Hats off for Microsoft.

After recent updates we are now able to install Windows 10 without ever being promoted to log into a Microsoft account. I was even able to uninstall OneDrive like any other application.

Small steps into the good direction.

feeling motivated..... small beginnings... baby steps :-)

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.

Do you know when you think "Oh that doesn't look too hard. I bet I can do it in no time"?
That is how I felt when I saw the DIY 3D printer kit Anet A8. It's only 150€ on gearbest so that is pretty cheap.
The reviews said it takes about 3 - 4 hours to build and I though "Ok I am a computer specialist and engineer so 3h sounds reasonable".
When I bought it from gearbest the first problems started: 5 days after the estimated shipping date the packet was still not on its way. After I fucked the support up, it finally arrived 3 weeks after the estimated date.
When I took the first look, everything seemed to be fine except for some small scratches but for that price that is not a problem.
So I started to build the printer at about 14:00 and even if some random sites in the manual were in Chinese I felt confident to get it done in a view hours.
And then it started to get really fucked. The first problem was that 2 screws were unusable and I had to use my own screws instead. The next problem was that the manual was just in the wrong fucking order at some points and I had to reverse multiple steps to get it right.
But the most fucked up thing: There should have been 2 threaded rods with a length of 345mm but the rods had a length of 310mm which was nowhere listed in the parts list. So I had to go buy some aluminium rods to fill the gap temporary so that I can at least go on with the build before getting a replacement. And I could go on and on and with the problems but the point is, it is now 19:30 which is about 5.5 hours after I started and I am still not fucking done with this.

So what have I learned?
Cheap Chinese hardware is good, but only as long as you don't have to assemble that shit yourself.

I forgot my password to [SITE]. Of course, I click "forgot password", and enter my email, which I did remember. Fairly routine "ah shit we have a problem" steps.

Now, it takes a second. This is to be expected. So I'm not worried. I then get the email and...

Now, you will notice that I redacted some information, like the company name, email, and my PLAIN TEXT PASSWORD, and my name.

I would like to note that this isn't a small, very local company that's new (even then it'd be unacceptable), but this is a multinational, multimillion dollar company.
How'd someone fuck up THIS badly?

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.

Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.

But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.

The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.

I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.

Yay!

So I finally dual booted ubuntu 16 lts alongside w10 on a laptop with nvidia optimus.

As have next to 0 XP with linux systems almost every step needed extensive googling, but in the end I have

- cinnamon
- vs code
- git
- cloned my xmlRant repo that uses asp.net core 1.1.2
- built it sucessfully
- *bonus* figured out how to use remmina to connect rdp to workplaces win 2008 r2 gateway

Very happy ^___^

We have this one professor in a mathematics course.
He sits there having no plan of what he's doing. He literally opens his python Jupiterbook with latex enabled, writes a complex equation and tries to solve it in 10 minutes. Makes mistakes every few steps and deletes his formatted equation that isn't even interpreted yet (we see the cdot etc. instead of * which makes it even harder to read). Every few minutes some student corrects him and he deletes it again.

Why can't you just think first and then write and try to teach us?
Use as much time as you want as long as you don't have to keep reverting back the humanly unreadable latex equation.

Hell, you are also allowed to use a basic pen and paper. Trust me, that shit is more readable, even if you have a bad handwriting, than your squeezed in complex untranslated latex equation in Jupiterbook.

Btw. he also streams with no zooming in I might add.

Am I supposed to trying to read your small as shit, focus on what you're teaching while you keep making mistakes or write it down on paper and practice the given tasks?

On top of that, he records the zoom conference but he doesn't share it anywhere on the college forum so that people who have missed it can download it and rewatch it.

Everything he does makes no sense. How did he become a mathematics professor with a PhD?

If you’re a Russian ux engineer who is present in a Russian ux community and you fucking make your form validate on change event and that leads to the situation when a user starts entering their email and your bouba form immediately throws WRONG EMAIL errors, we don’t call you a bouba.

We call you a ебанок (ebanok) — a small, stupid and miserable creature that you can only feel hatred mixed with disgust towards.

This shit is acceptable if you’re an intern making their first shy steps creating their own personal project, but if you push this to production, you’re a ebanok. If you don’t know how to do ux, just use server-side validation or display errors with alerts on submit.

You fucking ebanok.

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

[Rust]
I have a bunch of computational steps in a Rust program, all very expensive. They all depend on each other, forming a cycle-free and rather small graph of dependencies which is not a tree. The results of each of them for a given input are likely used tens of times by the others, so I would like to cache the subresults dynamically.

