- Sleep 7h+ each night (you think you don't need it - but you do!)
- drink NO coffee (you've slept enough!)
- pair-up (you're not as good as you think)
- get a grasp on the problem (it's time will spent!)
- communicate constantly (you're not alonw especially)
- refactor just as much
- learn from you partner
- celebrate even small accomplishments (you need success!)
- go home and do something else (your pet project does not need more than 5hrs per week!)
- repeat (because repetition makes perfection!)

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I'm tired of working for small companies.

I'm always either the sole developer, or the only dev for a specific stack, and therefore don't have anyone to ask for help. If I can't figure something out, it just doesn't get done.

It also means I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off, do code reviews with, or even friggin' have someone who understands what I do.

It sucks.

It would be nice to have someone I could actually ask for help! As it stands, I tear my hair out in frustration until I'm desperate enough to beg for help on discord or SO. whereupon, of course, I get ignored, as per usu. asdjfklasdjf

It really sucks.

It also means that I'm often surrounded entirely by sales people and managers... you know, those super-talkative people? who basically get paid just to talk? and are absolutely computer illiterate? Yeah. Think someone who says "I need my deliverables by end-of-week," "customer success representative," "turnkey solution," etc. completely seriously. (ew).

They're the people who constantly wonder why I can't push `n` features in `n/4` days, and ofc can't understand anything I say in response because of the aforementioned illiteracy. They're also the people who, almost every week, ask how long `y` is going to take, and then yell "But I need it by Friday! I just sold 50 clients on it!" (And they do this, of course, without ever asking for timelines)

It really fucking sucks.

Though I suppose larger companies would still have these problems.

but at least I could ask for help once in awhile. that would be nice.

So i was working with a small company which were developing software for insurance sector. It was decided then that there should be an app for windows phone community and i was hired to that job.

It took me almost a month to finish the job. Please keep in mind that project was huge and already developed for android counterpart and was a hit in market. This was a chance given to me to prove myself and i proved it.

First month was fantastic for the company as software the company made was not available for windows phone. Price has been set for the software was higher in those time. Almost $15.

Excited by the success i added some more features which were not available on android counter part.

But price was very high. Even i asked management to drop the price because there were less windows phone user but no body listened.

Result : in a year app has made roughly 5000 download in which only 200 paid the actual price. Company asked me to take down the app from store. I was blamed for my over confidence in adding features that this made app less usable. They did not say a word to business managment team. I was fired.

Rough, cruel world.

6 month ago i published my app for same purpose with same feature set and different UI. And made it free. Completely free. Added a link to pay developer $0.5 or Rs 30.

Result: i have now 10 thousands plus download in last 4 month in which almost 3000 users have donated already.

Now i have my resource and my confidence and making an android app for same purpose.

This is my story and is not fake, i am 28 years old. If you think you can, you can.

Amen.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

Me: This is good, but here’s a small tiny change that will make it even better!
Tests: 1 success, 3628 failures, simulator freezes and crashes computer
Me: never mind...

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

Thus far I've had little success trying to teach code to people I know.

But yesterday.....man

My best friend told me that he was serious about learning. He asked me about my recommendation would be. Against all odds, and after small demonstrations he asked to learn about Java.

I made some coffee and braced myself. Either the dude is a hidden genius or I am an amazing instructor, but he got the whole thing. I introduced him to the basics, oop, variables etc and he got it down in one session. He was able to understand errthing a do a little code along.

So proud.

That moment when you're finally getting your user registration and login system up and running!
As a web dev student I feel like I have accomplished something :)

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

Did anyone of you worked for a company where:

- there was a financial success
- code was clean and was enabler for fast delivery
- tests were professional
- CI/CD pipeline was working as expected
- features were developed in small chunks (few PRs per day)
- managers were trustful and were solving real issues to help you
- refactor was part of the everyday development

Is it even possible? Is there at least one company who achieved success doing the above?

I hate SQL Server so much, don't matter how Microsoft say they improve themselves at SQL Server.

There's a lot of fucking bloat, messes your system and your services, adds tons of crap in your system registry, while more advanced SQL engines such MariaDB/PostgreSQL are more contained, and its very small.

Why SQL Server has to mess with Windows' ACL and his own privilege systems?.

Uninstall it and a lot of components remain hidden and tons of registry entries, not even TotalUninstaller or CCleaner can help.

I hate it since my technical high school and my goddamn college is forcing us to use SQL Sever for EVERYTHING, instead of good alternatives, messed my computer entirely requiring to format.

I try always to convince my freelance clients to use open-source alternatives, and say how SQL Server is so crap, (i had variant degrees of success).

