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Search - "solved it the first time"
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Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
Step 1: Create and deploy feature. Get feedback: It works fine!
A year passes...
Step 2: Add another small feature that is completely independent from previous feature.
Step 3: Notice that feature #1 is broken.
Why the HELL did it stop working?!? I didn't change anything related to that feature. I can't explain that!
Step 4: Examine bug and find out something unknown about the technology used in feature #1.
Why the HELL did that ever work in the first place?!?
Step 5: Get time to fix it. Don't get time to find out why it worked for a year...
The problem is solved, the mystery remains...5 -
So me and my wife offered a friend to build and host a website for him for free for the first year when he was starting his business. We all agreed and wife started to build it.
The only thing that she had left was getting pictures and texts from him that would be on the site. That was 10 month ago.
And Today - it was suddenly SUPER IMPORTANT to get the site up because he has left alot of Business cards at a conference.
Wife - who is studying answered that she can fix it in a few weeks because she does'nt simply have time.
The dude sent this now:
"Ok no worries, I have solved it myself"
So I checked:
The domain he bought, is just a redirect to "randomshit.wixsite.com"18 -
At an interview, the first round was an online coding round. Two questions, one easy one hard, 90 minutes, easy peasy.
I solved the hard one first.
A bit of good logic, followed MVC pattern, all done. Worked flawlessly.
Submitted code. Online compiler threw up an internal error citing java is an invalid command(jdk not found).
Called the invigilators. What I heard next, I couldn't believe this shit.
"We're not responsible for any errors you may be having. Figure it out yourself"
I was like WTF dude. This is not even a compilation or runtime error!
After a heated discussion, I made him look at the code.
Him - what is all this classes and all? Why haven't you written everything inside the main function?
Me - those are model classes. Those are different helper functions. That is a recursive function to avoid 5 for loops and use divide and conquer. Ever heard of OOP? what kind of person writes a 300 line program inside one function?
Him - no no we write it like that only. Correct this.
Me - I fit everything inside the main function. Still the same error, java not installed. Called the idiot to have a look at it.
Him - yeah your code is wrong.
Me - may I know what's wrong with it? Can you fix it please?
Him - no no we aren't allowed to see the code (he had already read it twice. It was compiling and running perfectly, locally) .
Yeah you solved only 1 problem, you were supposed to solve 2.
Me - yes because the rest of the time I had the pleasure of your company. (It isn't everyday that I see talking buffoons.)11 -
I don't want to write clean code anymore :(
I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...
Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...
That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"
they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.
oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.
and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.
it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------
uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.
well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.
note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.9 -
This one time I aliased a coworkers 'sudo' with 'sl' (sl shows a train running across the screen)
And then I removed him from the sudoers group and sudoers list.
I then magnified his screen 200%
Changed his background to a shitty narwhal.
And then full screened a terminal with the 'sl' train stuck in a while loop.
You can't control c out of the terminal.
He solved the first part really quickly, fixing the full screened terminal and exiting out of it, magnification and the background.
But took him 4 days to find that I had fucked up his sudo. Apparently, he didn't need to use sudo in those 4days. It wasn't until he mentioned it out of the blue.
How did he find out about it? He was running an important script that had sudo in it. When he ran the script a train would pop up and his script would terminate early.
He came to me and cursed me to Satan's anus. He then asked me to fix it, but then changed his mind and said that he'd do it himself. After a while he couldn't figure out what I had done.
I walked him through it. Told him that he had to go to his .bashrc file and remove the alias.
Later he comes back to me and curses me to the 12th circle of hell. He found that he was no longer a sudoer. At this point he gave me access to his computer and told me to reverse everything that I had done.
Added him back into the sudoers group and called it a day.
Lesson to be learned? Don't leave your machine unlocked.20 -
I messaged a professor at MIT and surprisingly got a response back.
He told me that "generating primes deterministically is a solved problem" and he would be very surprised if what I wrote beat wheel factorization, but that he would be interested if it did.
It didnt when he messaged me.
It does now.
Tested on primes up to 26 digits.
Current time tends to be 1-100th to 2-100th of a second.
Seems to be steady.
First n=1million digits *always* returns false for composites, while for primes the rate is 56% true vs false, and now that I've made it faster, I'm fairly certain I can get it to 100% accuracy.
