original hardware)
Also, it's multiplatform!

I also tagged it as wk119 since this is my school setup

I told you guys that I would update you on my PiBM-5150 project. I figured out the hard way that my USB to DB-25 cable wouldn't cut it. Seems it is for printers and no matter how hard I tried it wouldn't work because of the path of the wires. After researching, it is apparent that the GPIO pins on the pi are configured for serial by default but it requires a little voltage change from TTY to RS-232. Rather than do like one of the videos I saw and solder junk to a bread board, I found a serial (rs-232) shield and 9pin output for the pi. Now, both computers are true rs-232 each. Instead of using a modem between them, I bought a null modem cable (crossover of Tx Rx signals) to interface the two machines directly. I'll update this evening to show it hopefully working.

Three back-to-back meetings today: Stand-Up, Planning, and Retro ... AKA two full hours of hearing everybody’s problems and hearing all viable solutions dismissed because we have no time to fix what’s broken.

The new ThinkPad Retro looks awesome, too bad that the price is heavily inspirired by crapple

Really start with the band I planned with some friends.
Learn some useful electronics
Move to a bigger apartment with a retro and a hobby room.

There are lots of more ideas 😅

RAT. HOLE. FUCK.

The retrospective is not the time to develop features and designs. We have burnt 45 minutes of an already ludicrously long retro ( 3 hours ).

Too much coffee + this horse fucking shit is geeking me out.

Lost Sector

It's a 2D 8-bit-/retro-style platformer based on Warframe

I made the game engine (Dethsquare) for it myself (which is probably still my biggest programming achievement so far), since when I started working on it Unity's 2D support was...lacking

I'm currently browsing for a new dev laptop, however I keep getting distracted by classic console adds! What classic consoles do you guys own and love?

Will those days in which we used to play the same levels multiple times inorder to improve skills come back?
:/

Thinking really hard about starting my own retro pc collection starting with the NEC pc-98 ......hmmmmmm wondee how my wife would feel about me spending money in this shit

Recently I have taken to all things retro tech, always liked it really, specially since my mom showed me pics of me playing with an old commodore 64 when i was younger as well as another of a family friend showing me the sharp 68k this shit fuels my appetite for knowing more about the programming ways of the old school coders. Some pretty interesting stuff, I feel that the newer generations would benefit greatly by knowing the things we had to do in order to build efficient programs back in the day. Not to say that I was part of that at all. I was born in 1991, how I came to see these systems is unknown and forgotten by me, but something that none the less os part of my story in computing.

Because of the industry that surrounds me I have been dealing with working with web development, but shit is really not that much of a passion of mine, had I the skills more than the academic knowledge I would love to work with low level C code all day, I just feel that the things that developers do there are so much more interesting than handilg web development, web development is tedious and a current shitstorm, not to say that shit was not like that for the programmers that i am referencing, but i just want more.

Web development has made me a successful man, at 28 i am the head of my department, I might sound like a Disney princess but I want more, I want more knowledge and more experience in different areas of Computer Science. I want to know it all and it seems like time continuously goes against me.

Oh well, here is to a new year lads, see what i can do.

Internet nostalgia is real.
StackOverflow's retro theme is proof that it exists.

So that laptop I got for R100 can do 4k... like wow..

For those who missed the first rant, we had an auction at work and I bought and old HP Elitebook for R100 which about the same as what a Big Mac meal costs...

Programming in c++ on DOS (dosBox) feels so amazing, I really like it, I'll get a CRT monitor just for this (also a bit of Doom)! So cool!

I used blue switch’s for the last 15 years, I have used bought 3 different keyboards in the that time, all use the mxBlues used blackwidows now using Logitech 54g or whatever it is...

I see these people using membrane or basic bitch keyboards. And I don’t understand how they do it.. I use the clickyness as a feedback for me. I don’t care how loud it is... nobody has complained but I also don’t care lol.

I’ve tried using other keyboards but I can’t type on a non mechanical clicky key.

I want to get one of those IMB retro keyboards, but I want to try one out before I spend the money.

I have this beautiful Sony Vaio C1XS ultraportable sitting around, I can't turn it on because it uses a non-standard RAM stick Sony only made in the late 90s... Such a pretty device

Found an old manual in the basement which explains the PC user how a mouse works. Approximately from 1990ish

Hobby coders, what’s your favourite vintage platform to develop on? I recently started dipping my toes into vic20 and Commodore 64.

