Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

UPDATE: I have my dream job.

About a year ago I commented on Devrant that I was having some hard luck interviewing for development jobs.
Shortly after my post I decided to lower my expectations and took a job at a tech support call center.(3 month contract)
After getting a little experience(Not just a degree) I was able to land a hardware support job at a fortune 500 company.(Not what a programmer really wants 😂)
I worked hard and started writing tools at home to help with the job. I started giving them out to the other techs and put them on a little internal website for easy access.
About 3 months ago I just became a software engineer within the company.(after 6 months of hardware repair.) The main reason I got the job was because I showed them how much overtime and extra work I had done and that the techs relied on my software to do there jobs and that I was dependable.

It was hard work but it was worth it. And I built software that I never would have done if I hadn't taken this "lower job"

So keep your chin up and your fingers on the keys, I was in your shoes a year ago. 😉

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

6 months ago I sold everything, quit my job, gave up my apartment and left the country with my 11kg backpack. I booked a one way ticket to South America. I wanted to travel, get lost but also finish up some personal projects and do a little tech books challenge I came up with. I learnt so much over the past half a year, it's crazy.

Not looking back. Projects paid off and it turns out that my dream company actually found me themselves without me even applying... and so still from South America I'm in final rounds of the interview! 🤗

All my worries about a gap in CV, no employment along with other problems I thought I was gonna have... It's all BS. So if anyone here is waiting for a sign. Well, this is it now. Go!

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

So at school the teacher gave us a MONTH to write a sorting algorithm in Java. I asked the teacher if that wasn't a little too much time.
Her answer:" I want to give the weaker people in class a chance."
Okay so far so good.

The day we had to turn in our code I asked around what algorithm others had choosen and if they had any problems with it.

Classmate A: "yeah we didn't know how to program it so we copied it from the internet and I modified it heavily."
Me *raised eyebrows*: "can you show me?"
Me: "but that's exactly the same like the first Google result?!"
A:"No look there , I added this line so that it works with my code"

That lying bitch just added bucketSort(myArr, maxVal);
In the main method.

Me"How is that heavily modifying?"
A:"Also I asked the teacher and she said it was OK to copy the method from the internet"

What the flying cunt is wrong with people. So you give us a month to copy and paste from the internet.
Yeah great teaching.
You are the reason why half the class can't program shit.

Thanks for nothing. 😒😒

First rant hope you enjoyed it.

Just sharing my experience of my spontaneous interview with Facebook. I'm not good at writing these but here you go :)

- I was working as an Android dev and didn't have much knowledge in algorithms nor competitive programming, never ever interviewed with big companies.
- a random day on LinkedIn, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me
- I ignored it for few week because I thought it's so out of my league, then somehow, out of blue, I had a thought of giving it a try, so I did
- passed first round
- start studying algorithms a little for phone interview in 3 weeks
- recklessly took the phone interview
- passed
- start studying intensively (while working fulltime) for the on-site interview in 2 months
- almost got the job, they gave me one more chance by a followed up interview
- messed up the last chance real bad
- failed!!!
- Initially I just wanted to give it a try, but the fact that I failed at very very last chance, frankly, bothers me a bit. Maybe I will interview with FB or big companies if I have chance later, but I know for sure that the studying had made me a much better dev. All the code I write now is much more efficient (I think), I can and not anymore afraid of reading complicated code.
- Overall, it does takes a lot of time (~4 months studying while working fulltime), but also benefits myself a lot though I didn't get the job, so basically, good experience, but better if I got the job 😁

Oops, wanted to write a few lines and it's a long post already.. I should stop here :D

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

Tonight I was getting ready to pay my monthly apartment maintenance bill so I Googled my property management company's name because I always forget the url. It's always the first result, but I noticed Google placed a little "This site may be hacked." line of text on their listing.

Seeing that before and knowing what it means, I went into the source for their index page, and to my suspicion, their WordPress installation was hacked with the standard invisible spam links.

I realize this happens to a lot of WordPress blogs, but this is an NYC property management company that is responsible for a lot of buildings and has millions of dollars in contracts. Normally I would inform them, but having dealt with them in the past I don't like them very much, but more importantly, I don't think they'd understand what I was saying because they are so technically inept. They might even think that because I found this, that I had something to do with it.

So devRant, it is up to you. What should I do?

My boss pissed me off so much yesterday I totally ditched work today. I had some spiced rum for breakfast (and dinner) and spent the day playing minecraft and browsing Black Friday specials.

I did a little bit of work that (oversimplified) involved paying a Clover contractor for doing basically nothing. Totes cool with that as the guy is really nice and a decent dev. Annoyingly, though, he started hitting on me and asked me out on a date at the end of the call. He's like 65 and has a daughter (grand daughter?) my age, so that's like totally creepy. Ugh.

Getting hit on by random old men is still better than talking to Mr. Asshole the Sales Fetishizer, though.

So I migrated over to ja.stackoverflow.com, which is just the japanese version of stackoverflow, and realized how much different japanese devs are to the american ones Im used too.

On the standard StackOverflow I would see people argue and lots of questions would be downvoted. but on its japanese counterpart if you even ask for a little more context on a question they speak to you as if you were there boss. They also always say thank you sir at the end of their comment.

Im tempted to just keep google translate open and stay on ja.stackoverflow

I have no words.

So the country I live in is going to get a huge mass surveillance law. Currently we're trying to force a referendum because this is highly (privacy) intrusive. We can still sign them for a little bit and a friend of mine hadn't done that yet. His reasoning was that it I isn't binding anyways.

We've got this John Oliver equivilant in the Netherlands who did a piece about this.

I put it on for my friend saying that I just wanted him to watch it. If he wouldn't change his mind afterwards, I wouldn't pressure him or anything.

We watched it.

Afterwards he looked at me with eyes like 😵😧😷😲😮😫.

"they'll REALLY be able to do this shit!?!"
"where can I sign this fucking thing to get this referendum going?"

So I asked him why he suddenly was all for it.

"I'm not much of a privacy guy but this shit just crossed a fucking line".

He's going to sign it as fast as possible 😁

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

Impostor vs Kenner syndrome

We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.

So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.

I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.

It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.

Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.

But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.

Am I the only one who hates it that everything needs to be done in JavaScript nowadays?
Why can't you just start writing native software again? Why does every program need its own fucking browser engine and at least 200MB of RAM to do nothing but show and edit text?
I want to have fast and streamlined software again and use my resources for important things. So much software that is called fast or lightweight isn't either. It's just a little less heavy and slow than the software it tries to replace.
I don't use C all the time, but maybe looking into Qt instead of electron might be a start.
I had a project where I could convince my tutors to let me use C++ instead of JS and they were surprised how fast my application started even though it only consisted only of a empty window with a status bar. How far have we come that we even need to think about performance when opening an empty window on modern hardware?

I'm not even that old and I've had it with young cocksure, full of them self language/environment evangelists.

- "C# is always better than Java, don't bother learning it"

- "Lol python is all you need"

- "Omg windows/linux/mac sucks use this instead"

The list goes on really, at some point you have got to realize that while specialization is great, you have to learn a little bit of everything. It broadens you horizon a lot.

Yea, C# does some nifty stuff, but Java does too, learn both. Yea I'm sure Linux is better for hosting docker containers, but your clients are on mac or windows, learn to at least navigate and operate all three etc. Embrace knowledge from all the different tech camps it can only do you good and you will be so much more flexible and employable than your close minded peers :)

Hell even PHP has a lot to teach us (Even more than just to be a bad example, har har)

My last special snowflakes teacher story. This happend last Friday.

Background: we had to do a "little" project in less than 2 weeks (i ranted about that) and got our degree on Friday. I did a perfectly fine meal suggester, with in my opinion one of the best codes i've ever written.

After getting my degree (which is totally fine and qualifies me as IT technician/ "staatlich geprüfte Informationstechnische Assistentin") i asked him what my grade for the project was.
Me: what was my grade for the project again?
Him: i left it at 90%
Me: why exactly? You seemed to be really excited and liked it obviously. And there was no critique from you after my presentation.
Him: yadda yadda. I can't give you more. Yadda yadda be happy i didn't lower your grade.
Me: why would you lower my grade? This doesn't make sense at all. I matched all your criteria. You wanted a program everyone loved, everyone wanted to buy. There you go. I made exactly that.
Him: i can't give you a 1 (equals an A)
Me: why not?
Him: you wrote to much. I didn't want so much (he never specified a maximum). And you used to advanced code. And there were so many lists and ref - methods. The class couldn't benefit from it.
Me: Excuse me!? The only "advanced code" i used was a sqlite library. And i explained what i did with that. What do you mean by "so many lists" and ref-menthodes. In which methodes am i using ref?
Him: I don't know, i just skimmed through the code.
Me, internal: WHAT THE FUCKING HELL!?
Me: so you are telling me, you didn't even read my code fully and think it is too advanced for the class? And because of that you give a 2 (equals a B)?
Him: yes
I just gave him a deathstare and left after that. What the hell. Yes, i used encapsulation - which is something we hadn't done much in class. But the code is still not more advanced because i use more files -.-

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

I'm mad. Really really mad. I've worked so hard and this guy just comes in makes me feel inadequate. I come in every day and there he is sitting in his corner watching me as I work. For him it's so God damn easy! It takes me hours to do what he accomplishes in mere minutes! Oh yeah and he's such a fat ass too. He doesn't even have to do much to get his food. It just comes to him. I don't know how he fucking does it. He's got no fucking phone! What the hell!? I actually have to get up and go places to get my food. He's so fucking entitled, the little shit. He thinks he's a suave motherfucker. Well I fucking hate him. I might actually get around to killing him and then wiping the floor with him. But today's not that day. He's just a little to high for me to handle, honestly.