In fact what I'm thinking I'll do is generate a random semiprime using the suspected prime, map it over to some other factor tree using the variation on modular expotentiation several of us on devrant stumbled on, and then see if it still factors. If it does then we know the number in question is prime. And because we know the factor in question, the semiprime mapping function doesnt require any additional searching or iterations.
The false negative rate, I think goes to zero the larger the prime from what I can see. But it wont be an issue if I'm right about the accuracy being correctable.
I'd like to thank the professor for the challenge. He also shared a bunch of useful links.
That ones a rare bird.21 -
Job interview..
Interviewer: gave me a question
Me: (took 40 mins to solve it)
Interviewer: Ok. 2nd question... Asks the ques..
Me: (relieved that 1st ques got over) Took some time 5 mins to come up with solution..
Interviewer: ok. 3rd question..
Me: ( feeling so happy that I solved 2 questions and reached the 3rd question)
Interviewer: Let's go back to first question and tell me a scenario that will fail in ur logic..( yes this is the 3rd question)
Me: Damnnn.. My heart stopped.. It took me 40 mins to figure out the logic that worked with different inputs I tried n now, I have to find some scenario that won't work...10 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.4 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
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.4 -
My manager is an idiot and a complete asshole.
Knowing that I was working on a solution for an important problem, he sent an email to our customers saying that the problem cannot be solved, and the customers need to take care of it themselves. He sent this email the evening before I was supposed to present my solution to everybody.
It's not the first time something like this happens, but this stupid individual RESIGNED ONE MONTH AGO. He's in notice period right now, and nonetheless he keeps fucking people like he used to do. WHY THE FUCK MANAGEMENT DOES NOT BLOCK HIS EMAIL!?4 -
When I solved a machine learning problem using naive Bayes in R for the first time.
I still remember it was 5am. Had been stuck for weeks and when it worked.. I called my teammate at 5am and said.. "I think solving this feels better than having sex".3 -
iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.
So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.
Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.
So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.
And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.
Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.
Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.6 -
First year at university, prepared to set up multiple electronics.
rPi, arduino Ethernet shield, laptop, and desktop.
Brand new netgear switch to satisfy my internet surfing needs....
After setting up my devices, I realized none of them have internet. Hm. The feed port on my switch wasn't blinking either. So I tell the front desk, and a short 7 days later the port is back on. Yay, problem solved.
One morning I arise to see the port dark and inactive. Furious I use my laptop to share an internet connection while my actual port is "broken".
Support ticket is reopened and this time I get an email saying the port was disabled due to a security issue.
Me: what's the issue?
IT: there was more than two devices connected to the port
(OnLy TwO dEvIcEs PeR port???)
Me: oh okay I will only connect two.
The next day the port is disabled, again.
Me: can you tell me why it was disabled?
IT: a switch was detected being used, security error.
Me: how do I connect more than one device to the port without a switch???
IT: ...
IT: Please only connect one device.
🤔10 -
Rant by cozyplanes
Continued from
https://devrant.com/rants/1011255/...
F*** it. Seriously.
I am sure someone of u guys know I am applying for CS class.
I passed the test, and seems i failed the interview.
They asked me how i solved the problem in the test (the one i passed)
I explained, then, it seems the time(15min) has passed, so i came out while i was talking. They didn't asked my skills or interest, it was just explaining how i solved the question.
And the kid who got picked is the kid who did his final year project with scratch.
Fuck why.....
I just can't understand with the results.
1. WTF was that interview.
2. We first sent "about me" thingy, and i guess they only read that even though it may be fake. I wrote my skills (the one in profile especially unity and c# with some interest in ai and ml) but i guess they are looking for something else.
3. How can a scratch kiddy go to CS class? Maybe it was bcuz of the name. The final project name was BetaGo. Fuck it.
I hate life. Damn it. I hate life.
I
HATE
LIFE
I thought for a moment, and the only way to succeed is to make the 2nd monument valley game. World famous, money, awesome life.
Just my thoughts. Random thoughts.
Thanks for reading til here. My mind is shaking now.
Help.
Thanks again.3 -
Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).
I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.
From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)
You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.3 -
Has been a long time since I'm appreciating working with GRPC.
Amazingly fast and full-featured protocol! No complaints at all.
Although I felt something was missing...