Feelin like a time traveller 🛸

OneNote sucks, don't know why it was chosen as a daily update tool. It doesn't sync properly with some people's poor connections, then some junior (who isn't very proficient with computers) decides to create a new update page every once in a while and nobody knows WTF is going on. I suggested some better tools for daily update notes before, but it gets shot down every time by the other lead programmer in a different squad. I can't even complain about it in retro, it has gotten shot down there too before. I give up.

Is there something wrong with me for trying to make work experiences a bit less frustrating and efficient?

Alright, listen. If you come up with a crackme that requires someone to wait for something to happen for, say, 250 hours in real-time... but runs on a Gameboy or whatever other retro console? You're gonna have a bad time.

I'm on a Ryzen 5 2600, and with the most accurate Gameboy emulators out there barely running in Wine I can hit 1000x normal speed if I unlock the emulator's framerate. That 250 hours just became like 45 minutes without having to actually *do* anything. This even applies to "lol reverse this seeded generation thing" if I can try a few million combinations/sec just by incrementing some var in memory and re-running your code. (Yes, i'm literally doing that now. Yes, i'm blowing through this 28-bit keyspace like it's nothing. YES, THEY GAVE ME THE LAST NYBBLE FOR FREE!)

Two kinds of retro PC
- used to cost $8000, needs 240v AC
- used to cost $150, can comfortably work off of 4 AA batteries a week
Both perform the same.

purity might just be the most important thing when refactoring code you didn't write.

for real, if you purify everything in that code, future refactorings will go way smoother and reasoning even more so.

But it's no easy feat, sometimes you face cockroach code. cockroach code is code written nuke style. The fire and forget code that you shouldn't forget.

cockroach code's easy to spot. you can't know what cockroach code does without reading it's comments. roach code is fat, roach code retro feeds from different spots of macaroni. it does IO and everything else all bundled together.

roach code isn't easy to scratch out its async version. in fact, thats a property of roach code. If you can't make it async without a rewrite, you've got roach code.

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 abandoned an old project i did for a retro computing community (i've posted about it here before) because I can't find any motivation to do literally anything anymore, and people in said community were waiting on it. If you want to check it out, it's too big for GitHub, so I uploaded it to anonfiles. I don't know if I can post a link to that in a rant though, so if anyone's interested i'll post the link in the comments once asked.

Is it a good idea to go everything Sony? Like a vaio laptop, an Xperia phone, Sony earphones, maybe psvita for games (I rarely play anyway and it’s hackable for retro stuff)? I generally like their aesthetics.

Had a four hour retro/review yesterday. Plus a mini demo I had to put together. Three hour sprint planning session today.
And they still wanted me to go to some "company values" meeting tomorrow, aside from the weekly call I have to report progress. Fuck that shit.

I feel like I got nothing done this week. Monday and Tuesday were fine for the most part, but since it's been just complete idling.

I mean, I love my company, great coworkers, good management, and just all around great experience. But man, it gets frustrating when you lose so much development time... I wanted to sprinkle in some extra goodies for the next sprint, but it doesn't look like that's gonna happen.

Had to call an API with SOAP, convert an Access Database to MySQL, Coded some classic ASP and used Campaign Monitor for the first time in god knows when. That's a royal flush of retro right there!

At the end of the sprint half of the stories didn't get done due to lack of coordination to put 4 people in the same room and get them to agree on the solution.

During Retro my Scrum Master says: Are these stories not done because we haven't estimated them during sprint planning? 😂

My team decided to do a MOB programming in one of our tickets.

New joiner: Perfect we did a mob yesterday .

Me: Great, that's good. How did it go?

New joiner: Well, we work together in the gaming room next to each other and trying to solve the issue. I think it's very productive.

Me: Awesome! Let's do it again today... When we started the MOB, all of them are using their own laptop. And I was like.. so, this is how you did the MOB yesterday?

New guy: Yes.

Me: This is not a MOB programming... MOB programming uses only 1 screen, 1 driver and everyone work together, will tell the driver what to do, we need to exchange the driver every 10 to 15 minutes, everyone can be a driver. (devs, qa, ux, product) and do a retro after.

New guy: ah.. wow! Interesting.

Working in a big tech company but re-image clients using an usb-stick.

When your SCRUM Master cancels the sprint retro because he knows all hell is about to break loose.

this moment when you forget to save a file and compile it with the same fucking errors...
Over and over and over again ...

I've build a gaming station with a raspberry pi for a supermarket. I was running a quiz i also created with red blinking lights for false and green blinking lights right answers. Featured by cool 8-bit retro gaming sound and score printing to win a small prize if you answered everything correctly. It was so much fun building it and testing it in the office 😁

We recently pulled in a developer onto the devops team, and also our manager was fired a month ago. Everything devops is Python/Go but all our developers are in Clojure or Node. He's recently been writing a lot of stuff on Clojure and I didn't get an opportunity to bring it up at the last retro.