I don't really have a notable successful project yet, but I'm working on a small game with my friend and I'd say that that's already a success. Doing something you love with people you love is amazing.

As you can see from the screenshot, its working.
The system is actually learning the associations between the digit sequence of semiprime hidden variables and known variables.

Training loss and value loss are super high at the moment and I'm using an absurdly small training set (10k sequence pairs). I'm running on the assumption that there is a very strong correlation between the structures (and that it isn't just all ephemeral).

This initial run is just to see if training an machine learning model is a viable approach.

Won't know for a while. Training loss could get very low (thats a good thing, indicating actual learning), only for it to spike later on, and if it does, I won't know if the sample size is too small, or if I need to do more training, or if the problem is actually intractable.

If or when that happens I'll experiment with different configurations like batch sizes, and more epochs, as well as upping the training set incrementally.

Either case, once the initial model is trained, I need to test it on samples never seen before (products I want to factor) and see if it generates some or all of the digits needed for rapid factorization.

Even partial digits would be a success here.
And I expect to create multiple training sets for each semiprime product and its unknown internal variables versus deriable known variables. The intersections of the sets, and what digits they have in common might be the best shot available for factorizing very large numbers in this approach.

Regardless, once I see that the model works at the small scale, the next step will be to increase the scope of the training data, and begin building out the distributed training platform so I can cut down the training time on a larger model.

I also want to train on random products of very large primes, just for variety and see what happens with that. But everything appears to be working. Working way better than I expected.

The model is running and learning to factorize primes from the set of identities I've been exploring for the last three fucking years.

Feels like things are paying off finally.

Will post updates specifically to this rant as they come. Probably once a day.

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

I had very small experience on programming and applied for a dev Job kind of accidently.
But having good mathematical Background I convinced the Interviewer to give me the chance of learning during an internship. So I started a console Tool for special testing purpose with good success.
After the internship they asked me if I'm willing to lern Javascript and HTML. Though I had a lot of fun there, the answer was easy 😏
Now I'm a senior there having a team of 4-5 devs
And I still enjoy coding a lot 😎
So basically I learned coding during work

So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.

I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...

I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.

Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.

I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.

Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.

Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."

It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...

The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...

Seriously frustrating some times...

!devrant.

More like 'relationship' rant.

The following is gonna be kinda crude and not work appropriate just fyi.

First, whats with this trend of 'shave your pussy", and small tits? Shit just a few years ago it was the opposite! Who wants to fuck a women who looks like an undeveloped boy. Give me a good medium pair of knockers and a (slightly) hairy pussy anyday and I'm in heaven.

On that note, all these guys whining and fucking whinging about "fat" women. Like I'm not chasing deathfat women or anything, but come on dudes. If you're gonna demand 'thin beautiful women' put in the fucking work! Just saying it now. Kinda pudgy, not a deal breaker for me. She have a pretty face, looks good in make up? Fuck it, I'll give her the time of day. Don't come at me with "hurrr...fat is unhealthy! Wheres your standards?"

Wheres YOUR fucking standards? Shit, I could take a 'heavy' girl and in a few months time have her trim. Its about the WORK you put in. All these fucking guys, all these fucking guys man, they all want something for nothing and chicks for free. No one wants to put in the fucking EFFORT anymore. I can't name on one hand the number of 'fat ugly chicks' everyone ignored from school (well except for me), who are now bombshells. If I stayed connected with people maybe I'd be with one of em right now, but I just get tired of this attitude that no one invests any time in others any more. It's all about 'me me me'.

Shes fat, maybe only a few extra pounds? Fat and 'not beautiful'? Fucking DO THE WORK and make her beautiful you bitch! Be her coach, like those fucking instagram couples you see sweating it out. Make her sexy. Become sexy, together.
Get her a fucking treadmill. Get her two. And jog together. Make her *feel* sexy.

More importantly get to *know* her. Why does she get out of bed in the morning? What drive her NOT to get out of bed? When does she feel lousy? What makes her feel that way? In addition to all the other shit men should know how to do, you should learn to play doctor phil, because every girl needs one. Women bond by talking, men bond by doing things together. Relationships should involve both.

Jesus fucking christ, this is basic bitch advice, and it annoys me I keep on coming across these spergs that don't fucking get it. Women are not cars you can stick your key in and just go 'vroom'.

They require maintenance, same as anything, any 'relationship' (because really, what are relationships in 2020, with instagram and fucking tinder and antisocial distancing?). You're a *team*, and i don't mean that in an inspirational way. You're a literal team. And far too many people prioritize the well being and success and concern of 'I' over' 'us'.