Back in the days of HTTP, we were all given very simple tools for making requests to verify behaviours and data of any of our HTTP endpoints, tools like curl, postman, wget and so on...
This toolset gives us definitely a nice and quick way to explore our HTTP services, debug them when necessary and be efficient.
This is probably what I miss the most from HTTP.
When you want to debug a remote endpoint with GRPC, you need to actually write a client by hand (in any of the supported language) then run it.
There are alternatives in the open source world, but those wants you to either configure the server to support Reflection or add a proxy in front of your services to be able to query them in a simpler way.
This is not how things work in 2018 almost 2019.
We want simple, quick and efficient tools that make our life easier and having problems more under control.
I'm a developer my self and I feel this on my skin every day. I don't want to change my server or add an infrastructure component for the simple reason of being able to query it in a simpler way!
However, This exact problem has been solved many times from HTTP or other protocols, so we should do something about our beloved GRPC.
Fine! I've told to my self. Let's fix this.
A few weeks later...
I'm glad to announce the first Release of BloomRPC - The first GRPC Client GUI that is nice and simple,
It allows to query and explore your GRPC services with just a couple of clicks without any additional modification to what you have running right now! Just install the client and start making requests.
It has been built with the Electron technology so its a desktop app and it supports the 3 major platforms, Mac, Linux, Windows.
Check out the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc
This is the first step towards the goal of having a simple and efficient way of querying GRPC services!
Keep in mind that It is in its first release, so improvements will follow along with future releases.
Your feedback and contributions are very welcome.
If you have the same frustration with GRPC I hope BloomRPC will make you a bit happier!3 -
Yeah, maybe I can solve your problem in 5 minutes with you. But first you have to spend 5 minutes explaining it to me, and I need to spend 5 minutes listening, and after we're done, it takes 5 minutes to remember what I was doing in the first place.
So you better be sure you could not have solved it in 25 minutes googling on your own, or you're effectively saying your time is more valuable than mine.
And if you spend another 5 minutes forcing me to spend 5 minutes listening to your goddam stories about what it was like growing up on your fucking farm, so help me jebus, I will take that idiotic thing you call a mouse and shove it so far up your ass you'll be scrolling with your duodenum.1 -
Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.
My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.
Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.
I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.
There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.
You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.
Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.
Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S
Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.
Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.
"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"
"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"
We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.
Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."
Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.
There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.
TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.
Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.
It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.
My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.
*THE END*
If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.
Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.
Exactly at the char limit9 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)
- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.
- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.
- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".
- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.
- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.
- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....
- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.
- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.
- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.
- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.
- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).
- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.
- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)
I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!4 -
My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.
Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.
The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.
Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.
Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.5 -
Tried to dual boot Arch with Windows yesterday.
Everything was going smoothly. Shrunk the C: partition, ran the installer, installed the OS fine. But it was still booting straight to Windows.
So I edited the BCD to point to Grub instead of Wilndows. Then the plan was to boot into Arch, find Windows, and add it to Grub, problem solved.
Wrong. I had forgotten to disable secure boot. Arch and Grub were booting in BIOS mode, but Windows was UEFI. Grub couldn't boot or even see Windows.
So now I was stuck with just Arch. So I flashed a Windows drive, booted from that, automatic startup repair failed. Opened up the command prompt, tried to rebuild the BCD from there. Surely I can just rebuild it and forget about trying to dual boot right? I just want to get back to being able to use my PC.
Wrong again. Didn't find Windows. Had to get rid of the BCD file before I could rebuild it, but couldn't find it. Found out that I could use diskpart to mount the system partition and assign it a drive letter, renamed the BCD, rebuilt it, and finally was able to reboot into Windows.
Learn from my arrogance. First time Linux users should not attempt to install Arch, let alone do it alongside Windows on the same disk.4 -
So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.
Now...
I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.
I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...
I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.
Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.
Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.
Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.
Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.
But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..
Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.5 -
If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.
Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.
Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.
So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.
This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it. -
I've got a Rubik's cube on Friday.
On Sunday evening, I solved a cube for the first time ever.
For the last two days, I've been solving them a lot. Seems it helps a bit with anxiety. Overall, my brain functionality, I'd argue, has improved.
It's funny how little obsessive things make one survive.
On the other hand, I don't think I'll stay obsessed with it for long. Pity that this nice little while of less anxiety is so short.3 -
I would have to say the first start-up I worked with had the worst recruiters. Albeit they were seniors of mine, and not full fledged professionals, but this was pretty ridiculous.
