Wrote a script that calms the extreme use of exclamation/question marks and capslocked rants, do have to say, it makes it much easier to read many of the rants, it also adds small stats at the bottom of the rant

may sound like it takes the "fun" out of those rants, but it only triggers if the capslock is more than the lowercased letters

wish the devrant webapp was accessible from mobile, to use all them scripts on mobile too

From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)

Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"

Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"

Him: "But given the choice?"

Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."

Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."

Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

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.

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

I have this project I've inherited, yea I seem to do that a lot, but this damn thing, has to run in php5.4, has deprecated functions for php7 everywhere and a lot of them and there's no classes anywhere beyond some libraries.

Everything is procedural with random scripts being injected left right and center.

I kid you not,

$thisThing = true;
If(x==y)
require "path/to/some/script.php";
else
require "path/to/a/slightly/different/script.php";

If($thisThing === false){
// well it was modified in that small block about 10 different times
}

Those injected scripts then accept data from the parent scope so, looking at file X, you need to have open file A,B, E, and M to understand where variables have been initialised and what there current state could potentially be.

Basically this thing was bandaid after bandaid for feature requests with 0 refactoring.

Here I am trying to implement some basic functionality (should only take an hour or so + a bit of manual testing) but no, I'm literally at the point of hitting the delete button on the entire project and starting again.

!rant
print("Hello World!")

Erm..... Here goes nothing.
Hello everyone, I'm [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] in the SEA region. I'm a highschool student, 17, with a hobby of programming in Python 3 as a self-taught trial-and-error script kiddy, mostly small scripts from random "Yea I should do that, how long will it take?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"-moments. I found DevRant while talking with people in a few programming Discord servers. Hope this is enough for a "Hello World!" post....and yea, welcome me to DevRant *pop confetti and hope not forced to clean up later*

I might be fucked up, but I have a tendency to gravitate towards the shit that everyone else dislikes for the sake of knowing if their bias against is actually because shit is truly fucked up or if shit is legit plain WRONG.

From all technologies that I have worked with professionally I can count:

Java(currently in the form of old JSP services for an "enterprise level application")

Java for Android development - i was the lead engineer for a mobile project

Swift with IOS dev, same gig as the above.

C++ for Android development in the form of OpenCV with Java as well.

Javascript in all possible forms, basic input validation, ajax services, jquery datatables, jquery animations and builders.

Css/sass heavily

Clojure for an ldap active directory application

Python for glue scripts

Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript

VB Net forms

C# For ASP.NET MVC

Bootstrap for multiple intranet frontends

Node+Express for a logistics warehouse management tool

Ruby on Rails freelancing small gigs

Php in all ways possible from complete standalone php apps to Laravel and just php+composer apps aaaaall the way to wordpress

Django consulting

I have found that the one that I dislike the most is wordpress. And the one that I like working with the most is Node. Don't know why, i just do really fucking like messing around with Javascript, the language has changed a fuckload throughout the years and continues to increase and change. It was my first scripting language following a stint in me trying to learn cpp way when i was starting and royally FAILING

Never really got the hate for it, even when I used JScript with classic ASP i just enjoy working with Javascript a lil too much. And from all the above mentioned stacks safe from Php is the one, or one of the ones in which i don't royally suck :V

> Make a small game.
> Do it in Rust because why not.
> Decide "Hey, why not make the game objects have Lua scripts for their logic because Lua is easier to do quick and dirty code in than Rust?"
> 5 hours later delete all the code related to running the Lua in Rust because AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Last year I was nominated for a reward by some tech internship 'charity' who helped me get my university placement.

It was about having made the most contribution and personal progress. I spent the whole year working solo projects and building small web applications and websites for customers having never written a line of even html before I started.

The girl that won did so because she wrote a couple python scripts to query mysql databases and put it on a table and spent an entire year learning how to do this. Confusingly the judges also told me that programming wouldn't be too hard because it's just copy pasting anyway.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from rant import depression as fuck
from WhiskeyBottle import *
import time

while bottle.contents > 0.0 and time.datetime():
fuck.rant()

Yeah ok, this will be one of a few, but I'll try to keep it short. Damn, whiskey is not helping. Nor various smokables.

So yeah, have you ever had a dream? I consider myself a gamer the whole life, always loved creative worlds, dynamics, mechanics, plots, stuff you could and couldn't do. To the point I promised myself I'd make a game - NAH - I'll be making games in the future. You know, good games, that you come back to. Like Doom. Or those porn games.