I should really just keep my head down and continue working and not let him bother me. But I can always feel it, that stare behind my head. I guess...

spiders are just better web developers than i am

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

So they discovered a small tiny bug in a thing anyone last touched about 3 months ago. It has been there for at least 6 months, and JUST NOW someone noticed it. But OF COURSE that bug is important enough to have me drop FUCKING EVERYTHING that I'm doing, despite us being very short on time already!

Fucking hell, if nobody noticed that shitty little crap bug the past 6 months how can it possibly be so important. Good thing I don't have a large wooden mallet nearby.

So thanks so much for having me fix this RIGHT NOW, or rather IN THREE FUCKING HOURS or however it'll take to set up this project's dev environment... absolute horseshit.

CEO - So... We'll have a new side project, it's a small thing, I spoke with a guy, he needs just a small thing...
Me - Ok....... So, what do you need me for?
CEO - Not much, this guy started a project but wants your help on a small part, and you already did something similar for us, so it should be fast, just copy and paste and change a little bit. You probably know better than me.
Me - *Sigh* ... So `friend`, what do you need from me?
Friend - So, I made a crawler that is storing some information on a local file, I just need to add multiprocessing and multithreading, a producer-consumer system with a queue so I can automatically add new links every now and then, a failback system, so when a process doesn't finish, it should be re-queued and crawled later, store all the information on a database cluster (that is not set up), [......]
Me - And when is this supposed to be up and running?
Friend - Your CEO told me you could do this by the weekend. Can we finish this by Friday?
Me - *facepalm* FML

We have a group slack chat for my class which was intended to be a space for asking questions about assignments and getting help from your peers. Instead it has become a dick measuring contest in there where guys who know very little can act all high and mighty about their (plain wrong, in some instances) facts they're distributing without care. It pisses me off so much seeing how toxic it has become in there. It's the same 5 guys using it to bully each other and God forbid anyone else asks a question, they'll be mocked for not being confident handing in a solution they aren't sure is right. Why can't people treat each other with respect? We're in school to LEARN. Not impress other students with how much (read: little) we know. GJ, guys. You created a smaller version of stack overflow.

if people are curious of the PTSD baggage i'm carrying and why i rage so much at everything, see attached picture

granted, this was partly my fault, as i said, i was far too nice, and stayed for far too long

also note this job was AFTER a 2+ previous e-commerce job with ultimately failed project and little pay

UG i mean LOOK at this... i could go on and on for hours "push notifications must run" - yeah a casual bullet point that needs to be finished by end of day? hahahaha

Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?

Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.

Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).

So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.

He refuses.

So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...

I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.

Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.

Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.

Moral of the story is, some people are retards.

!rant
Linux vs Microsoft

Well, this war is certainly one of the oldest. IMO,
Linux - great for automating stuff, free, and customisable.
Windows - user friendly, softwares much more easily available, much easier to use.

Frankly, I have tried using Linux a lot of times, but never liked it one bit. I am a GUI fan and hate to type commands for every little thing. Plus installing Ubuntu wiped out my disk once and I lost all my school memories ( this was in 2008, I didn't know much about backups, was quite young) ,so I am quite vary of it. I just don't feel it to be intuitive. Just to do a simple task, I loathe to learn difficult commands, and just read the syntax.

However, I have no bias against people who use Linux.

It is like religion, live and let live, follow whatever suits you.

On devrant, why's there so much hate for Windows? Because it is paid? Because it has updates? So what!
I never had a problem with it, I update once a month, takes 10 mins. If you set up your active hours correctly, it works great, you can disable updates also. Windows 10 is highly stable. It is paid, but in my country almost all laptops come with windows preinstalled. The OS-less laptops are about $10 cheaper, which is not that much to freak about.

Would love to hear your views and logical arguments.
Please be polite.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).

// Sorry for the long post!

EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces

When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.

When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.

Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.

In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.

31st December 2016, I had signed up for devRant.

It's my cake day today. Feels so good to be part of this community, have learned so much, made some of the greatest friends here.

2021 was a mind fuck. Taxing and draining. Very little growth and even less learnings.

I realised that I am in a toxic environment.

Lately, no philosophy, therapy, supplements, activity, work, etc. has been helping me to get back to my original self.

I used to spiral down with a lot of negative self talk and playing the victim card.

Just day before yesterday, I decided to listen to some affirmations on the Tube and that actually helped me bounce back.

I started socialising and stepping out to attend gigs and just be outdoors as much as I could.

My surroundings changed and so did my thought process.

Hence, I made a decision to continue affirmations and slowly change my surroundings, even if that demand domestic relocation.

Things are starting to look positive after a long, loooooong, time.

I also need more sun exposure for my vitamin D3 deficiency and steady dose of serotonin.

I feel lot clear in head and heart. My goals are clearer and I am ready to start working hard and be my original past self again.

I love you all and I really wish you all achive all your wishes and dreams, be happier and healthier in 2022 with ton of success and money.

That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.

So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.

At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.

One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.

His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."

Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!

And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.

But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.

!rant

This might be the most ambitious project I've ever started up till now, teaching my girlfriend everything college isn't.

As some of you may know my uni isn't the greatest and lacks in professor quality, my girlfriend (who's taking the same bachelor) knows this and when she knew I was starting a new little side project she wanted in.

At first I was skeptical, this could be just an excuse to spend more time with me, so I told her:

"if you really want to then I'm all for it, it'll be done my way and the first few weeks will be tough, however I promise by the end of it you will know 10x what you do now"

She agreed and so our journey began 3 weeks ago, my goal: make a kick ass project, do it in record time and teach her enough to cope with a IRL job.

I've setup the project so by the end of it she is well versed in the following: scrum, Django, MVC, python, HTML + CSS3, git, GitHub, PostgreSQL and Docker. In about 4 to 6 months.

We are into our third sprint this week, she had two small breakdowns because she couldn't believe how much she was missing out and felt she lacked talent, this is our third week and I'm glad to see that she's actually enjoying herself.

I was bored so I scanned through Dev.to and Medium. I lost the remnants of the little hope I had left for mankind...

JS this, Python that, JS that... and so much other mindless articles of exactly zero substance and headlines to make any self-respecting dev cringe for days.

I meant to write something else, too, but I'm too saddened now. I no longer wonder why so many of the fresher self-made "devs" are so idiotic of a breed...

My Nexus 6P died yesterday..
A new battery that I ordered for it months ago, arrived.. today.
4700mAh. If only I could've tested it.

This feels so much like it was just to rub it in a little bit further that that Nexus is gone forever.. just before I could fix the first shitstain, the second one occurred already... Fuck me :')

Anyone else sick of all the whining about college on here? It’s a CS degree. They are going to teach you science. Not to mention that Stack Overflow did a survey in 2015 and found that nearly half the developers didn’t have degrees. If you’re so much smarter than your professors then you should have no problem finding a job. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to not have to pay for school; you should just be thankful that you’re a step up in going for management positions and shut up. On the other hand, if you’re paying (going into debt) for school; then maybe you should take a step off the safe and well-trodden path and put a little faith in yourself. There is an abundance of free training online. I thought devs were supposed to be free-spirited rebels. Didn’t any of you see ‘Hackers’?

"You're charging so much for a work you did so little time. "

"It took me years to learn how do that in so little time"

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

!dev

It’s sooo weird.
I’m generally not feeling happy or good or “okay”, I’m almost always rather shitty but just keep going through my day without complaining too much because that’s what most of us do..

Today, for the first time in at least one (very lonely, cold and boring) year, I went outside for a smoke and felt good. No idea why.
Everything was orangy/yellowish outside because of the clouds after the first sunny day in weeks.
Its raining slightly but not so much that you actually get wet.

I just had this feeling of “yea, that’s good enough” which I haven’t had in probably 4-5 years or so.

Maybe it’s because I got a little bit of sun for once and saw other people walking 2m around me, I don’t know..
But it felt good.

Does that feeling sound familiar to anyone or am I just finally going crazy?

I also apologise for my last 50 rants not being about dev or rant but I’m lucky to not have much to rant about in my current job 😅

Hoping so much that the new devRant store has official devRant caps.
In the meanwhile I hacked this and wore it backwards during my last 4 race walks including the NY State Empire Game Championships so my opponents could watch 'little devvie' stare them down for 30+ minutes. It worked!

Is there a lot of people in the same boat as me?

I'm a self taught guy. Never in my life had I a senior developer i could bug for answers. Every little bug and inconveniece i have ever experienced - left alone to cope and find solutions. I just feel like sooo burned out. I have some large complex system questions building up and googling doesnt give me the answers anymore. This is frustrating. I'm supposed to be a mid level developer, but I'm acting as a senior to one of my colleagues even though I have so many questions and doubts in my mind. I think I developed a lot of plot holes in my knowledge and I have no real way to know which are which. I feel I dont know so much. Fuck. Where do I go from here?