So at the interview(which I won by winning a hackathon in college), they asked me the standard questions about my current knowledge and what I hope to achieve in the company. When they asked me my tech questions, one program that they thought was tough, I solved in 2 minutes. I was interviewing with 3 other people whom hadn't gotten the answer. Naturally I doubt myself due to the lack of answers being produced. The recruiters themselves didnt understand my answer initially. So much so that they were convinced I was wrong(at this time the others were coming up with, and submitting their answers, which the recruiters naturally expected from us). So to give me the benefit of the doubt, they whip out a laptop to run my code, and guess what? It worked, and had NOTICABLY lesser computation speed.
Needless to say I got the job, but the look on my recruiters' faces after exclaiming I was wrong, then they themselves being proven wrong? Priceless. xD4 -
It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.
We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.
We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.
Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.
So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.
In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.
Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...
Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.
It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.6 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.4 -
Another fun thing. This morning one of the first mails i read was a issue about a bug in our software.
This was a bug i mentioned months ago but there was nog evidence where i searched like mails chats or tickets.
If people would just listen to me this bug was solved months ago but back then i got a reaction like: "works over here" while i tested it on two different instances with buggy results each time. -
I gave a technical interview today and here is summary how it went . interviewer asked me to login to leetcode account then .
Interviewer :- "Open this problem( he gave link) and open submission section".
Me :- "Yes sir" I opened it and I have solved that in past .
Interviewer :- "okay so you have solved this one so let's move to next question(2nd)".
I opened it and again I have already solved that in past. Then he gave 3rd and it was also solved by me already .
Then he said " Okay now I will share with you this problem which you have not solved and I am sure ".
He gave me a hard problem which I actually haven't solved . I would have solved the first 3 , the 4th one was actually hard and I was not able to optimise my code on time .
sometimes life is really tough 😪. he could have asked anyone of them 😕.7 -
I just had to quit a part time programming job because I couldn't do it. I'm not really sure how I feel, there were alot of factors.
I took an internship about a year back to do some embedded C. I kicked ass and developed a system that really solved alot of problems for the company and so people started giving me "the hard back shelf problems". Like those problems that are really valuable if someone can get it working but not so important that it blocks anything day to day. Totally fair work for an intern, that is both complex and interesting.
When school started I took a part time remote role working on one of these problems. Fast forward to now (few months of remote work at school); i can't handle the stress. If I devote more time to work I fail a test. If I ace a test my work duties go neglected. On top of that my boss misses scheduled calls with me left and right, I even reminded him everyday 3 days before hand once!!!
Naturally I started feeling like I should quit. I was no longer interested in the work from a pure academic view, and emotionally hated doing it. However, since I was a good performer this place offered to interview my little brother!! Fuck, so do I choose my happiness or my brothers. It feels evil to choose myself over my brother. My brother, he's just a freshman so I know his odds are very low of getting an internship this year are low. And the place I worked at had some weight in the name so I could seriously jump start my little bros career. I do know however that if I don't quit that I will fail school, and do it while being miserable.
And so I quite my first remote job, from my first internship. I feel happy about, but also like I let someone down (them?, Me?, BROTHER?).1 -
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'21 -
The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)
It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".
To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".
I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!
"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"
"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."
"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."
"Ok. Then call me when your done."
I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.
I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.
I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!11 -
I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.
This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.
The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.
Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.
A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.
No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.1 -
Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?
I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.
This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.
Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.
I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.
The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.
Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.
Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.
Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.
But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.
Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.
My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...
Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?
The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T6 -
Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.
But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.
I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.
This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??
So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.
He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."
"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."
me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."
Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."
"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."
"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."
"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."
"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."
"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"
Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average3 -
So I now bought an iphone 6 again for development and tried just for fun to make it a daily driver and it feels really limited, especially because apparently theres no jailbreak yet for 11.2.5. (I feel near everything could be solved as soon as cydia etc. get fully released to the alibaba jailbreak)
I didnt even remember, that it doesnt have any option to have haptic feedback when typing, such a basic feature has to be jailbroken..? I thought I remembered that it had it, last time I had one - did they remove such a basic feature?
