*me, coding at a pub*
*random dude walks up to me*
He: "what are you doing? Programming? What?"
Me: "yup. That's a horizontally and vertically scalable webservice, that's using amqp, rest APIs and encryption to schedule starting, stopping and autoscaling of a total of 90 heroku applications. This webinterface *showing* allows you to trigger starts and stops manually and monitor all processes."
He: "oh, so you are programming a Website? In HTML?"
Me: "euhm........ Yes."

I understand this dude had probably no clue what I was talking about.. Yet I am angry at him. Reducing more than 12k loc to HTML... Go fuck yourself.

I came to Spain escaping my home country and started looking for a job in ANYTHING. Had done some coding as a hobby but nothing serious, still I sent a CV to some starting positions online (also sent the same CV to pet shops, Starbucks, cloth stores...) And I got chosen to participate in a one week training course / trial at a big company.

At the same time I managed to get a spot on a free and amazing course for music production, my dream profession​. Yet I had to go for the one that actually had some work opportunities!

Got the job after the trial was done and immediately got sent to work with a 3 person team that was in charge of setting up a giant SharePoint site for the local mail office. It was kind of insane! For months I had no idea what I was doing and thought I was going to get fired any day.

5 years later, I still have no idea.

Long rant ahead.

Holy shit is this hard.

I'm not a dev, but I'm working really hard to become one. I come home from work every day at 7:00pm and study between 3 and 5 hours of coding, and finally I'm starting to make decent responsive web pages. I got excited, finally the studies are paying off and I guess I got carried away and told a "friend" about it.

"What?, But making web pages its fucking easy anybody can do web pages! I did mine with dreamwiever, is that even considered development"

And there goes my self steem holy shit..I know, I know its not development, Im not a programmer neither do I pretend to be one but holy shit.

I guess I wish some people would anderstand the amount of effort that can go into an app or web..

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

--- SUMMARY OF THE APPLE KEYNOTE ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER 2018 ---

MacBook Air:
> Retina Display
> Touch ID
> 17% less volume
> 8GB RAM
> 128GB SSD
> T2 Chip (Core i5 with 1.6 GHz / 3.6 GHz in turbo mode)
Price starting at $1199

Mac Mini:
> T2 Chip
> up to 64GB RAM
> up to 2TB all-flash SSD
> better cooling than previous Mac Mini
> more ports than previous Mac Mini - even HDMI, so you can connect it to any monitor of your choice!
> stackable - yes, you can build a whole data center with them!
Price is 799$

Both MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recyled aluminium!
Good job, Apple!

iPad Pro:
> home-button moved to trash
> very sexy edges (kinda like iPhone 4, but better)
> all-screen design - no more ugly borders on the top and bottom of the screen
> 15% thinner and 25% less volume than previous iPads
> liquid retina display (same as the new iPhone XR)
> Face ID - The most secure way to login to your iPad!
> A12X Bionic Chip - Insane performance!
> up to 1TB storage - Whoa!
> USB-C - Allow you to connect your iPad to anything! You can even charge your iPhone with your iPad! How cool is that?!
> new Apple Pencil that attaches to the iPad Pro and charges wirelessly
> new, redesigned physical keyboard
Price starting at 799$

Also, Apple introduced "Today at Apple" - Hundreds of sessions and workshops hosted at apple stores everywhere in the world, where you can learn about photography, coding, art and more! (Using Apple devices of course)

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

Starting a tiny and purely personal coding project, mostly for practicing a newly learnt language...

...Spend 5 hours brainstorming to find a good name for my "product".

I've been coding for the last 19 Hours (not including break), and now I am starting to get hand seizure, my finger just start cramming for no reason.

i need a doctor

I’ve pretty bad ADHD (diagnosed) my entire adult life, so focus has been a huge struggle for me forever. Here’s my strategy:
- Noise-canceling headphones blasting chiptunes (Spotify has some, but YouTube has the best selection of old-school video game music) I’m usually way less distracted if I listen to music without lyrics.
- A chair cushion (I actually use one of those ridiculous donut ones, but I put a normal sized pillowcase on it. SO comfortable, even after many hours.)
- THE POMODORO METHOD. 25 minutes hardcore coding/debugging, followed by 5 minute intervals for breaks, like checking fb, etc. (Breaks are totally optional if you’re in the zone tho 💪) It’s a great way to reward your brain for focusing.
- And if all else fails, the looming threat of unemployment is always there to keep you motivated 🙃 (Sad but true— always crosses my mind when I’m starting to fall behind on a task)

Hi guys
I'm just starting to learn c++ (with no coding background) and being 22, i feel like it's too late.
Wish me luck.

