I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

OK heavy rant on 'modern' software development coming! --> don't take it to seriously though :-)

Electron... why does that shit exist? It is like stacking all the worst technologies available to mankind into an enormous pile of crap and polishing that turd to look like something wonderful. It is big, slow and overall AWFUL!

An example? ... Microsoft Teams :-( it burns your PC like fire and makes it squeal for mercy.

When a library/framework becomes the ultimate evolution of abstraction layer upon abstraction layer and it simply should stop to exist and a reset button needs to be pressed.

I would love to see some research on the real world environmental impact that all those shitty slow and bloated web technologies have.

Solution:

Software energy label!

C, C++ and Rust e.t.c. and all accompanying efficient UI libraries should be the only languages/implementations allowed to get a A, B and C label.

Python (without C libraries like Numpy), JavaScript and all those other slow interpreted scripting/Web API nonsense should get a D, E or F label by default.

Have fun!

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

PORTFOLIO INFLATION

when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.

Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.

And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.

And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.

And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:

Welcome to costco. I love you.

1) For other devs to stop being such whiny, pussy ass motherfuckers. Legit the ammount of whine in some of y'all is too extreme. Blow, judge and cuss out over the weakest shit ever. Like language wars. Dear lord if there is some pussy ass shit right there it is language wars.

2) To see Perl 6, Clojure and Rust see some hardcore adoption. Specially Clojure since I fucking love Lisp dialects and Clojure is pretty sweet Lisp. Clojurescript is also really nice for those that like working with Js.

3) To completely nuke Microsoft browsers. I am not a Microsoft hater by any means. But their browsers bring more pain than joy to everyone and they know it. If they choose to let them exist then by all means fix them! This is Microsoft! They got the resources!!

That's it really.

Learning Rust and I’m loving the process. I haven’t been this excited to learn a language since c++ years ago!

Holy shit. I just watched a video on Rust and I think I am in love.

Tracked mutability, reference counting, guaranteed thread safety, all in a compiled type-safe language with the performance of C++? 😍

Why did I not check this out sooner??

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

Check out this font! Makes my code look way more futuristic!

[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.

with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).

I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)

So what do you think devranters ?

Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.

FUCK

I really wanna love Rust. I really, really do. But no inheritance is just such a stupid decision. But inheritence bad REEEE. No. Just no. Composition only works fine for some things because it just isn't powerful enough to properly (without performance penalty or boilerplate, that is) emulate inheritance. Some things are just better with inheritance: Games, UI, html or xml libs, etc. Now I have to use stupid fucking workarounds because oh no we cannot implement inheritance because that's scary and might give the programmers to much power. I can decide when I want to use inheritance or composition for myself, dickheads

I'm just frustrated. I wanted a simple, statically-typed language that doesn't get in your way and offers GC. I can't find anything "just perfect".

- Go: enforces a style on you, nono.
- Rust: ownership system. I love it, but it's too low level for what I want.
- Scala: seems to have a bunch of useless and bug-prone features.
- Java: I hate how you have to declare and catch exceptions. Good practice, yes, but the code gets bloated with try-catch statements.
- C and C++: Too low level, no GC.
- C#: maybe? idk

I want to make a back-end for an app but I want it to be easy and fast. I need something with a gentle learning curve, not keep fighting the language. I'm between Java and Rust. Java's easier to use. Rust is rust <3, but it's hard, I haven't learned it properly and I just keep fighting the fucking compiler.

rust claims dropbox, firefox and cloudflare all use it.......

firefox's performance has steadily dropped
dropbox's performance was always awful
and cloudflare is that weird software i see when i try to view sex cam caps that limits me to 2 mins a day......

my love is not growing.

our new cto is advocating to start migrating our existing and any upcoming new features from php to kotlin.

I tried looking into kotlin but it just doesnt feel nice to me. call me an idiot for actually enjoying php or java but i really dont feel like using something other than them.

i don't want to write Kotlin or Go or anything other than php or java which I already feel extremely comfortable with.

Maybe id love writing Rust even tho im new to it but anyway...i got too used to my comfort zone... and very few *new* things tend to interest me anymore.

whats wrong with me

Hello everybody,

I am 17 years old, I love to code and I cannot decide which new language I should learn.

What do you think of Rust and Crystal? What would you prefer? What is better?

been about two weeks since my rust journey begin, and i've got to say, i love it. web frameworks with static type checking; amazing, standardised package manager; what a breeze, and macros; despite stating that i don't really see them as useful in earlier posts, they are really helpful. as well, in response to the slow "cold-start" build times, it's the price to pay for top-of-the-line compilation-time error checking. rust is amazing)

If languages had slogans...

1) Java -- Buy one get two for free on your delicious NPEs.

2) C -- I burn way too much calories talking, let's do some sign language. Now see over there... 👉

3) Python -- Missing semi-colon? Old method. Just add an extra space and watch the world burn.

4) C++ -- My ancestors made a lot of mistakes, let's fix it with more mistakes.

5) Go -- Meh. I can't believe Google can be this lazy with names.

6) Dart -- I'm the new famous.

7) PHP -- To hide your secrets. Call us on 0700 error_reporting(0)

8) JavaScript -- Asynchronous my ass!

9) Lua -- Beginners love us because arrays start at 1

10) Kotlin -- You heard right. Java is stupid!

11) Swift -- Ahhh... I'm tasty, I'm gonna die, someone please give me some memory.

12) COBOL -- I give jobs to the unemployed.

13) Rust -- I'm good at garbage collection, hence my name.

14) C# -- I am cross-platform because I see sharp.