Also the fingerprint reader is really weird compared to other phones from the same year, first getting it to actually fill all fingerprint lines without saying "try again" or it trolling you and vibrating as if it recognized your finger, but actually didnt (really frustrating when its the last 2 lines...) - is a real challenge, might be that I have some mutant fingerprints, but when I asked my s/o to try it out, it also failed most of the times, so you have to position your finger in a very specific position for it to work, even if you add the max amount of 5 fingerprints.
Most ads on iphones feel HORRIBLE, the amount of lag some can add is incredible, wait till it loaded or youre fucked and besides using some shady adblocker vpn, theres no way to block them, without again - a jailbreak.
Another feature that I used many times on my android phone, is controlling it from the desktop, connect it via usb and then just use it for demonstration purposes on a projector or to instruct how things work - theres no such function without a jailbreak, even if you use osx..
Then theres the feature, that instead of just setting your cursor to a specific location, you have to hold and it zooms in, not sure if I just got too used to the android way of doing it, but I can see myself making less mistakes of where I positioned it with the ios way.
The hardware mute switch feels like a great feature, its just sometimes weird, so if you were inside an app that was playing sound and you mute it, it still plays it until you either close and open that app or just change to another one temporarily, so its not an actual hardware switch as I usually thought, more like a request to mute the phone.
The cable that comes with it is too thin, I am afraid to even unwind it, as it would probably break, so I had to get another one.
Please don't turn this into a shitfest from any of the fanboys, I really just wanted to share my image of finally being able to try it first hand again.4 -
They say nightmares are bad, but have you ever solved a bug that was bothering you for a long time in your dream, only to wake up and realize it wasn't real? Worst feeling ever. And this happened three nights in a row. For three different bugs. You would think that after the first two nights I would know better, but yet again I was fooled.3
-
Today I finally solved a docker problem I was stuck with for 2 days.
For some reason it didnt want to download the needed images although colleagues could download the same images. Every time I tried it resulted in a Python IO error.
Today I had enough of it so asked if I could join another project. I had to download the exact same image for that project and it worked... Setting up the first project worked as well since I had these images already.
I still dont know why it didnt and later did work, but that is the life of devs.1 -
Sometimes i cant fix a bug for days. Like 3 days of brainwreck. Then on the 4th day i wake up. So whatever i love. Take some time for a rest. And then begin working whenever i feel like it. I start working at 2 pm. Try to solve the same bug again. The first thing that comes to my mind is Hold on, why dont i try to change this? I did and it worked. My first thought has solved a 3 day old bug.
Can someone explain this phenomenon. This is proof that a man is unproductive and cant work good if he doesnt feel like it.
You know all of those bullshit andrew tate quotes "i work even when I don't feel like it because that's what men are supposed to do. I train when im happy and i train exactly the same when im unhappy" but thats bullshit. I can not be productive if i am unhappy. I tried so hard and the harder i tried the more i failed. And now when im no longer unhappy i solved it on the first try.
Nobody cares when a man is unhappy. No one gives a shit. It's not fair1 -
In the new job as "Consultant", one of my duties is to maintain the website. Now, the website is based on PHP 5.6 (which they are still using mail method) and without git or sg-git and of course, it is based on cPanel.
Now, I update the website in real time i.e. working on cPanel itself. This is because I don't do for the front end, I do it for SEO. So one day, they reported a "feature" as a bug and assigned it to solve me, I took my time solved it, they did not like it, I reverted it back and I had to listen to a lecture because I did not test it.
Imagine old "wise" ass hats giving a lecture which they do not know about in the first place, 12 of them precisely, yeah that's what happened to me. -
Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.
tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.
For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.
After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.
Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.
At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.
I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.
I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.
I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.4 -
Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.
Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.
Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.
Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."
My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.
They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.
That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.
Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken... -
Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.
I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.
Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.
Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.
Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.
And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.
Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.
Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.
I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.
And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.
I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.
So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years. -
Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.
Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.
And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.
I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.
So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this. -
Most fun I had coding?
I was developing my first android app and the database accounted for all the weekdays.
It was a night and I was coding. I build the app after 90 minutes of last build. I was fucking amazed to see that my app was running perfectly on Genymotion Emulator whilst the same god damn build crashed on my phone.
As a new novice developer, I thought it could be due to the OS version difference b/w my phone and VB.
I went on to spent an hour or so, to figure out where I had gone wrong. I re-read my code multiple times and nothing. I could not find a single error in the code.