Amdy's story.

Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.

He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.

Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.

Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.

Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?

Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!

Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!

And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.

As a trainee in my very first company I was comparing myself to my mentor too much.

And I just couldn't compete.

He had deep knowledge, was more productive, had amazing skills in different departments and his side projects were astonishing.

Turned out: I wasn't expected to.
Turned out: Even among nerds, he was an extraordinary unicorn. Other developers in the company had huge respect and were humbled by his skills.

Yet nevertheless, I doubted my career choice when I was struggeling for 4 hours on a seemingly tiny problem, then when I approached him he would come in and write the code down in 15 minutes.

He made it look so god damn easy.

Little did I know that the main difference between him and I was: experience.

He had much more of it. I still had to make some mistakes and he greatly helped me avoid some of them.

It really helped me that one day he talked to me and set my head straight that I wasn't expected to perform on the same level as him. He was getting a salary, I merely some peanuts, after all.

Our company Nerf wars got a little rowdy one year, and a co-worker knocked over a (senior citizen) co-worker just to “win”. Like full on take down body slam. So much for no physical contact.

A little headpat for those who have suffered so much in making wrapper code for managed languages for native libraries

Because I know how painful it is to make one

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

I don't understand why so many devs complain about not having money or complain about the company that they work for. We literally have the skills to do whatever the fuck we want in today's world. Literally everything is structured around what we do. If you hate your life so much, do something about it. Granted, I understand if you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to control your own destiny but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the people on this app has the ability to do so. The rewards are endless if you decide to think outside the box just a little bit. Sorry, this has just been on my mind for a while and decided to rant about it here since that's what this app is for.

Idea was to make a little helper utility to be used once (only for myself, not client). But, I've kept adding layers of functionality over layers of functionality ... Long story short - this monstrosity (UI is bad, code not that much) was used for 10+ years (again, only by myself).

Finally, personal embarrassment was too big, so I took wooden stake and monster passed away. All related files deleted (but not before one final screenshot).

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.

So, I'm a CS student in a third world country. I love coding and I think i'm pretty good at it.

As I'm kind of poor, I'm pretty much constantly looking for any job I can take, and I've already done a dev gig at a software sweatshop here doing mostly PHP, JS and Android/Java... the dev experience was cool, but money was absolute crap ($1.5USD/hour at the current rate, working 9h/day Mon-Sat, did it while in vacation). Better than min wage in my country but still, looking at the numbers I see from programmers all over the world... it was practically working for free. The real problem is almost every dev job here is similar, so I was looking into going remote but every opportunity I see is for seniors/people with 2-3 years experience or more.

Can you give me some tips on getting a remote job as a student/recent grad with little experience? What would you do in my position? Any input is greatly appreciated!

I finally fucking did it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

this.category != Tech Rant

Often when I walk down a street or take a suburban train, the sight of much less fortunate people being happy with the little things that we don't even bother like recently a old man bought a few vegetables for 10INR (17 cents) and he looked so happy.

At the other end I see people who have everything given to them and yet lack the slightest of satisfaction.

Homosapiens are sure a weird creature.

About browsers and whole SSL CERT thing...

Most likely everyone here noticed, that https site with broken certificate will throw these big red warnings, in your face and there is so much wording like "ITS NOT SECUREEEE" or "ITS HACKEDDD" almost like it was written by passionate fanatic.

But when you are on plaintext http browsers reaction is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you have plaintext with password, it will for example in chromium put small little red thingy that almost no one notices.

I believe that broken cert with some error like invalid date is MORE secure than plaintext password, yet still there is this hypocracy with browsers...

I dont say that broken SSL cert is good, or something, Im just pointing out contrast of "broken" https vs plain http.... One looks for casual Joe like end of the world is coming and second is bearly noticable. Da fuck?

I disagree with this approach

I'm getting so fucking sick of non-technical business people talking bullshit, nonsense, technobabble on LinkedIn, buzzword buzzword buzzword. Their mouths work so much fucking faster than their pathetic little brains, they should be put up for case study.

One of the first things I learned while screwing around in Linux for the first time was the calendar in the terminal. I never thought I'd have an actual use for cal, and it just sat in the back of my mind for a year.

Then, two weeks ago, I needed to find the date for a saturday in December, because I thought it was the seventh. My duck was like "Hey, your terminal is right there, why not use that cal function instead of looking for your calendar?" And I was like "Dude, that's genius!"
I have since done it thrice more for various reasons, and it has saved me like four minutes in total. I love all the little things like this in Linux (I'm pretty sure Windows and obviously MacOS do the same thing with practically the same command, but shut up and let me enjoy myself (and it just feels more accessable in Linux because I use the terminal so much more often))

So yeah
Stuff

God I need something to do...
Wait! I have several things to do! The first one will be making a list of all my projects.
Or spending another two hours on devRant.

I don't know what non-German people do without ubuntuusers.de.
Without this wiki, I probably would know nothing about Linux today. I would have never been introduced to it as a child, would never been able to learn that much, play around with desktop Ubuntu, Raspberry Pis, administrate own servers...
So, thank you, ubuntuusers.de, for helping little Benedikt with Ubuntu in his mother tongue, and making me the Linux enthusiast I am today!

DON'T. INSTALL. BETA. SOFTWARE. BY. DEFAULT.

RAZER

When I plugged my $250 keyboard (Which I have had for years and love beyond measure) into my new install of Windows, it popped up with a cute little message to install Razer Synapse, which manages the lighting on Razer devices, like my keyboards (One mechanical and one not - for silence during voice chat), mouse and headset.

"Wow, this looks different", I mutter to myself, as I unknowingly and non-optionally install software which is IN BETA.

I notice that my other keyboard and mouse don't show up. I don't customize my mouse much, I leave it in spectrum cycling. Easy, works well. My other keyboard is much cheaper and does not offer very much customization (three colors. whoop. I don't touch that either much)

Since I only really touch this keyboard, I am not bothered in the slightest and carry on for a couple months. Fast forwards to yesterday when my mouse stops lighting up. Fuck, now its just a black blob. I'll open synapse tomorrow and fix that.

No I won't

After uninstalling devices, uninstalling synapse, restart restart restart, uninstall again, install again, blah blah blah, download a tool that didn't detect the device either, etc etc, for about two hours, I was about ready to accept my dark fate. But then, I saw (screenshot attached) this little itty-bitty beta tag next to the software (again) installed by default.

I about flipped my shit, uninstalled Razer Synapse 3 so hard it sent a tsunami towards some coastal country, and then angrily installed Razer Synapse 2.

That looks more familiar. Oh, there we are, all three devices. Ah, very well, my mouse is working correctly once again. I know its at the header of this rant, but let's reiterate (or, reiterage, in this case):

DON'T. INSTALL. BETA. SOFTWARE. BY. DEFAULT.

Thank you.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!

Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.

I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."

Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:

- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit

I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.

Note to my past self:

Thank you for taking care of me and assuming that out of no fucking sudden authorization token will be required to perform an API call!
You saved me so much refactoring and modifications with your tiny little assumption of how fuckups will think :)

They probably should have made me sign a NDA, but I never did.

I was a wee little front-end devloper for a really small dev shop. The lead devloper, who was also the only back-end developer decided to quit. The company was in the middle of a huge project with Rolls-Royce aerospace. I managed to learn ColdFusion and release the application in only a few months. It was basically a giant warranty management application for jet engines. This is one app I wish I can go back and redo because if I had the expierence then that I do now... I feel like it would be so much better. That application allowed me to advance in my career, and 5 years later, I'm working for one of the largest development companies.

Hey folks, this is ben.
Just a little story of me and IOT
,for the past few months, i have been working on various projects on Internet of Things and, with the little exposure... I have seen so much goodies that come along, i love the robust and realtime architecture that IOT has, on my platform i use
Arduino, esp8266 and Android, i am able to control my car park, home lights, and my pulse rate using the few components.

At first it was hustle, but now? Am loving it😋😋😋,
If you wish to join me or have a project of the sort..... Just holla me up :bensalcie@gmail.com

I can also teach for free.

I was supposed to be asleep four hours ago. But I have to say, screwing around with linux distros on antiquated machines I've acquired over the past two years is much more fun. The oldest computer I have with me today is actually the most recent addition to my collection: an HP Pavillion from 2002. It's got a Pentium 4 2.6, and is currently still running XP, though not for long. Thinking of turning it into a little cloud/web server for entertainment purposes.
I might just harvest the hard drives from it and put them into the other Pavillion I have (it's about 3 years younger) to have more storage in one device. Maybe I'll make them both separate servers, one for cloud, one for web hosting. We'll see.

Sorry for the ramble, I usually ramble to my girlfriend, but she's asleep, so I figured I'd dump it here.

Back to doing research.

I never thought I'd say this but I fucking hate my cousins and relatives.

Money and fame hungry people, constantly judging and excluding if you are not 'cool' enough. Give them attention, obey their orders, spend your money on them if you want to be considered human by them.