It was friday evening and almost everyone in office had left. I was assigned a bug related to some of my code changes. I called my senior to help me debug (has three years of experience, whereas me having only one year exp, who is also a very good friend of mine *always helps in debugging*).
So the code goes

switch (someEnum) {
case One:
doSomething()
// no break
case Two:
t.x = someEnum
break
case Three:
.....
}

I had recently added new enun One and was reciting the code logic to him as we were looking through code.
Him: Hey you haven't set t.x in case One. How did you miss that?
Me: No look, I haven't but a break on it. It will go ahead and set it in next case.
Him: What are you talking about? if the someEnun is One why would it execute Two case. Lets copy that line up there and try it locally.
Me: No no no wait. Are you saying that groovy doesn't need breaks in switch (Me being new to groovy but good with Java).
Him: Why would you need break in switch case even in Java?
Me: *stares at him*
Him: I'm going to execute a psvm right freaking now.
Me: *while he writes the psvm* Why did you think there were breaks in switch in any code?
Him: Shut up. *writes psvm code cursing me everywhere*
*executes code*
No way. Really??
Me: Tell me why do you think are there breaks in switch.
Him: I though they were to get you out of switch block and not execute the default block.
Me: So were you coding switch until now without breaks?
Him: I don't know man. I'm starting to doubt all the switches I have ever written.
Me: Anyway that's not the problem, so moving on.
*a while later*
Him: If a interviewer would ask me how would you rate yourself in Java. I would be like "Well I worked on various projects for 3 years in Java, but didnt know why we put breaks in switch. So you figure it out yourself."

One of the best moments in office.

I just had my worst hackathon so far and need to puke my whole toxic hatred, the rant will be full of hate so be warned. (I just don't want to let it go on my girlfriend, but I need to shout it out loud somewhere)

First of all, it is alright to be a beginner at a hackathon. It is also alright to not know that much about coding and want to learn. But it is not alright to lie about your skill, pretend to be a senior programmer and waste my fucking time.

Don't even fucking dare to say your are "fit" in Android development if you just have done some foobar tutorial on YouTube, don't even bother to read the document and have literally non existent knowledge about computer science.

Why the fucking hell do you need to pretend to be a seasoned programmer if you are just a bloody beginner? I mean you are in a hackathon full of computer nerds so soon or later your impostor ass will be debunked so what is the point?

And the other guy. Why the fucking hell did.'t you say that you just begin Python for 3 months? You are not a fucking developer if you just started coding for 3 fucking months. Learn some fucking coding before starting with machine learning you fucking punk ass bitch script kiddie.

Alright, maybe I was too naive to not check my teammates' background before make a team with them. Fuck me and my fucking stupid ass. My dumb ass monkey brain fell for big mouths, I deserved the headache right now and none less.

Lesson learned!

I spend so much time coding on my laptop that my girlfriend starting calling my mac "the other girl" in our relationship.

Online coding challenges are so addicting!! :D
It's 4:44 now, the sky is starting to light up already, finally going to sleep.

Coding is slowly starting become my ticket out of the military and allowing me to make a life for my family where we don't have to move every few years.

Enjoying the college life to the fullest was the mindset of the confident boy, who now burns the midnight oil to cope up with world and give himself a proud future.

Is this a story of some successful person, who has achieved a lot in his life?

No, it is the story of the guy who lost all his hopes of future after spending the very first month in his college.

The first month was enough to perceive the reality of the domain I got myself let into. It was enough for someone, who didn’t even knew what programming languages are, to realize how left behind is he from the people around him.

Being from a private college which hardly anyone recognizes, expecting them to prepare me to stand out lone would be foolishness. I took my first step and started learning my very first programming language , Python.

I met some people with similar interest .We discussed, we exchanged resources, we used to talk to seniors to guide us. And yes, we were guided.

There were many bad days. Days which made me regret about starting late. Many a times I myself confirmed me as useless and some other time people did. The good thing is I never stopped , and improved myself with each day.

And now, after spending more than a year in the same college, I look at the things I have learnt. Today I can develop decent websites, can train neural networks, can make me stand in good position in coding platforms.

All you need is to take a step.I may not be the best, but I am definitely better than what I was yesterday.

If you have started something, then concentrate on finishing it.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?

@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :

Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.

We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.

Thank You

here is her cheerful photo.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Disappeared into an epic ten day coding session. It was interrupted only when someone decoded to check I was alive.