I was fucking speachless when it hit me, FUCK, today is Saturday (last build was around 11PM Friday) and VM's time is usually screwed (it was Wednesday there) and since I had not accounted for weedends entry in database, the app crashed.
It was really fun having this sort of a bug for the first time in my life. Solved it within minutes after that. -
Isn’t it delightful when you come in to a large project to discover that they have a large underlying core that no one wants to touch but everyone relies on.
Quickly perusing the code you realize that the base was clearly created by someone who found their first tutorials for Java, but were previously a c developer.
It’s funny cause this code is of course from ~20 years ago and in different sections you can tell they were a C developer, a business admin, a Db admin, a junior conforming to pressures from others.
I recently looked at the deep rooted abuses of Java beans, and this entire internally created state management engine that serves no purpose but to create contrived complexity.
The use of propriety tools, that they paid lots for that perform incredibly simple tasks that have long since been solved by the open source community. Many of which are long defunct.
And the constant focus is on monkey patching the engine to solve small issues, which bloat the time to deal with issues. Since everything needs to be tested by their methodologies.
The inability to understand that the underlying structure is the issue and that tackling that, rather than just shifting the entire solution to new languages will suddenly solve the problems(or other underlying systems).
It’s just sad.1 -
Customer Service(cs): clients complaining our site crashes on their computer
Support: they dont have enough resources, its their computer
CS: customers still complaining, how do we fix this?
Support: tell them to get a better computer
CS: lets borrow their information and see whats going on
Support: reluctantly moves customer data over
CS: I dont see anything wrong here. It works just fine
Support: ... ... ... -
I would enjoy a position where I would have to write tons of tiny scripts for solving different logic problems. Tweak data, visualise it, pass it through different mediums. I would feel the best in research, implementing and testing different ideas, and build solutions for later use. Right now I'm on the first line at the customer site where the upcoming problems have to be solved instantly, I have the constant feeling that the thing could be much more efficient but there is no time for change, test and implement differently, so I'm not really using my full capacity on anything. I'm kind of a user of the built stuff but I feel more a developer. At the other end I'm satisfied and this is the best job I ever had :)1
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Okay, my first serious rant.
An acquaintance of mine when needed my help always explain his problem equivocally. Like, he would explain laboriously of the method to achieve what he needed when the thing he only needed is just a simple API call. Im not saying im an expert in this area but his explanation doesnt help me to understand his problem. If i do not understand his problem, how can i help him? At least if i know what his problem is and i cant help, i can seek help from others.
And hes not even working in the same company as me. And he wants it solved ASAP. I dont know your problem, yet you want me to solve it? I dont even know if im capable of solving it! And I have my own job to do..
He always try hard to explain it. He tried to sound professional. And he always ask for my help first because I knew he doesnt want others to know that he doesnt know how to code. Why do you apply for the position if you know you cant handle it?! Everytime. He's been fired before. And he did it again. I cant. We are fresh graduate. Apply for a fresh grad position. If you dont know anything, just said you dont know unless youre very quick to learn..
I remember once we need to submit a linux commands or something homework. We need to code it during the class and submit it by the end of the class. He asked me to code for him while mine is still half done. "Quicker please!" he remarked. There were still plenty of our classmates still doing it and some even havent done it yet. What the f are you rushing i felt like slapping him in the face with the keyboard at that time but because i am a matured adult i did not do it.
Hes not even a bully he just always get panic without reasons. He wants things done early and then he can post on social media. "Oh so tired this program is so complicated" or like "Oh damn, they want me to lead the group again (roll eyes emoticon)"...
Please somebody run over him.
Hes making me bald everyday and i think this is unhealthy. If he wants to get bald, get bald alone. I was just starting to work but my hair has been falling everyday.5 -
This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.
I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.
So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'
I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.
After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.
Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.
The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.
Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.
Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it. -
Does being dictate consciousness or does consciousness dictate being?
In this layman form, the answer is undefined. But let's dig deeper.
The layman form doesn't account for the difference between discrete and continuous. Without that difference, the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise can't be solved. Yes, it took from ancient Greeks up until 17th century to solve it, introducing that distinction.
Both being and consciousness are discrete entities. This way, technically being was the first, because you were born to it. But when you became self-aware, your consciousness started to dictate being, and not the other way around.