They spend 24x7 of their on Instagram with all their activities and gatherings revolving around the core idea of taking pictures and showcasing on Instagram.

All of them have inherited a fuck ton of fortune from their parents and live to spend. Nothing else in their life.

Their ideology is everyone should spend all their money and even if you have $5 in your savings, you are miser.

Cousins and relatives have bullied so much in my childhood that I had to go for therapy before I stabilised a little. They still fuck around and use me.

Now that I am living a better life than what I used to, they have started mocking my parents for it by shaming and excluding them from the family.

Not only I never wished ill but I prayed for their good health and success all my life. But all they did was neglect and ignore me.

Fucking blood sucking bastards. I still don't wish bad but I never thought I'd see this day where I'd hate them so much.

As I have worked really hard for my current life, because unlike them I had no fortune to be inherited, they pick some weak aspect of my life and poke it continuously to the point that it hurts me.

I never felt so alone. If not for my parents, I'd cut off all the times with such scums and move out for a better life with new people in life.

I lost one of my idols, there are few people I have that much respect for. I literally can not think of anyone else infact.

Ive just been taking a second.🙁 I mean you live your life thinking there's time or that you can wait to do things , like I'll just do that one thing a little later. But it's not true. The reality is there's so little time.

There are few truly great people. It's going to take me a little while to get over it properly.

But when I do I hope I don't switch back into old patterns.

I want to be just like him, his work was amazing. He worked all the time not because of fame or money but because he just wanted to make cool shit for people to enjoy. Because he enjoyed it himself and he liked seeing people amazed and happy due to his work.

The best people are the types of people who bring a smile to your face by just being who they are.

It was enough to know he was out there doing his thing being that incredible, it never occured to me he could just be gone. The world needs more people like him especially now with everything so fucked up. He died far to young. 33 isn't old it's not even middle aged

All I want is to be like him, I hope I will be one day 😞 and I'm going to start trying right now.

And I will try harder.

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

I used to kill some time reading devrant some years ago and I just stopped because most rants were basically whinny little teenagers that think they know everything, keepers of knowledge and truth, being clearly crying babies about “ boo-hooo my coworker is not using the language I like” or something they clearly still have a lot to learn about.

Grow the fuck up. I guarantee you that when you have a few more years of experience you’ll realize how little you knew and how great you thought you were when in reality you knew shit.

Hell, I’m on my 16th year of programming experience and what o thought I knew last year had so many knowledge gaps.

Friendly advise, be more humble. You know shit. Get off your high horse and consider for a second you’re not as smart you think you are.

With that said, there are some really good rants here. But it didn’t change much from years ago.

I have been playing skyrim on my switch. The reason is simple, family watches movies or whatever, and I get to sit comfortably in my little screen shooting mofockas with my bow(i made an archer build)

Its my first time playing the game after all these years and I love it, far better than I expected. The story is great and the side quests are fun instead of boring, it does not take much to learn how to craft, enchant etc and I dig the simplicity.

But it has got to be one of the buggiest glitchiest majorly famous game I had ever played. Literally, and I have it for both the ps4 and the switch and it still is so fucking buggy its unbelievable.

Dear intellectual crew, your double-digit IQ little shitposter needs your help.

The situation in Russia is always bad and it will always become worse and worse. In addition to that, it's illegal to have medications that can potentially cure me. Add 15 sunny days a year in my city and it becomes clear that I need to leave.

However, despite the absolute lack of sunny days, I FUCKING LOVE my city, Saint-Petersburg. When I was living in Moscow for like six months, I liked Moscow but I was missing my city every single day. Sometimes I forgot that I'm not in St. Petersburg anymore, tried to figure out what street I'm on, realized that I'm in Moscow and felt like I'm physically suffocating. I always miss my city so bad.

I'm not going to talk about why do I love it so much. If I ever start, I'm going to write a book about it.

Questions are:
1. Is it Stockholm syndrome? I don't miss Russia and don't identify myself as Russian. I only miss one city and I wasn't even born here.
2. How do I leave in that mental state?

This is the only problem that is holding me. Money, finding a place to stay and finding a job I can approach rationally, but my problem I can not.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

!rant
I've lost all fucking motivation to do anything at the moment.
Fuck not even gaming is much fun anymore.
Also amazing that I have so little time on Mondays that I can't even eat properly.
Literally living on caffeine, a spoonful of, like, porridge and water on Mondays.

And of course the nice bistro is closed on Mondays.
Then there is that motherfucker of person at school that just randomly starts sharing weird ass details with you and promptly started to break out in tears when she failed maths today.

Like fucking hell, then for some reason the same person fucks up everything in her volleyball group by literally doing nothing and complains when she gets hit by a fucking volleyball, like, she doesn't even attempt to dodge it catch it.

So much for that fuckery.

Then there's these little brats that just completely play asshole and are being jackasses to everyone including upperclassmen and teachers.
Grab em by the throat and fucking put them in a toilet.
Literally the reason why our school is generally known as the 'Drecksloch', literally dirt hole.

The fucking volume is driving me batshit insane in school to the point where I just start yelling at people.
Fucking kids, it literally doesn't cost you shit to just shut the fuck up.

Okay, vent over.
Sorry for that.

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

Hey DevRant Fam! Hope everyone is doing very well! Just would like to ask, for awhile now i have been focusing on languages such as c++, C#, Java, and little bit of python the others I mentioned before were mainly from Uni, but I’d like to step out of my comfort zone a little, I’m interested in learning things such as “NodeJS”.

I actually haven’t laid much of a finger on JS so i do not know much, and i also see things such as Nodejs, react are very popular and would like to step my foot in the door, what would you guys suggest and or recommend :-) I’m open to listen to you guys and learn more!.

Hope everyone is doing well wherever you may be!

Thank you 😊
Milo

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

Not here to disturb y'all , but am a little sad because our cute little boy honey has wandered somewhere and hasn't come back for last 2 days. :'(

I don't know what to do, we searched the whole area nearby and there are no signs of him. We have also alerted a few neighbors who aren't bad to animals.

But i guess it's his time to go out. We always had many cats , and we live on the topmost floor, so cats usually wander over to different terraces and come back after a few hours. But there is always a day, when they go away, nd never comes back.usually the female cats return, with stomach full of babies, but the boys are full Roadies, king of some random place

Its just my heart says he hasn't gone forever. He is a super dumb, and not very much of a bold boy. I think he fell somewhere in an empty home,and couldn't find his way back. ;_;

Ya'll know what... If humans weren't such annoying vulnerability-searching little shits then we wouldn't have had to implement any protection against them and think of all the performance that would be saved on that. Take branch prediction vulnerability mitigation in the Linux kernel for example, that's got to make a performance hit of least 10% on basically everything.

Alas, I do get why security is important and why we keep such vulnerability mitigation running despite the performance hit. I get why safe code is necessary but still... if these people weren't such annoying little bastards.

Yeah, I was just kind of set off by the above. So much would be faster and easier if only the programmers wouldn't have to plan for people exploiting their software. Software would be written much faster and humans would progress to stuff that actually matters like innovation.

So at the old job, i needed support for an issue relating to Amazon S3. We used a third party Python plugin for sending files to our buckets, but had some pretty severe performance issues when trying a 2-way sync.
Naturally, I sought help on StackOverflow, and was asked to share my config. Without much thought, I pasted the config file.
Next comment made me aware that our API id and key was listed in this config (pretty rediculous to keep such private info in the same file as configuration, but oh well).
I edited my question and removed the keys, and did not think about the fact that revisions are stored.

Two weeks later, my boss asks me if I know why the Amazon bill is for 25.000$ when it used to be <100$ 😳

I've never been so scared in my life. Luckily, Amazon was nice enough to waive the entire fee, and I leaned a little about protecting vital information

This guy, in a different department to me, was bad mouthing me to his boss for about 2 months, slagging off my Dev abilities as well as me as a person. Really snide two faced little fucker.

Anyway, when I finally met his boss on a company outing we got on so well he opted to stay out late with me drinking, which was when told me about what this 2-faced cunt had been saying and pretty much offered me his job on the grounds that we'd work better together.

I've since left the company but I've heard from others that no-one wants to work with him.

Not quite a rant... more of a question.

So, I'm almost 40 years old. I have a lot of work experience in varying fields, much of it in low-level management.

Truth is I've ALWAYS wanted to be a programmer.

I recently got into a somewhat competitive training program
where I'm learning to write Java, and will subsequently learn Android development. It's fairly in-depth, so it will take 10 moths to complete. My ultimate goal it's to work as a mobile dev at a great company, making products people love. Ambitious, I know.

My question is: Am I a fool for attempting to get into this field at this age? I'm starting to panic a little. I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time, or if 40 is too old to be the "newbie".

Thoughts?

Fuck. I'm fucking alive. The past month or so has been hectic. I've mainly been working, sleeping, or at school (not like I've showed up much lately anyways, maybe 12 days or so since the middle of February).

!dev

I'm fucking tired.

Bought an FX 8350 with the Wraith cooler for my desktop, got it for $70 when normally it's about $140 or so. Gonna replace the PSU and case when I get paid on Saturday, cause I don't have to pay anything with this check, so it's all to myself. Cut myself putting a heatsink back on my motherboard, still hurts 3 days later.