Never went to Uni or nothing. Was born in a poor European country with Internet more broken than my soul right now. Years later, after acquiring some good hardware, learning a bunch of languages, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and experimenting for about 10 years now with small scripts, apps and mini-games I've come to this realization.

I only made one "full" "game" in my life, and that was when I was like 16 in Klik & Play (early Game Maker). And it was shit. It was horrible, horrible shit. It literally makes you want to cry when you play it. It's 16-bit brain cancer. And it's the best I've ever published.

Now I've been through countless prototypes, none of which I've developed any further. I had ideas, plans, even made some more advanced roadmaps and dev cycles. Estimated costs, time, mechanics, gameplay hooks.

I never finish anything.

I get bored. Frustrated sometimes. There's always an improvement, something that "if I'd finish that it would be it! Screw this thing I was working on now, THAT will be worth sacrificing it." It's tiresome. I'm getting old.

And honestly, I don't know how people do it anymore. Trying to compromise those side-projects (they take all my free time which is not much) and work is just... draining. I'm losing hope. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed into the gamedev world after all. Maybe I'll just pump half-assed pieces of crap everybody will hate.

Or worse, nobody will care.

I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.

So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.

Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.

Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.

BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"

I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"

And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)

Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.

Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.

Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.

Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.

I've just started my new career with a job in IT operations and I love it. After my electrical engineering degree I fell into a job as a website manager for a small company, I self taught html and css and I knew from then that I had found a job that didn't feel like a job. I'm​ excited to learn everything I need to know to progress as far as I can go in this industry. In my first few weeks at this new job (where i have my own office!) I've self taught python to create automation scripts for live projects, currently up to my eyeballs trying to figure out how to change the VB code for an excel module.....Then there have been so many other projects and bugs and I love it! Any tips and advice is greatly appreciated!

when you cant be arsed to do icons so you just use emojis for button icons.

btn.textContent = "🗑️"

because icon sets now have their own apis (like what ever happened to icon fonts?), and documents explaining what scripts and commands to run to *install fucking plugins* on software written to *supplement* doc servers. plugins and software whos host site returns an SSL error. nice.

to use web icons. downloaded only on request. from other sites.

seems kind of eh, tower-of-baylon to me. like a bird landing on the electrical lines near your house might cause a blip and break one or two icons on your slick 2020 web app.

idk just seems unnecessary, like if you're small, your gonna want to embed your fonts on the webpage instead of overcooking things and hosting *a fucking server* just to serve an api for fucking *icons*. and if you're large you're gonna reduce those requests anyway

Vendor lock-in for cloud providers is really small, and you don't notice it until you need it. Route53 has an "import zone file" button, but they don't have an "export zone file" button. Yes, there are other tools and scripts to do it, but bit-by-bit AWS, GCP, and Azure make it difficult to leave.

I am not sure if this is the best place for it, but let's go:

I am 35 years old and I always worked in the localization industry. I really love to code and I always developed small tools and scripts to help me and others at work, but now the company is going bad and it has the chance to close.

I was reckon if it would be a good idea to give development a try, besides my age and the lack of experience in a real development place. I am not even sure if I use programming good practices, as I always developed by myself.

Do you have any opinion about it?

Thank you so much!

My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are.

If you use a Windows system for work and have the permissions to, I highly recommend you learn Powershell if you haven't already.

I've only started learning it a few months, but it's already improved my workflow immensely since it's a decent bit more powerful than batch scripts, but not as 'heavy handed' for small tasks as a programming language like C# feels sometimes.

I kinda regret ignoring it for so long, I noticed it installed on my high school laptop and toyed with it a bit outside of class, but then gravitated more towards python which I can't use at my current job. really wish high school me had the attention span to learn both back then.

So last night I ran out of space on my root partition, apparently 30GB isn't enough for `/` besides `/home` and `/data` because both `/var` and `/usr` used around 14GB each so I decided to create partitions for them, had 500GB unallocated disk space on my SSD for if I wanted to install windows on my machine besides Arch Linux.

I edited the fstab file and sure enough, the partitions were mounted on boot, everything went fine. Then U realised the data wasn't actually removed from the first partition so I decided to mount the drive again and remove the files, the system still worked fine.

Untill I rebooted. Apparently the bit scripts require files in the`/usr` folder which wasn't mounted at boot, but right after. F*ck, system won't boot and now I'm in a recovery shell in busybox. After googling and reading the arch wiki I noticed a small message saying what you should do if you want to have `/usr` on another partition. I didn't do any of that.