If being truly fully dictate consciousness, then consciousness can be cut away by Occam's razor. In the same way, your parents are technically the reason you exist at all, but if that fact fully dictated who you are, then _you_ could be cut away in similar fashion.
Contrary to that, if consciousness fully dictated being all the time, being could be cut away too.
So, yes, being created your consciousness. But later, when your consciousness was created, it started to dictate being. This is the only way they're both can't be cut and are aligned with the timeline.6 -
Okay Android dev intern here.
This has been an awfully weird experience for me as an Android dev and this is not the first time. I am seeing a pattern here and i don't know if its just bad luck or its the reality
I have always learned Android by searching on the web , on stack overflow, medium articles, youtube , books , etc.
Sometimes i had a vision to create some unique nd innovative app, nd sometimes i just wanted to learn a particular tech, framework, library, or a feature.
The former case sometimes required the knowledge of unexplored areas, so in order to make the possible product, the original idea would reduce to a smaller, more possible one if i thought it isn't possible or "need more resources on that" after several hours of searching.
But as an intern i found this approach not working out. Here the company gave me an app idea by a designer who thinks its possible, the senior Android dev also thinks its possible and i also believed it to be possible.
The thing is we all know its possible but the person working on it, i.e me, doesn't know have all the knowledge for it.
Fine . I will apply my usual time taking approach of searching and debugging to tackle my issues when they arrive.
But at one stage i too would get exhausted. To me , the code in my front is the correct code for this approach and i have checked all the possible cases, debugged it and yet can't find the issue.
Now the only thing i want is for my senior to look into it, tell me if its an architecture issue or is there any possible case that i missed.
But that's not what company wants. The senior says that he's involved in a lot of projects and my problem is too simple to be solved by solely myself. Now i am sitting here, with my code, exhausted and no longer willing to work here . (And that's maybe why it's my 4th internship and not first)
Am i the asshole fresher?is this always going to be the case? Am i the one running away from the problem and deserve all the lashing that i am getting for not completing the product and getting stuck?4 -
Bought two hp z230 and one hp z210 to setup as a kubernetes cluster at home.
The first two worked as expected to install Ubuntu 18.04 but the z210 just fails installation just at the end of.
I've updated the bios, I've tried different hard drive, (obvious I've turned off secure boot), I've downgraded the bios, I've cursed, spoken harch language at it and sprinkled it with holy water, still it fails.
A Google search the problem, one hit similar to my problem but it did not help me.
Currently I'm on my 5:the glass of wine, if not solved tomorrow I'm hiding it at work until the next "downsizing" and it will have an accedent from the 9:the floor.
I've spent 150$ on it but I have the economy to nurture my mental health... Not all the time but this time it feels worth it!!!3 -
I am new here so apologies if I make any mistakes.
I have been a opensource contributor since last 2 years and it has been a great experience. As I am looking for a new opensource organization, I got around an organisation X(name changed). It is my first time when I don't like an opensource organization. The organization is controlled bh a single person and he does just tells me to copy the whole website of another popular opensource organization and make the organization website. Also, he does not listen about anything. He just pings me about the work done everyday even after telling him that a review is a blocker for me to do new task. I don't say it is a bay thing but don't looking at the issue is the main thing. On another case, the build pipeline was failing. It can be solved only by changing certain settings on the build pipeline and I does not have its access. I told him about how to tackle it in the review comment. Even after this, he just pings me for around a week just telling me that it has something to do with my code and the pipeline is all right.
I can understand that in the early phase, an organization may have some problems and the setup may have some flaws but this type of dictator behaviour is not good in my opinion. I had worked in 3-4 opensource organization and all have very welcoming community. I had always learned from them but this is my first time bad experience with it3 -
There is no perfect library for you
Recently I tried to update a very old hobby project by adding new features, but sadly in my case these features depended big on an external library, and because of how this library handle their things I just can't make it work for my use case cuz again how the library works, at the end I removed the library and installed anther one that solved my case
Now I will make clear that I'm not blaming anyone here, not even me, devs that creates free libraries created the library for their use case in the first place and then thanks also to contributors (library users) that library became good for the common use cases, it just time that will tell if the library will keep with the updates and not breaking things
So we should be very thankful for the devs that creates free open source projects that tries to make the devs life easier