My "best friend" is still not talking to me. But she's been talking ABOUT me. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm done with the whole situation with her. It's just her crying over every little thing.

My rants tend to be about my personal life, and this one is no exception. I just have a lot of shit going on and I need to get it out sometimes.

Worked as a student in a big company. Just doing data entry and checking product data. It was a nice part time job at the same time with computer science study. After a year I asked for something else and switched to the Android Team. I said I could do a little bit of Java and wrote for another half year Unit Tests. That was the point where I really learned coding and got experienced. Would never learned so much in my study because I was lazy. Now I can call me a Android Developer. Still love the company for giving me this opportunity.

So, 9months ago my scrum master came to me and asked me to spearhead a "little" API... 2months work, no worries... I started the analysis and quickly discovered that that estimation was grossly understimated...

I convinced them that it was not 3 months but 4. I alerted to the design mistakes that were made, I pushed changes and made sure the entire project worked, was stable and the best it could be... 4 months passed, target proposition donne... Several change requests since then and we have been implementing braindead CR after CR for 5 months... Most CRs came from design issued I raised but we're ignored at the time just to come back and bite them on the ass...

Horrible design, bad documentation, amateur requirements analysis... However, delivered successfully with great acceptance...

What was my reward? They rearranged my team, removing virtually every good performer.

Never did I receive a "good work" or a "thank you"... I don't want one, I am just doing my job... However can you please not fuck me in the ass!? I now have 2 projects to spearhead at the same time and virtually no team... I can only handle so much!!!

Some good news? Ok, just announced I'm the project owner of a new project, that we will take advantage and make a 2 in one.... Great! Some more work for my lap! Thank you for the workload raise!... Ok, timewise? One month! And I still don't if that includes implementation....

TL DR; did my job, got fucked with more work...

Sorry for the vent, just wandering if I should try and not do my job...

The fucking defective Caps Lock on Apple keyboards drives me fucking ballistic!

WHY would they ever think it would be a good idea to introduce a minimum press time for a key?!?

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. I use the damn thing it inevitably fails and I have to backspace, delete the non-caps text I just entered after HITTING THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK KEY, tap the damn thing again (harder this time) and try again. It usually takes 2 or 3 tries before it actually catches. I'm sorry, but training myself to type slower is not as easy as you think!

Who the fuck thought up this nonsensical bullshit?? And who the fuck is going around accidentally tapping their caps lock key to the point where such a delay would be needed?? Do you not know where your own fingers are??

Seriously, all this does is penalize fast typists and people who actually want to USE the caps lock key for what it was meant for.

I swear to god this one little thing pisses me off SO much. And what's worse is they don't even give you an option to disable it, AND it's bloody fucking impossible to disable yourself even through the terminal.

(Also, typing this rant with so many caps was probably not as cathartic as I was going for!) 😂

So today is my last day at my current job. I've been here for 4 years and started working here even before I'd even graduated high school. It's really bittersweet. On the one hand I'm so excited for my new job (and vacation), but on the other hand I'll miss this place so damn much. Some say you shouldn't get too attached to your employer, and while that might be true for many cases, I feel that I've gained nothing but positive things from these last 4 years.

Having gone from just having colleagues to having actual friends has been an awesome journey, and I think a good indication of our good relationship is the fact that one of them even wrote me a goodbye song for our little goodbye breakfast this morning.

Idk, just thoughts...

Anyways, away I go. Let's hope my new job will be somewhat good as well.

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

A note to my team, who I hope never actually reads this.

To my manager: Grow a fucking spine, you asshat! We literally ignore you, you are useless!! Other people do your job, and you can't even talk to your reporting person directly! You have us do it!

To my tech lead: You are crazy, but in a good way! I have no idea how you cram so much work into so little time, and I would march into hell for you. You are in the trenches with us, and I respect you greatly!

To dev number 1: You are hard working, but stop modifying my code and breaking it!

To the other devs: If you leave 4 hours before the tech lead anymore, I will beat you to death with a cum filled sock! My rage fucking erection is that strong!

To everyone else: fuck you!

Had a burnout at my last job when I worked myself to the bone to cope with stress, a failing relationship and not having much money. Also, made a crap ton of mistakes at work because of it.

Didn't sleep much, started skipping lunch to save what little money I had so I could commute (friends treated me every now and then, still grateful), dropped out of college because couldn't juggle work, studies and got chewed out by my family every day and just worked non-stop.

The end result was that I collapsed when I got home one night and woke up at 3 am with a severe migraine; stayed awake till sunrise then left for work again (got scolded really badly by everyone, felt loved). Fun times.

I really hate the childish corporate culture at some tech companies. Today I received my Christmas "gift" from my employer. It was a branded chocolate bar and a sticker pack. The stickers were designed by our UX designers, and the stickers look like they are made for little toddlers at kindergarten. The stickers said things like "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!". Jesus Christ, are we little kids? The average age of an employee at my company is around 30 years old, and those are the stickers you give us? Stickers are childish anyways, but it seems like 50% of my autistic colleagues seem to like putting those ugly things on their laptops to lick the boots of upper management.

The office itself literally looks like a kindergarten. There's LEGO artwork on the walls and the "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!" nonsense and similar motivational bullshit is plastered on all the walls. Seriously, who ever thought it's a good idea to tell 30 year old adults to "make friends!". I already have my friends, I don't need to be friends with anyone at work, and I definitely don't need to be told to do so!

Even funnier than that is the fact that the whole "To The Moon!" bullshit is a phrase introduced by upper management to symbolize their effort and wish to make our company bigger and stronger by having a bigger market share. Basically it's the rich peeps from upper management telling us to work harder and make them more successful. Today I had a meeting in which they told me they wouldn't increase my salary because they have a tight budget this year because of the economic problems we're currently facing. But that doesn't stop them from childishly motivating us with bullshit like "To The Moon!" so they can become richer themselves, while the little people at the bottom of the pyramid need to work harder without extra pay.

The most annoying part of this is that many employees lick the boots of upper management and go along with all this bullshit. God I hate cringy childish corporate culture so much.

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

!isNotRant(this);

I'm an avid user of Snapchat and have used it for quite a while, but there's always been something that pisses me off.

When an app gets an update, I'm quick to check the changelog and see what's now and what's been fixed. That's my little snippet of information I like to know on a release. And then there's Snapchat.

They put fuck all in their changelogs. By fuck all I don't mean a little bit of information, I mean they don't list anything. They, instead, lost features from their last major release which could've been 10 or so releases back. Even Twitter's "Fixed some bugs" is more informative than their bs.

So I ended up writing a well worded and surprisingly clean message in their feedback section about this, but I'm not expecting much. In short I said "You changelogs are crap, you need to put more into them to show a bit more respect, showing stuff from a few releases ago isn't helpful" and my favourite "if you can't do it in the team that releases, get the primary devs to write the changelogs for you".

I'm saying this here to see if anyone agrees with my opinion. If you're going to release an update, you really need to tell us what's updated.

Thoughts?

Interviewing is much harder than it was even a few years ago. I go into it knowing I probably won't get the job. It may sound negative but it relieves the pressure. I also make note of what I didn't do well on so I can work on it. Last year I wanted to leave my job so I would go to interviews at lunch and do phone interviews in the parking lot. I was turned down for soo many jobs. Just a couple of years ago I could get a job in one or two interviews. Things have gotten more complicated. It used to be if you knew even a little about a backend language and a little sql you could easily get a job. It has all changed. I think the javascript framework of the month thing has only made it worse.

Ive reached a point where seeing the telegram logo with the little santa hat makes me so happy that i smile for hours because everything else sucks so much. Can we just burn formal education to the ground and only hire <30yro people as professors?

I used to think my first relationship was awful. I went through so much and rather it served as a trigger for my childhood trauma as well.

Little did I know that it would be the best the thing that could happen to me. I grew so much and every next woman I met, I realised how fucking amazing my ex is. God I miss her terribly.

But what happened with my recent fuck up, I am devastated. This toxic women brought out the worst in me. I have never been so hateful against myself or anyone else in the world.

I was love bombed and walked into a trap. I quit as soon as I realised what it was.

My values were comprised. My integrity was put to test. My trust was intentionally broken. During the initial days, she tactically identified my vulnerabilities and insecurities. Then used to sadistically trigger me as often as she can and sit there and watch me in suffer pain.

It led me to self harm and being suicidal.

I am so badly wounded that even after few weeks, I am still discovering all the wounds. It will surely take some time along with external support to build a healing environment for myself and overcome this damage.

I am very angry, terribly hurt, lost and confused. This shit developed a phobia in me. I cannot trust anyone anymore. I constantly live in fear of being hurt (physical, mental, and emotional). I am paranoid of that stalker.

I don't think I'll ever be able to start and build a healthy relationship with anyone. I used to be sooooo fucking strong emotionally and mentally. But now not only my trauma relapsed but I got more issues within me.

I really want to live a free, healthy, happy and a fulfilled life. I don't know when time will heal this but right now, I am in terrible pain and hate myself a lot.

I'm too ignorant about the rituals you need to do for dating.