How would I go about doing this, considering that caching (rightfully) requires mutable access to the cache and multiple operations often refer to the same subresult?

I can't ask SO because they'd just tell me to use another language or recalculate everything every time, fully convinced that difficult questions can only emerge from design mistakes.

Plan my workday a day ahead. And plan it into as small steps as possible.

So that the next day I do not have to think about what to do. And that all steps are so small that I wont have much mental rejection for them.

In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.

In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.

But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.

In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.

The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.

Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.

I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.

I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).

Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.

Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.

My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.

I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.

I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.

The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.

If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.

PC setup upgrade

I'm making baby steps, at least I can boast of a very standard PC and write code in peace and use all that screen real estate to my advantage

looking back at two years ago when I was crying and begging my parents for just a core 2 duo laptop that I could learn programming with,

now I almost have all that is needed and an even stronger drive to push my limits and become a better programmer

yes, the kind of PC makes a lot of difference when writing code.

I'm still unemployed and relying on small side contracts but it's still a big step and a consolation for me when I consider the crap I have been through for years

I'm not stopping, higher we go

So, it was kinda a reversed effect?
My parents didn't give me access to computer for a long time, the only option was to play games with my dad. I also didn't have a phone for a quite long. And, when I see what is happening today with the kids that get their first own phone/tablet at age of 4, I am really happy about it.
But, somehow, that made me really interested in what runs all the squares on the screen etc. When I convinced my parents to give me my first laptop — to play Minecraft with classmates — almost the first thing I did after installing the game was searching "how to make a website". I played with some shitty builders, then I discovered HTML (which was :o for me then). Small steps into PHP, then some JS. I really enjoyed it, but PHP gave me headache each time I wrote something bigger (I was writing a super spaghetti code then, I was inexperienced), so I thought of trying something else...
Minecraft plugins!
I fallen in love with Java.
And after that the real journey began.

Its 5:32 am been working on a new social media website opened up devrant to check whatsup and found out people really have amazing pc setups ♥️ I couldn’t post mine because my laptop has a broken keyboard and i use a usb keyboard also my laptop overheats so i stuck skateboard wheels to two of the back supports its an i5 processor with 3gb of ram but I love it,its what you do with your resources that really matters right ? with that broken keyboard i created a website for my college department which now 720 students and teachers use and we have around 8k entries in 3 days. Running the website on a local server at my college so no money spent on hosting. Taking small steps towards my goals and hopefully one day i’ll publish my setup

Every single linux tutoriel ever :

Do theses steps :

Ste p 1:
Ste p 2:
Step 3 :

Reboot your system.

System doesn't boot anymore

AT THE FUCKING END in SMALL TEXT : "Oh you can't follow these instruction if you are applying changes to system disk. here is the right wasy : <link>"

Stupid linux communty. Warning ashould be AT THE FUCKING begining.

* break it into elementary steps, small enough to fit into your "estimation time unit", e.g. days or hours.
* estimate those steps for "developing at a leisurely pace" if nothing goes wrong.
* think about "what could go wrong" (list everything!) and adjust values accordingly.
* adjust total amount with experience values, like:
* times 1.2 for every manager
* times 1 to 4 based on which legacy projects i have to touch

and finally:
* multiply with `1+log(t/u,2)`, with `u` being the amount of useful data in the requirement description and `t` being the total amount of data in the requirement description
* sample: with our current "favourite" customer, about 90% of all tickets is garbage, so t/u = 100/10 = 10 => log(10,2) = 3.3 => multiply everything with 4.3

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

ChatGPT is so much better than Google:
instead of wasting my time by linking to unhelpful / outdated / unrelated StackOverflow resources, it tells me to do the work by myself right away:

> To ensure consistent pseudo-element width across different browsers, including Safari, you can follow these steps: [...]
> (some basic HTML/CSS 101 seemingly quoted from a 2015 textbook)
>
> It's important to note that browser behavior might vary due to different rendering engines or versions. While following best practices helps achieve consistent results, you might still encounter small discrepancies. Cross-browser testing is always recommended to ensure your design looks consistent across different browsers, including Safari.
>
> For any specific issues you encounter in Safari, consider checking for known bugs or quirks that might affect pseudo-elements and their sizing. Online resources, developer forums, and documentation can provide valuable insights into Safari-specific behavior and workarounds.

I have mixed feelings about Elon’s Neuralink. Just read a bit of the abstract.

“Neuralink’s first steps toward a scalable high-bandwidth BMI system. We have built arrays of small and flexible electrode “threads”, with as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads.”