15) VB -- 🙄

16) F# -- 😴

i don’t know how to feel about these c++20 concepts. even though i haven’t seriously written c++ for years, it’s a little sad to see the language i know and love getting so convoluted and lost in modernisation. it’s gotten to the point where i look at a modern c++ code base and all i see is rust. especially the universal trailing return types everywhere, those get to me.

So I just saw this 'rant' where there was a link for a book/text that is called 'intermezzos', so far it's freaking amazing, love to the person whom 'redirected' me to it and especially the author, yaaay Rust here we go! :-)

I think I've just fallen in love with 1Password

Locally synchronized vault, command line integration AND the desktop app is written in Rust?
Hooo boy

So until now I ran bitwarden official docker image on my server but as I forgot to create snapshot before updating yesterday and the whole network got fucked up :D I installed bitwarden-rs (Rust implementation) instead... Aaand it is sooooo good! It takes only around 20MB of RAM instead of 1GB+ and it is just lightning fast. Also replaced Apache with nginx for the first time and I love it so far.

!rant

Hi fellow DevRanters! I've been studying software engineering for a while now and, while I love programming, I'm starting to think that all I'll be doing as a software engineer now a days is pulling data from a database, sticking it in a nice gui with some buttons and moving on to the next, similar, project. At the same time I am loving linux more and more, I love working with bash and other unix-like tools and I am interested in systems languages like C and Rust. It is for these reasons that I am playing with the idea of switching to Systems and network engineering. What are your thoughts on this? Is Systems and network engineering a field in which I get to program a lot? Will there be more variation in it? Is my view of software engineering completely off? Please share your thoughts and opinions!

Hey everyone, need some advice here. To give some background, I am 17 years old, and currently residing in New Zealand. I love software and have my career path set on being a developer, most likely full-stack web. (Windows/native development & Game development I wouldn't mind either). I would say I am confident in JavaScript (incl. TS), web-dev languages (HTML & CSS) and Python. And with less experience, but a strong interest in Rust, C# and C++. I plan to go to my local university to study Computer Science. Because of factors like my age, location, lack of previous job experience and degree(/s) make it hard to meet any requirements for the few jobs available locally, or even remotely. Anyways, what have you done to get where you are today or what would you recommend based on my current background? My main goal is to get my foot in the door than to "have money" or "be occupied", so if other paths like certifications or more temporary contract-like work (similar to Fiverr) is a better idea then let me know.

I'm a web developer.
I build web apps using JS/TS, vue.js and some Go in the backend
But I'm not that kind of dev who knows how a compiler work, and I usually get lost when I read a comment written by that guy 100110111.
Weeks ago, I started looking for a new language to learn, I tried Rust, Nim, V, I spent 30 minutes on the haskell homepage doin' the "learn haskell in 5 minutes"
I really wanna learn a new language, because I love learning new things.
Even if many of you here did not agree that Vlang could become a great language, I liked it and I'm following it waiting for the v1.0 maybe it's gonna achieve all its promises.
There is some other languages that I wanna learn too, like Nim and Zig.
What makes me like a language ?
1- the simplicity of syntax
2- performance (benchmarks)
3- the possibility to build anything with it

Now I'm wondering if it's a good thing to swap between languages like this, without knowing exactly what I'm gonna do with it, and what should I do to stop hesitating and stick with one language
...
what I really want, is to learn a language so good that can be used on servers (web backend) and on desktop (cros platform)

Look for things that can be rewritten in Rust.

I'm currently working on a dynamics CRM project which has been going on for almost a year, we're on week 19 of defect rectification brought on by a mixture of the clients abysmal testing and spec writing and the pain of debugging in Dynamics.

This project has left me emotionally and physically drained. I used to love where I worked and the guys I worked with but right now I'm the lowest I've felt in a long time.

I have autism and I really struggle with situations I have little control over, I also pride myself on being able to diagnose and fix problems quickly, I've been working on the same 2 bugs for the last 3 week's. I squashed one on Friday but this other one is persistent and I feel like it's killing me.

I've mentioned my low mood to my boss who could only say "It will be over soon". Well I was supposed to be transferred to a new none dynamics project in September, but yeah that didn't happen.

I really enjoy Angular and I've found this long project has caused my skills in it to rust to the point where even the most basic elements are a struggle.

I hate Dynamics and I hate the prospect of going in tomorrow and facing it again.

Too early in the year for goals so far, but I'll give it a shot. Here's what I'm gunning for in the short-term:

Week 85 - 2018 Dev/Coding Goals:
- Continue educating myself in the Rust programming language (I feel like I dropped the ball there last year, Rust is easy to get programmer's block because it's syntax isn't always clear what should be done with it and/or why, the references. Ugghh fml).
- Get feature parity of PYXReloaded with it's predecessor, and get most of the planned features implemented. Friends of mine really want this and like screencaps I've sent already. It's a project I've been working on with @Gianlu for the past few days.

Week 85 - 2018 General/Personal Goals:
- Get over my motivational issues.
- Get over my depression/loneliness
- Get over my social anxiety.

I'm trying to better myself, both in coding and personal life. I fucking love this community. I used to use Reddit to find posts exactly like the ones here, but this is wayyy better and has everything all in one place.

Have a prosperous 2018, guys. Remember not to look at what you want to get done in just 365 days. You need to see the big picture.

This thing always bugs me. What should i do totally??
I've been experimenting with all kinds of development. Web, mobile, system, desktop apps and softwares. I don't know which one i should choose as a career. I like doing everything and will code till the end of time. But, Frontend stuff, UI/UX doesn't interest me. I love writing softwares that makes things easier. Like Rails made web development easier and fun. I have been following Redox OS which is built using Rust and my interest in OS has been propelled. I have interest in cloud development too. I don't know which i should choose for my profession. I am currently a student so i have a lot of time to try everything but i don't know what i should do professionally. Any suggestions guys?