I don't usually befriend ladies, I would just keep my distance. being a little cold to them, not hanging around, not chatting too much with them, just a greeting if possible

1. I try to get a little closer(just a little. to avoid da frend zone) to those I'm interested
2. I ask them to a date
3. If she refuses then back the 'being cold' attitude.
4. If she accepts... Haven't happened so I don't fucking know D:

I'm just inept at dealing with landing a date (not coding affecting my dating)

My best prank: A year ago I was at my friends flat, which he finally rented with his new girlfriend. He is a kind of person, which has like constantly opened 110 tabs in chrome, three or four instances of chrome running, torrenting at full speed and in the meanwhile a few films having opened to "watch" later. He is very very secure about his computer and NEVER leaves me or anyone else alone with his computer. That day we were just talking in the same room, and he goes for some food. I was like yeah thats my chance to prank him. So I opened a new tab and came with an idea - what If I change his desktop background to some random chick, to prank both him and his gf. I knew she will not be mad but his reaction would be priceless (it was his first gf). So I started googling, found a three pretty naked chicks. This was like soft porn, they were still "dressed" but not much. I did not wanted to use a porn for this.
So I was about to download image - right click - save as - little window opened and..

...what the hell, that guy had literally like terabytes of porn in download folder, all totally in one chaos, thousands of images, millions of downloaded videos, all categories just everything from gangbang to milfs or old/ young, what the fuck that computer was like cursed station of porn.

In that point I was like fuck that. This prank has no sense then. So I just closed that little window and did nothing. Prank failed.

Nowdays, He still does not know what I know about his "hobbies". And I will never say him lol. About a months after he broke with his gf and moved to different house. He has now three monitors attached to his computer and 4tb of space. He is still complaining about "lack of space" and "too big downloaded movies" but we all know what is going on lol. We call his "working deck" a sacred porn station.

First of all I want to say that I like how much this group rant is inspired by people complaining about their parents last week. (there were a lot)

Whenever I wanted to proudly present my family something I programmed they just answered (and that really infuriated me) "Just don't do anything illegal, ok?".

These words held so little appreciaten for what I would invest so many hours into because I love it so much...

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

I just found a vulnerability in my companies software.
Anyone who can edit a specific config file could implant some SQL there, which would later be executed by another (unknowing) user from within the software.

The software in question is B2B and has a server-client model, but with the client directly connecting to the database for most operations - but what you can do should be regulated by the software. With this cute little exploit I managed to drop a table from my test environment - or worse: I could manipulate data, so when you realize it it's too late to simply restore a DB backup because there might have been small changes for who knows how long. If someone was to use this maliciously the damages could be easily several million Euros for some of our customers (think about a few hundred thousand orders per day being deleted/changed).

It could also potentially be used for data exfiltration by changing protection flags, though if we're talking industry espionage they would probably find other ways and exploit the OS or DB directly, given that this attack requires specific knowledge of the software. Also we don't promise to safely store your crabby patty recipe (or other super secret secrets).

The good thing is that an attack would only possible for someone with both write access to that file and insider knowledge (though that can be gained by user of the software fairly easily with some knowledge of SQL).

Well, so much for logging off early on Friday.

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

Why the fuck don't you provision and configure the cloud virtual machine yourself, "web lead" guy who uses fucking WINDOWS to develop software? Why don't you install Webmin and PHPMyAdmin in the VM yourself if you like GUIs so much? Why do I have to configure Apache and MySQL and fix all sorts of little issues for your project just so you can use some shitty CMS? I'm not your fucking IT support guy. Go learn how to use Unix, take responsibility for your shit, and let me spend my time actually developing software.

Client on his 40-inch 4K monitor: "Why is there so much white space on this page?"

Me: "Mobile traffic accounts for 70% of traffic..."

Client: "Can we just make it a little more interesting?"

Ugh, I know I sound like an u grateful little brat, but summer holidays just aren't for me.
I hate wasting my time on the beach.
I hate the feeling of skin burn.
I fucking despise people that don't give a flying fuck about other's comfort and blast Disco Polo on their own JBL speakers. Even though there's music provided by the hotel.
Also babies, babies everywhere, crying and dashing around. My head hurts when I think about flying back. And I LIKE airplanes. But not when every baby and their mothers are crying on the top of their lungs.
Winter is so much better. Skiing is great and I don't have to worry all the time about getting skin cancer.

So yesterday I discussed how I am using speech to text to do approximately 50% of my rants. I am now doing a growing percentage of my outlook emails by voice as the human-computer voice interaction is pleasing and very natural. I have even named my iPhone 'little jumpshot' today.

Today I experimented with text to speech so that my rants are automatically read back to me before I send them. Some decent results.

In settings - general - accessibility you will find voice over (not recommended - be careful). Below that is Speech - speak selection or speak screen options.

Speak selection allows you to highlight text to be spoken. Too much human interaction for my purposes of walking hopefully not tripping be looking down. Using up my nine lives 😐

Below voiceover is - Speak screen - which allows you to pull down the screen with two fingers to speak what is on the screen. This will read the rant or of there are multiple rants on the screen it will read those as well.

It works but it will take a bit of getting used to. It also requires a few clicks here and there.

My goal is to interact with devRant fluidly 100% by voice. Just talking to 'little jumpshot' and him creating and posting all of my rants and reading all the other rants developers post.

For a few days experimenting I am satisfied with the progress but there is a long way to go.

Hopefully, in the end, this may help some people. Any ideas are very welcome.

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

I have a question for all you Linux pros:

My son's PC runs on Linux Mint. We wants to switch to the Pantheon desktop so we installed it (I think). I can't work out how to actually switch to it, though.

We don't have an option when we log out.

On a related note, we switched to Linux from Ubuntu because his old machine couldn't handle Ubuntu's resource requirements. I'm curious whether vanilla Debian would perform better?

(No, I probably won't switch to Arch, that's a little too much for my limited Linux capabilities).

--- Visits stackoverflow for an answer
. You find the accepted answer amazing... Yep this is what I'm looking for. (You copied the code into your source)
.
.
. scrolled down a little bit
.
.
. You saw another answer with a higher upvote. Ooh lala, this is fucking cool. (You copied and replace your source again)
.
. scrolled down once again
.
. You noticed yet another answer which is the most recent and a lot shorter implementation of what you just copied. (No shit! You copied and replace your source yet another time)
.
. scrolled down for the last time maybe and it looks like the previous was the last.
. But then...
.
. you saw a comment with lots of upvotes even more than the accepted answer and this comment points to a link.
.
. You clicked the link with your mouth salivating waiting to see what holds at the other side of the world which amount this so much upvotes.
.
. And Tadaaaa 404 not found!
.
. You feel hunted by that mysterious link for the rest your life...

This pisses me off soooo fucking much.
"We're sowwy but we'll have to ask you to turn off your pretty little adblocker! We can't keep making money off of you by showing you stuff you don't want to see if you don't turn off your adblocker! But it's okay, who doesn't use an adblocker? Just turn it off for our site pleeeease"

Quit it with the quasi-friendly bullshit. If it's okay, why don't you fuck off and let me block whatever I want to block? It's ridiculous how many hoops I have to jump through just so I don't have to see ads on the internet. Even pi-hole doesn't help with this anymore. Now I need an Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker just so I don't have to wade through heaps of obnoxious ads every time I visit a page. It's so goddamn stupid.

Google announced a little piece of wizardry called MusicML, which seems to be a pretty decent music generator based on text prompts or sample imputs

I can only think how much would this thing help indie game developers (if available), but then there are a lot more industry (beside music itself) that could save lots of money with this kind of stuff

I mean, yeah, the results are not so great or ground breaking, but so would be most of the human generated compositions as well; if the music is not the main focus, most of the results are just enough. Just think about an elevator with a custom generated track for day, or so many other places where sound it's just a side stimulus

What a time to be alive c:

I'm getting to the point where every time I encounter a new bug to fix I die a little inside. So tired of stuff not working and as soon as I get one thing fixed another blows up. Unresolved problems and open loops keep me awake all night. I sometimes want to switch careers but what else is there for me after more than 2 decades of this? I guess I could flip burgers and mow lawns. The burger flippers make about what I made in my last job and the guy who mows my lawn makes twice that much.

A question here reminded me of how websites were made long ago. Frames! Remember those little jewels? <frameset> and <iframe>, I still remember them. Man, even then it felt terribly wrong to use them. I remember using them to create web pages with header and side bar.

The only alternative was using <tables>, which, well, we know how they ended up. Frames today have been silently forgotten, but tables have been loudly hated for many years!

Ahhh, those were the times. So much has happened since then.

(Is "website" still a word today, btw?)

Hot tip: if you are a company, don’t ever ever ever ever spend your money on an Optimizely academy course. They have the worst course material I have ever seen in my life, and the material is outdated by several years from exercise to exercise. And the training videos are literally just a recording of a live class with a couple students. They should pay me to sit through this fucking shitshow. It is not worth a single cent, but guess how much they charge for the course and certification?!?! $2300 😱🫣😂. It’s so fucking bad I want to kill myself. Whoever decided to pour as little effort into this as possible over at Optimizely, I hereby curse you to a 2300 painful deaths and I hope someone shoves a ice cold rod up your ass to wake you up. *slams keyboard*

So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.