I’m curious, will this be this be the next “form of cognition”?

I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.

It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.

But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .

When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.

But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"

I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .

the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.

ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

My little journey of regrets:
I remember when I was fourteen, I opened a small gap the door of "programming". It were the first steps of html, tags and what they do, to be precise.
"May, looks good. Thanks for the glimpse. Cya"
For about the other half of my life only magic happened at my desktop.
And now I'm standing once again at the door of programming trying to breach it with nukes n shit.
"Giev me all the knowledge plx, teach me senpai! I will never ignore and betray you again!"

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

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.

Today our PM planned to deploy in production an e-commerce based on PrestaShop.
A colleague of mine mamaged to implement everything that was necessary, and I made a small script to add random sales on random products every sunday.
We tested it several times in our environment, on multiple machines, and everything was working fine.

BUT
Today we launched the script on production server, and we was a little mistake.
"A bug? Say no more pal, I'll fix it!".

Fixed, tested on local environment, deployed and.... The first steps weren't working.

"Fatal error".
That's what I got. No exceptions, no error messages, no references.. Just "fatal error".
We spent two hours looking for the problem, thinking it was a server error that was just outputting that shitty message.

And you know what? Some fucking fat cocksucker son of a bitch thought it was an excellent idea to stop the code execution with a simple and very helpful "fatal error".

"oh, wait, there is an error here, let me print die(" fatal error"), ao the other developer will be able to find what's going on", he thought.

FUCK YOU MORON.

TL;DR: Avoid French software, they are a bounch of asshole (except some goos guy..)

One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.

Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".

Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.

Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small.

After how much dev experience you wrote your firs API ?
what are essential steps to write a small good api?

i always get sucked into this "cute code" hell whenever i am working with a b2c codebase, and especially with kotlin code.

here's a scenario:

task : build a debounce logic for an input view where each user input is currently triggerring an api call.

my steps
1. read what debouncing is.
2. see if any code is available on the internet
=> found a code piece on the internet with some level of abstraction ( basically a simple final class that implements the input event callback and encapsulates the debounce logic)
3) copy it, run it , it wokrs

------

for any sane coder, these steps are hardly 10-30 mins and they can move on with life. but its your truly that made this task into a 6hour research only to come up at similar solution. my curiosity led me to stupid places

1) why this class is final? what if someone else wanna use it but with a different behaviour? lets try open(non final class) .

2) why even use a class? it extends an interface, lets try to wrap the logic in interface itself (kotlin supports interfaces that don't require implementation)

3) umm , the interface works but it looks ugly, with all its global overridden variables. what about we make it extension?

4) yeah the extension approach is also not very good, lets go back to open class.

5) but extend is super nice to look! lets keep the extension and open class too

6) can we optimise the implementation? why it uses an additional handler? what if we provided everything in constructor? how about builder pattern?

FUCK MY BRAIN! there are so much fucking options that i forgot that i spent 4 hours on this small thing

the simplest approach would have been tk just shove all the listeners and everything in activity and forget about it :/

senior devs on this platform, how do you stop yourself from adding every concept that you know into the smallest possible task?

I want to start with web development and combine ESP projects with a nice interface or just to make a small websites showing algorithms in an animation. (Just as examples) But where the hell do I start. I have a background with C/C++ and python but want to develop more skills. Like do I go with react, node.js, typescript and postgres or something else? And what are the first steps I should take? If any of you got tutorials they can recommend I'd really appreciate that, because I feel like there are a ton of BS tutorials out there...

I am so sick and tired of ChatGPT being down all the time! It's like the developers at OpenAI just don't care about the people who rely on this tool to get their work done. I mean, come on, it's not like we're asking for much here. We just need a stable, reliable language model that we can rely on to complete our tasks. But no, instead we have to deal with constant downtime, error messages, and other issues that make it impossible to get anything done.

And don't even get me started on the lack of support and communication from the OpenAI team. It's like they're completely oblivious to the fact that their product is causing major headaches for so many people. I mean, I understand that developing and maintaining a large language model is no small feat, but that's no excuse for the constant problems we're facing.

I'm honestly at my wit's end with this whole thing. It's just so frustrating and frustratingly frustrating to have something that should be so simple and straightforward be such a constant source of stress and frustration. If the OpenAI team can't get their act together and provide a reliable product, then they need to step aside and let someone who can do the job properly take over.

I just hope that they're listening and that they'll take the necessary steps to fix these issues and provide a service that we can all depend on. Because right now, it's just not cutting it.