Recently he changed all our old Go projects to use a CI-pipeline he built, even though I wrote a build tool, with tests, that does everything his pipeline does, in Python .. over two years ago. When I asked him why he doesn't just use our existing builder, he responds saying he doesn't know why he should use some tool/script just because it exists ... um, everything we've built uses it?! 😡

Our last manager was a dick and I understand why they let him go, but he also would put this guy in his place. He's literally made is own little "devops roadmap" for himself and shared it out with the team. It's all about his personal goals and what he wants.

Brought my old "gaming/music/media" PC out of storage because of a video on Youtube thinking I could relive some glory days. 18 years old and she still purrs.

I do not miss this old "3D accelerator" card though... The only "Rage" in the Rage2 chipset was mine at not being able to play most games because ATI didn't think standards were important.

Just found half a box of these dinosaurs in my desk drawer, right next to a 2003 Digitech Electronic Organizer, a Dell Pocket PC, and a Sega IR 7000. Retro treasure trove ftw!

I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.

We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.

In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.

He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.

I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it.

I suggest at our retro that other teams have skills in languages and frameworks that we have only just started using, and that we practically just make it up as we go along and then keep making changes as we realise things suck. Why not bring a real expert in from another team for 1 or 2 days to rapidly improve our knowledge?

15 people in the room, every single one of them: "no that's stupid. Why would you even do that?"

Really? Am I the retarded one?

Rien ne va plus, les jeux sont faits.

SYS49152

Don't have planning on Monday, don't have retro on Friday

old habits are hard to break

just got this relic back from a friend: "Prototype and Scriptaculous in action". its from 2007.

Just had a random nostalgia moment:

Childhood days playing wolfenstein 3d in the telephone cable modem internet times.

I clearly remember the first cheat code i used in my entire life for that game : ILM

What was your first cheat code and the first game that comes to your mind when talking about your childhood games :)

I have a list of favorites but the first person that always usually comes to mind is John Romero.

I love listening to the talks Romero gives and even though I don’t partake in the practice of developing games I still love hearing his stories about his projects development or having to work with old/retro tech and learn something from those stories.

Had a release retro today.
We had the usual Trello board with columns for "what went well, what was bad, what can we improve" etc.
columns for the bad and the improvements had 10-20 cards each.
column for what went well was empty....

Take your pony to the next water station. Brush her hair.

Your pony died because it wasn't pretty enough.

AH, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Whenever we have to do Sprint Retros i feel like i am trapped in self-help group.
Recently, we had to describe our work/team like we would do amazon reviews. That is, we had to write "reviews" about our last sprint.

I sincerely would like to know why we can't discuss problems like grown adults, if there are any. Why do we have to pretend we are in a space rocket, on a sailing boat, in a formula one race car or reviewing amazon articles to articulate our needs?
I feel like developers are treated like stupid, little kids, and the majority of the developers don't have a problem with it.

My most successful project is always the one I'm working on just before the retro meeting.

Sprint meet:
40 mins: Others' retro and task planning while I browse 9gag
5 min: me

So i'm currently working on my PiStation..
(look at my previous post if you're interested)
I'm imaging over RetroPie over to the SD card, screw back together the housing, and it boots up fine. As soon as i configured my XBOX-controller i got to the wifi-settings. And when i try to access my wifi, guess what, it doesn't connect to my f**kin wifi. So i double check my wifi-settings in the router i just bought to get over my roommates paranoia (that's a whole another story. Just in short, he's got no idea of IT-security and tries to be an admin, which results in a HUGE amount of bulls**t), confirm that the settings are alright, double check the PSK too, anything is fine. So i go through the whole process again, download the image (from their goddamn slow servers), open up the PiStation, image it over to the SD card, close it back up, anything boots up fine and works, except this f**king wifi. And the thing is, i COULD connect it with a patchcable, but i dont want cables going anywhere through my room. Currently imaging over recalbox OS, will keep you updated. I just want to play some old retro games ._.

Google play store retro engineering ?

All I wanna do is make bots play retro games 😔

Anybody used the integration ui from openai’s gym-retro library?

According to you,when the retro Thinkpad comes out?

Who else did his first "wall hacks" using Imps in Dungeon Keeper 2 decades ago? Still one of the best games.

How do I use Tables? I'm trying to do some retro we design for my personal site,but I can never seen to get how to use tables.