No.

It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

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

Great googly moogly is Kotlin an ugly language.

If you are just starting out with Android or Java development in general, I highly recommend sticking with Java and avoid Kotlin like the plague. It feels like a meme language that was taken a little too seriously.

Full of little flowery nonsense that aims to make the language more human, but only serves to make it look like a child designed it.

I absolutely hate when a language doesn't require type declarations.

The "it" keyword rankles my underwear beyond belief.

Trying to build a dictionary/hashmap/hash felt like I was writing out an essay for school. In other languages it's straightforward and makes sense. Even PHP makes more sense.

I am obviously missing something here, because there is no way something so common and done the same way across different languages has such a wildly different approach in Kotlin.

I have as much experience with Java as I do Kotlin but it immediately makes more sense as a language and doesn't have all this flowery nonsense. It is verbose, which means I don't have to decipher what the code is actually doing when I read it.

I'm familiar with the enterprise Java meme, but I'm not writing enterprise Java, and that's not my style anyway so it doesn't affect me. But even so, that would be a million times easier to handle that Kotlin.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

!Dev

As a something-designer and content writer, you would say I am pretty much used with people stealing my ideas and then bragging with them, right? Well, yeah, but not when I am fucking backstabbed by my OWN FUCKING ASSHOLE-FIANCE (hi, hun).
In our little depressing family, I am the one with ideas. One day he starts to work at a little very basic app and he starts bragging with it at me (mostly disrupting me while working). So I start giving him ideas based on what he experienced at work and what he could add to this management app so nobody will get the same shit as he did + several things + I basically designed it from scratch, how it should look, what it should do, who should access what etc. Anyway, he starts implementing them and then I told him „Well this is nice, how about we sell it”. I advise him on what kind of possible clients he should search for and how to negotiate and etc. Well, he goes to a meeting with somebody interested in this application, after, he calls me back AND HE HAD THE NERVE TO SAY THIS TO ME :

- Good news, MY APPLICATION would lead us in*blabla* market.

BITCH, YOU BETTER SLAP YOURSELF `CAUZ EXCEPT FOR THE CODE THAT SHIT IS MINE ALMOST FROM SCRATCH. SO SCREW YOU AND YOUR FUCKING NEED TO SUCK YOUR OWN DICK.

(i said that to him on the phone)

I really need to get my shit together. Can't even begin to describe what's going on in my mind right now.

God damn I'm gonna rip anyone's ass who so much as came within 5 meters of me.
Few months back, my dad's colleague dropped his (my dad's) phone and broke the screen. She was a low pay nurse, so my dad didn't ask for compensation. Instead of repairing it, it would be a better deal to get a new phone altogether, so I got him one on Credit (I didn't have cash).

Now amidst all this horseshit 🏇 in my own office and this pussy of a boss, and my hobby of learning coding and trading stocks part time to make a little extra money so that I can help dad with home loan repayment, I forgot to pay the credit bill.
Had to pay $25 as late charges. Motherfucker.😣

I'm just finishing my bachelor's degree in computer science in Germany. I love programming, especially for Android. I am working on a really cool note-taking app for my bachelor thesis and I love. A few weeks ago I started looking for jobs, I thought this would be easy. Why is this not easy?! Does no company need help with developing an app?!?! I googled jobs and opened the first few pages on the browser then I chose a city in Switzerland because I read that's where developers make the most money. Then I had to write a CV, what the fuck am I supposed to write in the CV?! So I wrote what languages I had dealt with during my studies and I wrote that I now speak German English and Hebrew. I had to upload the CV for EVERY SINGLE COMPANY and sometimes I had to write a cover letter for a companies I don't even know much about. WHY IS THIS SO ANNOYING!!!
I'm the last few weeks I've been getting emails rejecting my application, such a waste of time. I would love to work with people I'm just so bored sitting at home all day without much motivation to program alone, I need company and a company to pay me. I've already wasted a few months and I just can't believe that the market is so terribly organised. I could be getting so much work done, all I need is people who are a little bit motivated! I'm just so frustrated that everything works so slowly in this market...I even tried looking online for people who just want to talk about programming Android apps, NADA I just couldn't find anything... Well that's it if you have a job offer for me just hit me up I'll do anything...tiny.cc/chagai is where you can find my contact information I will literally consider even working in North Korea I just don't care where I work..

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

So new job started.
Just for context- old company was shit.
Promised the world but.
No benefits.
Terrible project management.
High pressure.
But green field interesting work (except by now it’s a few years in so it’s a ‘browning’ field but I was on it from the start).

New company first impressions..
Seems a fantastic company.
True to their word they have money for tools.
Making time for personal development.
Much bigger development community/department.
Seems like the term are under far less pressure so far at least.

But a MASSIVE amount of tech debt.
People seem to want to do the right thing and they’re making time to try and deal with it.
But one or two are very opinionated as to how to deal with it.

So this could go either way and only time will tell I guess.
Trying not to over analyse every little thing they say but I’m hyper sensitive to it at the minute while in the early days.

As always the real challenge in IT is the people not the tech. I count myself as part of the problem, sure I will form some opinions and sharing them too.

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

Had my first official coding interview for a "real" developer position! Really is a different experience. So much to do and so little time.

Overall I feel like it went well. Hope I get some good news soon 🤞

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

Technical debt.... so much technical debt it’s driving me crazy!

It’s not only that there’s commented out lines in abundance, methods and whole classes not used anywhere anymore in a decade and code using not only deprecated standard library functions, but some that have been REMOVED in earlier versions of the language (have no idea how those have even stayed functional...), and documentation that has very little to do with the reality... but today, I submitted a pr to fix the documentation for setting up dev env - which was outdated already when I started a few years ago!

I know we are understaffed and busy, but c’mon - it doesn’t take much to leave the code in a better place than when found...

The saddest and funniest side of our industry is (atleast in India): someone works hard and makes it to the best colleges, do great projects on AI, ML; get a good score on Leetcode, codechef; gets a job in FAANG-like companies...

Changes colors in CSS and texts in HTML.

And, why is there so much emphasis on Data Structures and Algorithms? I mean, a little bit is fine, but why get obsessed with it when you never write algorithms in production code?

Now, don't tell me that, we use libraries and we should know what we are doing, no, we don't use algorithms even in libraries.

Now, before you tell me that MySQL uses B-tree for maintaining indexes, you really don't need to solve tricky questions to be able to understand how a B-tree works.

It's just absurd.

I know how to little bit on how design scalable systems.
I know how to write good code that is both modular and extensible.
I know how to mentor interns and turn them into employees.
I know how to mentor junior engineers (freshers) and help them get started.
Heck I can even invert a binary tree.

But some FAANG company would reject me because I cannot solve a very tricky dynamic programming question.

remote work is so much better for me.. i think something is wrong with me because little things my co-workers do like clearing their throats, them slamming their keyboards and sometimes the way they laugh or even the way they speak... pisses me off so bad. OMG!!! even putting on headphones does not help. I wish i could ignore all that.

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

I decided to format party my desktop since I'm working at home every day (got a 1TB ssd to replace 150gb OS drive).

First fresh Windows install in 4 years. I had forgotten how much fuckery windows puts you through to do some basic things. I can imagine being a newbie hobbiest programmer and having to go through this stuff?

So I just embarrassingly spent 15 minutes reading and troubleshooting why you can't run a python script inside of powershell. PS just blips for a moment leaving you wondering if the script executed. So I created a test script to use a logging file handler to see if it actually ran. No.

Turns out you have to register the .py extension by appending it to your PATHEXT environment variable. Before that I was going to add it to the PS profile, but realized it takes more than a quick moment to find out which scope of PS profile is appropriate to create, and on top of that, you have to enable script execution in PS (which I recall is easy, but didn't do yet).

Tangentially, I solved an ssh issue days ago. I would tell you what it was, but I seem to have mentally blocked it due to trauma.

For real Microsoft. Yes powershell has some great advancements--my friends say so.

But this needlessly nuanced bullshit needs a little attention from you guys to save the world a shitload of time. I can only imagine what it's like for non-tech savvy people trying to learn to program and having to face this stuff.

I still haven't solved the color scheme stupidity of powershell. This is 2020 ffs. Yet seems there's no clean or intuitive way to do it.

Other issues omitted for 'brevity'

Me: *opens devTools*
Firefox: yea bro lemme just ..uh.. hmm yeah so this is the css for the element, see?
Me: Thanks.
Me:
Me: this makes no sense, why would I ever do that?
Firefox: also you can't have width on an anchor tag. I can't put that rule into effect
Me: I didn't put any width on your inline element, you sure about that?
Firefox: yea try using display: inline-block
Me: No. I'll just delete that. *checks file*
Me: Maybe that line is wrong because IT DOES NOT FUCKING EXIST!

What is this shit? I just restarted you! What else do you need, a reinstall? Drink too much over the holidays?

It's like the css editor has become a shallow tray with rules on it, and as soon as you bump it a little everything spills over and then Firefox just thinks oops, I've got this font-size: 200% lying around, lemme stick this into the hr tag which makes sense because THERE CAN'T BE ANY TEXT IN IT.

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Happiness hit me on the first day that we met; he was standing in my feeder with a face I can't forget!

