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?

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

I decided to draw something while checking out 3000+ builds happening in parallel in the school infra

sysadmin life is boring

It was the time of the 90s when one created HTML with frames. During an HTML exam we had 1 hour to create a website with 3 frames. Top, left, main. Some aligned random images and some formatted text. Kind of boring, I know. So I finished early and handed in my diskette with my homepage. To make it easy for him I added my name and class to the title.
When we got our grades I was in for a surprise since I had expected a good grade. I asked him why I didn't get a good grade. He kind of shouted at me that my task was perfectly done but I shouldn't have written my name in the title but name and address of this school. It is not a really dramatic thing but I always hated when teachers quietly assumed stuff and didn't tell us. And then handed out bad graded for totally unrelated stuff.

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

So this happened last week.

Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.

The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).

Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...

There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.

So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.

Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.

Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.

At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.

At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!

They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.

I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.

He was happy and felt honered.

He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.

Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"

That dickhead smiled and felt good

Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"

I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.

That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.

The class started clapping.

One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life

Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect

Thank you for reading

Have a nice day!

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

That feeling when teacher ask you how to use "ssh"😂😂😂

there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

I’m new to programming. I first learned G-Code and M-Code for CNC machines and being a machinist got boring, so now I’m in School for computer science. But I swear, the amount of motherfuckers that act like they are the programming gods and they know everything there is to know just because they’ve been a programmer for so and so amount of years just grinds my gears. They act like some knowledge is important while other knowledge is useless, and generalize it and push that belief on everyone. But fail to realize that some people, such as myself, just love computers in every facet. I don’t give a damn how many years of programming experience you have and how many people you’ve taught. If you act like a stuck up know it all and walk around like your shit don’t stink, I wouldn’t work with you even if I had the same amount of experience as you.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.

At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.

At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).

At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.

So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.

The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...

I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

I am in an apprenticeship as a software developer so you might think I would have lots of stories to tell in wk73 but you could not be more wrong! Our school teachers don't care about us or the thing they teach!

BUT in the first year, our company payed to send all of their IT trainees to a special training facility and the coaches there where amazing!!!👍🏼

For every IT related subject there was a coach! And they were fucking experts!

Let me tell you how this "training" worked:
1. Basic introduction to a certain subject
2. Some basic tasks
2.1 Extended tasks for those who want to dig into it
3. Search some other students to team up
4. Define project
5. Discuss the project plan with a coach.
6. Realize project
6.1 - Question rises -
6.2 Discuss question with coach
6.3 Coach prepares prepares presentation on the questions subject
6.4 Coach sends out invitation to everyone
6.5 LEARN AND PROFIT
7. Awesome product is finished
8. Present project to other students

The awesome part about this is that the coaches pushed us to our limits (so we would keep improving) but they would assist with every problem you faced.
They where relatively young and the spirit within the teams were amazing!

Because not all IT trainees have this kind of training the professional school is pretty boring ever since...

But I silently thank them for that training after every exam at school.

When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.

Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).

Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.

Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.

This is sort of a boring story. I always have been interested in making games but actual coding always made me very uncomfortable and never tried it until I got to college. I met some really cool guys there and got into an association that was based on pop culture and videogames. Me and the president of that association started on our spare time to code for a videogame. He made his and I made mine. The software I used was gamemaker studio and I made like 7 games. I wanted to make a website for the games so I learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At that first year I was studying criminal justice and was slowly being taken away by programming. I changed my concentration to computer information system thinking that I wanted to do a more general approach but programming kept gaining ground. I had depresion on middle School all through highschool and early college. I'm safe to say that after I decided to code seriously my depression has seize to exist and life feels very good. Coding for me is very rewarding and challenging. I'm soon going to pursue a bachelor degree in computer science and hope I don't change concentration again.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

So in the school we had to do the “court hearing” performance for the Civicis class.
Of course no one would write the script, so I sat down with my dad and wrote it (it was inspired by A War movie from 2016 [I think it was named also Krigen], really good movie). I actually still got the script on my Google Drive. Anyway, I wrote it, printed it 5 times and the next day I showed up. I gave them it, and one said “it sucks”. So I’ve replied “maybe you’ve should have done something instead of complaining now?”. He didn’t replied.

So anyway, the class began, our group was the last one. The others had really mediocre stories, so I was pretty confident. We sat down, I was the judge, we had a defender, accused, accuser and the witness.

I hope everyone knows how real court hearing looks like? There is lengthy beginning, overall it’s boring, and remember - the defender, accuser and judge read most part from their notes? Okay, note that.

So as we started, I started to speak the introduction monologue, and then all of the sudden, the teacher in the middle of me saying said “why is it so long?”. I’ve ignored that and continued. After like 50 seconds, she again stopped (not me this time) and said “why are you reading all of this?! You should have remember all of it!”. First of all, she didn’t said ANYTHING like that to other groups, second how come you remember such a long script (even tho we had a week to prepare it). At this point I have tighten my fist.
Anyway, we’ve continued. After like a minute or so this fucking bitch AGAIN stopped us and guess what she said...