After a couple of hours and a lot of reboots and chroots from a live USB to the broken installation it was fixed without losing any data! I did learn to read the manual or wiki to see any specifics when using more partitions. 😂

Finally found a use for my rpi 2 after more than a year xD
Small testing env for client server scripts and OS portability, later project buy a rpi zero W and try to use it as something probably illegal :/
Feelsgood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My biggest ambition? I'm working on a programming language as a side project right now. I'd like to get it to a point where id rather use my language over something like Python for small scripts. And maybe even do a larger project using my language.

Hello, I have a question for anyone familiar with multithreading!

I just started working with threading for the first time, I mostly write powershell scripts 😅, I found that certain conditions make using multithreading an absolute time saver. And of course in some tasks it's not such a big deal.

I am currently working on a project that runs multiple threads and each thread might invoke one of my functions that also threads the work.

I'm a total newbhat when it comes to this stuff, but if my main process is 4 threads, and I can spin up, up-to 4 more threads to run one of my functions, does the math equate to a possible total number of threads of 16 or is it possible to have the threading go ape-shit bananas and utterly thrash the cpu with rampant threads getting created?

I've looked online and based on some of the info that I've managed to come across on my own, the answers elude towards being safe because I'm creating pools for running the threads first and the pool is responsible for maintaining min/max threads, but I can't seem to find good info on running a pool+threads inside another thread.

Just to let you in on what the function does that requires threading in the first place, I need to basically query CloudTrail based on ARN's to find events, but I can only pass a single ARN to the find-ctevent cmdlet. So I'm essentially making 1500-ish really really small calls to AWS just to get back event data for the ARN.

Serially, this takes like almost 20 mins, on my laptop using stupid settings like 24 threads, it completes in about 95seconds. On the actual server that will be running this code, I'm going to limit it to 4 threads and try to figure out a way to cache the info locally and update the info on a cron or schedule so only the initial scrape takes forever and then the updates can be done nightly or something.

thank you in advance for your help, I'm not too sure if the question is dumb but please let me know either way!

There was a department. Long time ago their work was somewhat complicated: background checks of businesses, websites, ToSes, assuring agreement compliance, some risk management on top. They started as small 3 people team but over the years they were hiring new employees to catch up with the growing customer base. They were still struggling. Few years back we've integrated 3rd party services to help them and, finally, their backlog was gone!

In January they complained about how much more work they have since the merger so I inquired about which process was troublesome, what was the flow, etc., and it turned out to be very... Tinder-like - the issue was the sheer number of cases:

1. open a case,
2. check results in few windows,
3. if green + green + green, move right.
4. else move left.

It was ridiculous, I wouldn't stand for that. I sat for an hour, made some ghosting scripts that followed same business logic and saved results alongside their actual decisions. Last week I compared the two and there was zero difference so I green-lit it with my boss and pushed to prod.

Oh, the happiness on their faces when they heard the news, the disbelief, the tears of joy!

And then it happened. After 4 years of being cautious not to stir the waters I did it again. Yesterday I accidentally replaced 17 people department with 3 scripts. How was I supposed to know it was *all* they were doing??

Question: What are 3 or 4 hard development skills I can focus on learning in the next two months or so to make me more marketable, given my lack of real development experience?

Details: I graduated college with a compsci degree, but have been doing systems/service administration since then. Aside from some small scripts for work, I don't have any post-college development experience. And even the skills I got from college aren't phenomenal because I was convinced I would be satisfied on the admin -> engineer -> architect ladder that I'm on right now.

But things have changed. My interest has dwindled in my current field, and I want to switch into a development role.

I am extremely comfortable with the Python language, but not so much with its many frameworks for frontend and web development.

I'm responsible of the smooth operations of the platform, i.e. I'm responsible if something doesn't work. As I'm the technical leader, cofounder and original developer.

However I have no control on installations scheduling, on feedback from customers, on new features planning, on installations tasks performed by the team. No resources whatsoever.

And everybody NEEDS me to perform even small tasks. I would delegate and automate if only I had the time to explain and develop scripts.

But I have zero time. So basically everybody is counting on me working 15 hours per day to get things done.
And one person is also claiming to be "in charge of operations".
He is actually only in charge of me.

I cannot exit from this vicious circle.
I'm like the house doormat.

Utility libraries, because I actually get to see my life improve because I have them. Creating new projects becomes easier because I put parts I reuse somewhere else.