In short, if she ain't coming, you shouldn't be either. And if you expect her to on-the-regular put sharp objects on her fucking nether regions, don't expect any blowjobs unless you're doing the same thing for yourself!

Ideally you should be doing it to each other.
After all, you're partners. You trust her to put sharp objects near your groin, right?
Aren't relationships supposed to be about mutual trust?

<repost because previous one had many typos and grammatical mistakes>

I have arrived at a conclusion, rather two.

- I am a misfit who generally does not belong anywhere. Not that Steve Jobs Hipster type where you'd think I am a misfit genius. I am rather a misfit ignorant loser, at least for wide majority of things. I also have some ego issues of being included, hence I often turn out to be an asshole if things don't go according to me.

- People in general will hate you for no reason. And hate you more for your success. They'd be happy at your misery and pain. If you are running, walking, or even crawling towards success based on your hard-work, they will be jealous. Only time you are valued is when they need anything or can extract benefits out of you. Once you are drained, no one looks back because for them nothing more is left that could be exploited.

As long as you are providing, you'll be included.

This has significantly affected my self worth. I have allowed people to take advantage of me at the cost of my self respect and time.

These people are narcissist takers.

But there is a very very small group of people in my life, many of them I haven't even met and/or less frequently interacted, who are givers.

During my time with them, all they have done is kept giving me. Even when I asked them to stop or tried to resonate their kindness, they refused and kept giving me more. Most wonderful and best people in my life. I never failed to acknowledge their worth and valued them more than they deserved.

As of now, life is a mess.

way back in highschool, for recitation i fixed a bug in the code written on the board with a very small change. feeling proud of my work, i did a 'mic drop'-esque thing on the marker i used.

my prof apparently did not see the change i made, said to the class something about 'having guts,stagefright,etc. he thought i really did not do anything, and just erased the whole thing. i almost lost interest in programming after that.

after college though, graduating top of the class and all, the school asked me to do their website, it was kickass and the board liked it.

months after golive, i came across the same prof in a party for celebrating the success of the website.
i will never forget that "in your face" smug smile i gave him, and the obvious stumped look on his face.

sorry if its too long, here's a rant potato (:/)

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

My biggest dream is moving to Europe. Obviously a rich, westernized country.

I have Bipolar type I (the most severe one), ADHD & Autism combo. Initially, getting diagnosed with bipolar and getting treatment was LIFE-CHANGING. I cannot overstate this. We're talking body weight, relationships, job, position, salary, life insights, political orientation, personal projects and their success.
I live in a very small, relatively poor Eastern country now. I fled Russia for it. The medications I need aren't available here. More than that, some of them are illegal, so importing them is out of question.
Getting the meds I need will definitely change my entire life. It will change everything. I will also be able to start my gender transition without the risk of being beaten up on the street. The only thing I need is some kind of visa.

If comparisons make you feel better, and you live in a rich western country, just remember that there are people that will do anything to get to a similar position as you.

I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.

I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.

I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D

Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?

What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)

I gave a very small overview of the flutter sdk a whiiiile ago and I have been thinking about going back to it. Currently considering between 2 courses on udemy that are at a discount price. I love the idea of dart as a language and prefer declarative ui building over xml shittyness. I was an Android/ios development for 2 years and hated every minute of it, but really love the idea of building mobile apps.

What are your thoughts and considerations on this? Should I jump right in or just leave it asside? What are your success stories with flutter and what did you use to learn the framework besides the docs? How easy are things like state management and persistent storage with flutter compared to android and ios?

I will eventually make my own decission by building sample projects, but hearing from the community would be great.

Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...

Every day is tempting to me..tempting to use some solutions i am not sure that i can handle it.

The Company i work for has an external IT Partner that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to our infrastructure, like installing servers, doing the installations and such. I mostly monitor it and do basic maintenance. Its all windows.

Recently i thought about adding a fifth Hyper V instance for an intranet webserver...based on some linux distro (probably ubuntu cause that is what i am familiar with). But i am not THAT familiar with ubuntu or any linux distro..buts its just the intranet and i already installed nginx and apache with success, what could go wrong?

today i sketched some intranet websoftware our production might find useful to collect data input from our workers (we are somewhat small so there is no big ERP software as of now). When thinking how to realize the data input i thought that maybe a basic raspberry and some cheap 1280x800 10.1 inch touch panels would be best..its very tempting, but on the other hand i am not sure i am ready for that, my experience is shallow and only based on my own RaPi that i 99,99% run headless. On the other hand it would be a very small and space safing concept..and cheap..compared to the use of Laptops (the go to company solution when computers are needed).

It also had the risk that i am the only one that could unfuck anything if things go south..it also has the advantage that i am the only one who could fix things when it goes south...

so much temptation