“It bores me”

Well FUCK YOU then! Most of the court hearings are BORING. It’s not a fucking Hollywood!
Anyway, we’ve finished our performance, she gave us “3” grade (that is like in the middle). I was super pissed, and yeah...

tl;dr

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

Tomorrow I'll write an exam in programming. I code since I was 11 years old and as soon as I got to that stupid programming class in school I felt bored. My teacher is an former encryption expert and thinks I'm too good for that stupid school. Well at least I am ready for the exam... That shit is so boring in class 😂

I hate the US education system, its just designed to fuel capitalism. It keeps getting less funding so that actually passionate, intelligent people get kicked out and replaced with people who only want to be a teacher so they can have power over others.
Why do they block news websites? Why do they block github, so their own robotics team can't even access the essential building blocks for the robot? They make everything more complicated and for the reason that it might distract you. Maybe just make topics engaging and not boring asf, just cramming for the exams so the school gets more funding. Maybe prepare students for jobs, allow them to do projects, pursue classes that interest them, and have any sense of individualism.
Anyways, yeah, the school blocked github so I can't do my FBLA project, I can't access the code for programming our robot for competitions, I can't even download software required for half of these classes. I have a Linksys router, is there any way I could set it up to bypass the firewall?

!rant && load('epilogue');

So I saw my little brother yesterday and... Hell, I don't know. The addiction thing is less a thing that I expected, it's just that he can't find anything else to do than going on minecraft multiplayer servers and play, play, play. Gotta be honest, his life outside high school is pretty boring.

I mean, if I were him with this the few responsibilities, I'd be even worst than him, so how can I blame him?

Still, I had a big discussion with him where I tried to make him see what could go wrong if he fails (in a soft way), and helped him with french and english homeworks (french is our native language but a pain in the ass to learn 😁).

I do believe that saying all this "plz don't ruin your life this early plz" stuff had made him react, I just can't tell how deep and for how long. My main goal was to make sure that he won't feel helpless if he ever struggles for whatever reason.

However, since kids don't get shipped with a README.md, I just hope I did the right thing at the right time, and that he'll actually remember this discussion. But fuuuuck, he's 11 years old 😓😓

Side notes, I asked him about being a developer but it's pretty obvious that it was too early to speak with him about this. Might try again next year or the year after.

Thoughts ? I'll try to answee to you all

In my school, We started learning computer science (Java and programming stuff, to be more specific) last year in 11th standard (I was 16 at that time), starting to learn programming and stuff like this are common in India at that age (Yes, I live in India). I m the only student in my class or in my school who knows about programming and things related to that, yes of course I know, I made my own game when I was around 12 y.o.

In school our teacher started teaching us everything from the most beginning, It was really boring and exciting at the same time for me, it was exciting because I always wanted to tell my teacher and friends about my game and other programming kinds of stuff I knew, and it was boring bcoz I had to learn those things again which I already knew.
It was obvious that I was getting good marks in the subject without even reading my book for once, and it really amazed my friends, classmates and even my teacher.

Now, since my friends have learned CS for 1 year, some of them thinks its nice and are fascinated by the world of programming and developers, and some of them think it's boring and they just need to pass the subject for good marks and nothing else.

It feels funny and bad at the same time when some of my friends come to me and ask what does a for-loop (any loop) even does... And the rest of them thinks a for-loop is just used for printing tables of numbers.

well, that's the story of my school.
The thing that will never change is that I love programming and I will never stop programming...

Thanks for stopping by Ranters,
Happy programming!

Sad story , i guess im not the only one.

I have literally no friends who like to code or who seem to like but are lazy. Nothing

Is boring to work on personal projects or school projects like this :/

But today found out that theres only one in my school who does this, he is not that much into it but when he asked me what languages i use, also if i use php ...

I was happy inside to know that im not the only one in my school :D

That's all! Is here anyone or was in this situation , having no friends who like to code 🤔

!rant
Preface: As it was unpaid labor I won't count my school-internship in a games resell shop in which I was ordered to "program" a BDSM-Shop with MS Frontpage.

My first paid gig was back in 2006. I got booked to write the website of a new company by friends of the family. The problem was that the gig had to happen ~600km away from my home town. Back in 2006 it was far from common to own a laptop for young folks, which is why I packed my Pentium 4 HT "powerhouse" tower, my 15" TFT monitor, keyboard and mouse into a suitcase and took a bus. I not only had to write the website, but had to do all the Frontend and Design as well and was paid 400€. Hahaha what a deal. They are still using my logo btw.
Anyhow... I was like 17yo and the work experience was more valuable then the money anyways. Plus at the time 400€ weren't a bad payment either. After that it took 2 more years and half a dozen of boring jobs until I started earning money with programming again. I can't understand why I haven't started programming earlier. Especially considering the wage gap between the jobs I did and potential programming jobs. Guess you're always smarter afterwards.

I have 4 pencils 1 black pen a sharpie marker an 14 year old book on web dev because its the only one my school library had an really shitty school iPad which is my only computer that i somehow managed to teach myself multiple programming language's with an developed my love for code using nothing but an online IDE and whatever i could find online i also have two marines recruiting pan-flits and a business card for the local Air Force
recruiting office an old worn out deck of cards an the antenna from an old baofeng uv-5r ham radio that i had modified which my mom decided to throw away because "it looked like trash" a few months ago even tho it still worked perfectly ...............
Pretty boring desk

I got invited to a quinceanera by someone that happened to be on the same night as homecoming. They did all the traditional stuff. They had some sparkling cider that may or may not have been spiked and I had a lot of it. I learned after that it might have been spiked. It was right before homecoming started when the traditional stuff was over and it would've just been kinda boring dancing for the next FOUR HOURS. My date and I decided we didn't want to stay for that long so we went to homecoming instead. It has better dancing and a mosh pit which is way more fun than just slow dancing. We met up with a group of friends there and had a ton of fun. Homecoming only went till 10 where the quince would've gone till midnight. Our group went out for ice cream and I got home at 11. It's almost midnight now. High school is awesome, ain't it?