I'm the creator of cheesy references, but I'm also currently waiting for a process to finish, and, before writing this, I tuned into one of my feeder 'cams, and I saw a little male downy woodpecker. This pleases me because I hadn't seen much activity at the feeders since these ones had been hanged, so his presence is very welcome! Thank God for Mr. Downy!

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

I have got so much stuff to learn.

I have had little to no experience with Python and JavaScript and was planning to learn the lot during my holidays. Where I'm from, we have a huge ass festival this weekend. So holidays for a couple weeks, at least. Probably the biggest festival in our country. And for the last two months, I had my exams. So no learning back then either. I have so many tabs open to learn stuff but I don't seem to get the time.

So for the last 4-5 days, I've been cleaning the house, top to bottom because its the holidays, the only time I stay home and free. It sucks to do it alone. My parents are getting old and get all sorts of back pain and shit upon little physical effort. So I should get all the stuffs done.

Yesterday, I finally finished my chores at 10 in the evening. But by the time the chores were finished, I was finished too. *sigh* I guess I shall find some time soon.

We released a website for a client 10 days ago. The site was up and running and everything seemed fine.

But it turns out that the site used 15GB of bandwidth in 5 days ( WTF???).

So now I need to go and examine my code to make sure I didn't forget something and implement a new caching methods to try and reduce the amount of bandwidth being used.

But I still don't understand how a small "newspaper" website with a max upload size of 5MB could of used so much in so little time.

I also added a screenshot showing the number of visits from an addthis dashboard

Worst documentation? Unreal Engine 4's documentation on editor customization (custom panels/windows and whatnot). It might have improved in the last two years, but the last time I made a custom editor there was almost zero documentation on the matter and on their Slate UI framework. The little documentation that existed was very vague and had awful examples.

I don't remember very well, but I think it took me close to two weeks to get something very basic working. I had to read a LOT of C++ code filled with generics and macros to figure everything out, but after I did I enjoyed a lot working with that stuff.

I just don't know how I was able to do that, working with UE4 was a pain the butt every. single. day. Runtime error on the gameplay code? Too bad, the whole editor will crash and then take ~40s to reopen. It was crash after crash, ~1min of compilation time for any little change to the code, so so so so much frustration.

I do miss a those times a bit though, because even though it was hard, it felt good to feel competent, to know something complex reasonably well to the point I could help people on forums. Today I always feel I don't know enough about the languages/frameworks I use. It's kinda depressing, it takes a huge toll on my self confidence. But whatever, let's keep going, one day I'll get there :)

Hey guys, this is my first rant. I like this friendly community very much so far and hope it stays that way. So here it goes...

I have this Trello app on my Android phone. It has this nice feature - calendar... But week starts on Sunday. So I started investigating, how I could change it to Monday. Googled and found that you have to change the language, which I did. Now I wish I had this nice ISO date format yyyy-MM-dd, but this motherfrakker doesn't allow me to!

How much I hate this little piece of shit! What does he want from me? Download the sources, add the functionality, compile for a week and flash it into my Xiaomi?!

Hi, everyone!

I was struggling to write this rant (it's been a while since I've posted anything here) and was trying to put in enough details, but it was getting too long and heavy, so I thought I should try to keep it concise.
I get frequent headaches and feel physically and mentally exhausted all the time. Here's a little list of what I think lead to all this -
- Leading a team for the first time
- Not-so-great junior teammates
- Working with backend for the first time (doing it on top of my frontend work)
- Long working hours (unpaid overtime)
- Being underpaid (for all the things I now have to do)
So, I overworked myself (and still fell short in delivering my sprint goals) and after some time, considering all of the above things, I decided that the best course of action would be to give my notice and take a break for a month or two.

I talked to my boss about my struggles and my intention to leave, and after some discussion, he basically said that the difficult part of the project was over and things would get smoother from the next sprint, and so I should stay on and discuss on the matter again after the sprint. That sprint has passed now and I have still somewhat struggled to work each day with diminishing motivation.
I'm not sure if this is the right time to leave, and I just don't have enough energy to look for another job and go for interviews. So, I guess it is a bit of risk not having something lined up before I quit my (first ever) job, but I think I shouldn't have much difficulty finding something for myself.
At this moment, I don't know what to do, but maybe, if things continue to be dour, I may hand in my notice soon.

I know this topic is tired and this isn't supposed to be a pure "REEEE SPACES BAD" kinda rant but I still don't understand why people would ever use spaces over tabs for indentation. I'm genuinely curious so please give me your arguments in favor of spaces because I just don't understand

So here's my position:
Tabs are objectively better than spaces in every single way
(I know that IDEs also do some of these for spaces, more on that later)
1. They are typed with one key press
2. They can be removed with one keypress
3. They allow for individually configurable width (some people prefer 2 and some 4 width)
4. They take up less memory (kinda irrelevant, but still)
5. You can properly navigate your code using the arrow keys which is much faster than using the mouse while typing
6. You don't have problems with accidentially having one too much or one too little
7. You don't have problems when copy pasting or moving code around (e.g. refactoring)
8. Code is much easier to select with the mouse, and
9. it's much easier clicking the right spot with the mouse where you want to continue typing, which is often at the start of a line

Apart from specific alignment, where spaces are fine (but which also almost never comes up), I just can't see a single thing where spaces are better at. So much so that most IDEs have to *pretend* that they're tabs when typing and removing them. It's so ironic yet people still defend it and big companies still use them.

I feel like I'm going mad 😨

!rant

For the first time, I solved a pretty serious optimisation problem in our codebase without any external input. It's a little thing, but small victories like this are part of what makes the job so much fun for me.

Currently rewarding myself with coffee and chocolate. I feel good!

Me: trying to do any simple fucking project
Me: cant figure out how to do something simple or cant figure out how to start or how something should work.
Me *Looks up problem* (everytime...)
results: SOMETHING I WOULD NEVER HAVE FUCKING THOUGHT OF.

Am I just a shitty programmer, a shitty learner, or just not cut out for this? because I fucking Love this field. this is the only thing I ever want to do. BUT I CANT FIGURE ANYTHING OUT FOR THE LIFE OF ME EVEN WITH LANGUAGES IM GOOD AT!! WHICH IS JUST PYTHON AND IM STILL SHIT AT THAT.

I TRY TO DO PROJECTS WITH JS, OR C, OR PYTHON PICK WHICHEVER ONE. AND I NEVER KNOW HOW I SHOULD START IT, AND IF I LOOK UP HOW TO DO IT ITS SO MUCH LONGER AND COOLER AND BETTER THAN MY DUMBASS WOULD HAVE DONE (and longer in a good way because its well thought out and works)

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET A REAL JOB IN THE FIELD IF I CANT MAKE THE RANDOM IDEAS THAT I SEE ON THE INTERNET AND WHY CANT I MAKE THEM AS GREAT OR LONG AND SHIT ON MY OWN. SO MANY PEOPLE CAN WRITE SO MANY LINES OF CODE AND FUNCTIONS AND ALL THIS SHIT THAT WORKS AND YEAH THEY LOOK UP SOME PROBLEMS BUT NOT HOW TO FUCKING DO THE ENTIRE THING LIKE SOME FUCKING RETARD
AWDJKBAKWJBDAOLK;JWDBOALBJKWODANLWIO;NIAWDN;PIAWLDJBAWIDHB
I CANT GO A PROJECT WITHOUT LOOKING UP HOW TO DO ANYTHING BECAUSE MY LITTLE BRAIN CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT

So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

it's been a while since my last rant and coming back after so long made me realize how much I missed here.

at some point i realized that the career I wanted and my current situation wouldn't match, I decided to go in real hard, I moved into the dreaded backend development (you can guess, node and mongodb),

I isolated myself from almost everyone and everything, cleared out my mobile games, social media and for almost two months I wanted something stable(might not be job ready but it had to be reasonable). I have come to love backend development so much, the joy of not having anything to do with css.

dad fought me, mum cried, probably thought I was slipping into some deep end, quitting school in my second year of studying food science(still dont know how I accepted that course lol) to start afresh didn't help matters. really hard decisions, made money on some little freelancing gigs, wasnt constant, I needed something stable and that was a job and a degree to get me one.

nothing special, just some regular hustler hoping his passion will pay him, I have always loved what i do but I need something to keep me going.

Hello everyone :)

I left a job a while ago (8 month maybe a little more), before me alot of the team left, and the lasts ones left after me.
They hired back an ex teammate from years ago (he actually started the POC), but he doesn't do php so much and don't know symfony and he's alone. I'm not either (i don't like php), i was doing python and admin sys for them, but i saw the project going/evolving for two years, so i can help them.
They contacted me a week ago, asking me some help. I said yes, (because i believed in the company and i'm too nice i guess), so i spend two days making a new script to setup the environment and serveur and also had to do some package update on the project (late shit with pear php apparently).
I don't have any way to make a bill, i don't own any company. So I'm not sure what i should ask for money, and if i should keep helping them.
(it has been my first serious real job, and i put some money in the company that i took back).
Should i keep helping for nothing even if it's only few hours the month or should i change this situation fast?! (already worked 20h for them, and the boss a nice guy)

Thanks devRant