Got a job as a controls engineer. Told my parents.

Parents: Good Job!
Brother: Bro! How you make so much money?
Me: I went to a tech school and learned how to do technical stuff.
Brother: Oh... fuck that shit!

Everyone was really supportive. Been slowly gravitating from controls to more pure software. But a lot of the software I write is for controls and automation of machines.

My family had no particular reaction. I wanted to be a programmer since school, and they knew it was my intended goal.
I guess, my uncle being a professional programmer was something that showed it is a good choice.

From wiki: "The word 'hacker' derives from the seventeenth-century word of a 'lusty laborer' who harvested fields by dogged and rough swings of his hoe."

Isn't it fun when meaning shifts over time?

I remember hearing old school guys refer to themselves as hackers for years and my thought was whoa, so you fucks were pentesting in the 70s? Holy shit.

... turns out their usage of the word differs from my understanding of it. And to be honest, I've read so many definitions of the term since I have no fucking idea what an 'actual' hacker even is anymore.

So a 'hack' is supposedly a clever yet unorthodox solution? I always used it to mean 'I pulled some shit from my fucking ass and now it works', that is to say, this is a somewhat shabby and arcane way to get the job done but I have not found a viable alternative, or at least not one that makes any more sense when read through the lens of conventional logic.

Perhaps both meanings apply, in their own way.

One things for sure: I'd rather refer to my 'clever' bits of code as black magic rather than hacking -- but *just* to be silly about it.

So they finally implemented vaccination certificates here that are apparently "WHO recognized" and you can generate it online. We used to only have vaccination cards. Guess what?

1. There's a data privacy section that's supposed to be step 1 but when you load the page, you're on step 2 where you have to enter your details. Step 1 is not clickable, you advanced child! You're skipping grades, congrats.

2. They have questions that can be answered with "yes" or "no", the question itself is a drop-down and wait, clicking it opens a dialog box that has two radio buttons for "yes" or "no". Amazin'.

3. Some words are capitalized for no fucking reason. It's so random, it makes you wonder if such entities exist and you just don't know about them.

4. There's minimal validation for the dates and even the bare minimum doesn't make sense.

5. You have to enter each detail in perfect order, otherwise it will assume you didn't enter anything.

6. Some of the fields are required but it allows you to proceed anyway. Well, it's your fault, get fucked.

7. Their version of CAPTCHA is literally a dialog box with random texts on it. TEXTS. If you enter it wrong, it doesn't generate a new one so take your time, dear. You'll get it right.

8. When it tells you that you did something wrong (rare), it flashes a black box at the top of the page that says "Oops, that's incorrect!" A literal fucking high school project.

9. When you finally reach the last page, it proudly informs you that they have successfully looked you up except your name is wrong. You know it's you from the first and last name, the date of birth, the vaccine brand, the vaccination site, time, and date. For some reason, the middle name is wrong and it's not a matter of "John" and "Jhon" or "Louise" and "Louis". They got the first two syllables right, removed one, and made up the few others. HOW?

I remember going to the vaccination site and seeing the brand new tablets they struggle to use. They even have keyboards and some slick leatherette casing for each. There's not a single scratch on those things. They have the best of the best tools while typing with one hand. Okay, maybe it's not the best tool but it's ages away from the typical pen and paper oops-i-lost-it system they had before. I chastised myself for being a cunt. "Come on, they're trying."

This is where our taxes go. High end tools for the damn fools. Even the website, just like every other government website, looks like a high school student's project. I thought the last bullshit I'll ever see was that stupid OTP crap that doesn't actually send you an OTP, it just writes the numbers on the textbox and all you have to do is press the OK button.

God have mercy.

For a long time I could not understand how do people put up with watching ads in Android apps. Then it dawned upon me: they grew up like this and they never had a proper classic old-school desktop experience. Back in the day it was unimaginable to have intrusive ads. I will never put up with intrusive ads. I despise it

Now even developer tools have ads, like Docker or NPM

We have a tradition in our company to post in an anonymous forum about the things we're thankful for when it's thanksgiving.

I almost wanted to post that I'm super thankful to have this job, because I have the ability to stay at home, work "remotely", while the kids are in school/daycare, and just sleep all day because I can finish my task for the week in 2 hours.

Where did you learn to make ice cream? Sunday school.

Old-school tabletop RPG and board games.
Taught me how to work out data and stats tables, establish many-actors processes and strategies, how to ask for clarification (and give it), and even gave me practice in drawing a representation of what is in my mind, and understanding someone else's.
Who have ever surrounded a dragon in D&D knows what I'm talking about.

Which is better....Learn to code by self teaching.
Or join an online school

Any non-tech hobby usually helps my coding, because relaxing breaks are far more efficient if I'm not just laying in a bean bag trying not to think about work but rather engaged in something unrelated. During the summer I was storing a really good electric guitar because the owner emigrated, so when I felt stuck I played some music. I used to play the cello in middle school but I was never really good at it nor did I care to practice properly because it felt a lot like yet another class to attend. Apparently music practice works whether you do it in one long or several short rounds as long as the total time is enough.