There was an old config file generator/manager I kept using for a while, some string conversion libraries between formats, some REST/WebRTC API wrappers, I have a web audio API I create tunes with in various projects. CI/CD scripts for laziness so I never have to know how to set anything up again. Lately the thing I'm most happy about is I turned some free text saving service into a makeshift database and it's been working well for about half a dozen projects now. Wouldn't handle large amount of users but can't beat free and easy.

I also find merit in prototypes/old projects, because I can reference random things I did in them in newer unrelated projects. Things too small to warrant their own utility library, argh!

Colleague is programming/scripting for over 5 years now (that I know of), even attended Udacity programming nano-degree.
Yet, he still writes code/scripts without a single function. How the hell can we start any programming best practices, clean code, or making steps towards TDD with this sort of mentality.
And it's not just him, it feels like a death by thousands cuts as the small things add up. I know we're Ops and not Devs and some other colleagues are trying really hard to get their work on the next level but I see no hope for the team as the whole.

Hello, I am doing master in Pharmacy, but I like programming and consider to switch or connect somehow industries. I could write simple scripts and small programmes in Python, but I want to write code with good practice from beginning.

So my question what should I know and put in use, maybe some resources if someone has them or just terms for further search. At this moment I use gitlab for VCS (my commits sucks and my whole usage of Git sucks, but at least I use branches), I am trying to separate control from model (MVC but I guess I do it poorly), also I use keepchangelog rules for changeling, and semantic versioning for versions, PEP8 and Pokemon names for my variables and functions as it helps read code later.

All I've ever done is write scripts and small utilities, but Quality Assurance sounds really fun...

Once upon a time in the exciting world of web development, there was a talented yet somewhat clumsy web developer named Emily. Emily had a natural flair for coding and a deep passion for creating innovative websites. But, alas, there was a small caveat—Emily also had a knack for occasional mishaps.

One sunny morning, Emily arrived at the office feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a brand new project. The task at hand involved making some updates to a live website's database. Now, databases were like the brains of websites, storing all the precious information that kept them running smoothly. It was a delicate dance of tables, rows, and columns that demanded utmost care.

Determined to work efficiently, Emily delved headfirst into the project, fueled by a potent blend of coffee and enthusiasm. Fingers danced across the keyboard as lines of code flowed onto the screen like a digital symphony. Everything seemed to be going splendidly until...

Click

With an absentminded flick of the wrist, Emily unintentionally triggered a command that sent shivers down the spines of seasoned developers everywhere: DROP DATABASE production;.

A heavy silence fell over the office as the gravity of the situation dawned upon Emily. In the blink of an eye, the production database, containing all the valuable data of the live website, had been deleted. Panic began to bubble up, but instead of succumbing to despair, Emily's face contorted into a peculiar mix of terror and determination.

"Code red! Database emergency!" Emily exclaimed, wildly waving their arms as colleagues rushed to the scene. The office quickly transformed into a bustling hive of activity, with developers scrambling to find a solution.

Sarah, the leader of the IT team and a cool-headed veteran, stepped forward. She observed the chaos and immediately grasped the severity of the situation. A wry smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

"Alright, folks, let's turn this catastrophe into a triumph!" Sarah declared, rallying the team around Emily. They formed a circle, with Emily now sporting an eye-catching pink cowboy hat—an eccentric colleague's lucky charm.

With newfound confidence akin to that of a comedic hero, Emily embraced their role and began spouting jokes, puns, and amusing anecdotes. Tension in the room slowly dissipated as the team realized that panicking wouldn't fix the issue.

Meanwhile, Sarah sprang into action, devising a plan to recover the lost database. They set up backup systems, executed data retrieval scripts, and even delved into the realm of advanced programming techniques that could be described as a hint of magic. The team worked tirelessly, fueled by both caffeine and the contagious laughter that filled the air.

As the hours ticked by, the team managed to reconstruct the production database, salvaging nearly all of the lost data. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. And in the end, the mishap transformed into a wellspring of inside jokes and memes that permeated the office.

From that day forward, Emily became known as the "Database Destroyer," a moniker forever etched into the annals of office lore. Yet, what could have been a disastrous event instead became a moment of unity and resilience. The incident served as a reminder that mistakes are inevitable and that the best way to tackle them is with humor and teamwork.

And so, armed with a touch of silliness and an abundance of determination, Emily continued their journey in web development, spreading laughter and code throughout the digital realm.