Ten days is shorter than I expected but still, I'd be physically starting to rot at that point.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Starting from this week my boss started to be pain in my ass. He wants me to do sales more then developer work. I told him on Monday that I can’t do sales because my interest is in coding. My boss said that I have to do whatever he tells me to do because in my contract there is a clause that’s “Any other work that may be assigned by your boss”.

I’ am fucked!

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

First post.
So, I've been teaching myself front-end for about 7 months now, and I'm really enjoying it, especially the actual programming aspect of JS. I also just started a new job, nothing to do with development, that I expected to be extremely boring and unfulfilling, as it doesn't fulfill any of my interests, but it'll pay my rent and it has decent benefits. I'll be mostly working with excel.
Now, like I mentioned, I'm really new to the dev world, just a little infant really. I know enough to know that I don't know shit. So, I was surprised to learn today that you can program in excel with VBA. I know the language gets a good bit of hate on here, I did a search before posting, and while I haven't started to learn it just yet (I'm starting tonight) I'm excited about. Firstly, because I'll get to do coding for my job, something I'm interested in, and secondly, because if I can figure out how to automate part of what I do well enough that it's implemented with the rest of the team, then maybe I'll be rewarded, and I'd be able to put professional coding experience on a resume for when I try to find a better job.
I've really enjoyed reading all the rants. They've been entertaining and also educational sometimes.
tl;dr Discovered VBA and was actually excited about it

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Every University should make it a requirement that CS and Info technology juniors and seniors spend time on devRant. It is an education in real world coding and business challenges. No surprises. Easier transition to being a pro.

Wish it were available when I was starting.

My 23" screen is starting to look tiny ... I think 27" is the next "standard" for coding :/

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

So I promised myself some down time this weekend since I usually end up working all night and in a blink my weekend is over. I also declined going out for better 'relaxation'. Here's how it's going so far...

>Gets home. Hmmm what should I do I can do anything! *thinking*
>Pours a stiff whiskey
>Trys watching something as well as playing a game, gets bored of each and abandons them.
>Opens a dev newsletter
>*blinks*
>Realizes I'm elbow deep in some repo... starting to feel inspired.
>Decides to code something "fun"
>Uses "Well as long as I'm not *working*" to justify his addiction.

I'm really not sure what I did for fun before I started coding. It ruined things by being so damn enjoyable and ultimatley many other things became well... less fun.

This is what addiction looks like.

/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */

=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.

=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.

=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊

I'm just starting on the dev world. I only taken Java and C++.(Both professors knew their coding however, sucked balls at teaching it). now i am here looking at this post scared as shit for my future.. damn what did i get myself into?

This customer's dev is going to be the end of me. I had to explain to him why it doesn't make any sense to return a value after throwing an exception.

In a function that was supposed to insert a record amd return its id, in the error handling code:

catch(Exception ex) {
//logs the exception
throw ex;
return - 999; //this code will NEVER be reached, and why the f.... - 999?
}
The customer wants us to develop the project together, but he won't listen and always write whatever he wants. Some might be differences in taste. Like me preferring
if(condition) {
return a;
}
return b;

And him preferring :

Foo result = null;
if(condition) {
result = a;
} else {
result = b;
}
return result;

Ok, that I can accept. But things like the one I'm ranting about... I wont.

I'm starting to wonder what was he doing during his "9 years of coding experience"

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

I've now for months been lurking on this awesome app and I love the community. I've been trying to self learn coding but kept hitting a wall. But now i'm starting in school to learn coding and i'm so exited to learn it and be a part of this awesome community.

I have an uncanny ability to--in the middle of coding--open a tab on the browser and type just about anything on the search bar and go on to what I am starting to call a "link binge".

I pretty much bounce around the internet reading about random (not even useful, always) shit and end up wasting hours.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

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.

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

I'm starting a clean Sierra installation and I've been using Sublime in my old installations but I wanted to asked you coding monkeys:

Atom, Sublime or Brackets?

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

My biggest personal challenge as a dev is learning and retaining, as well as keeping current, any particular language. I swear I really did build a career as an HTML/JS/CSS programmer. I have a resume that shows I did. But for some reason, lately, every time I open an editor I feel like I'm starting over from 22 years ago. Everything I do nowadays is copy/paste from StackOverflow, hiring another dev to help out, or cribbing code from past projects. I'd love to be able to just open Sublime and start coding like a badass like I imagine other coders do, but I just can't even get started. WTF is wrong with me?

What time do you get up on work days? I'm starting to think I should have me time in morning (reading, learning, coding my own things) before going to work.

I've think I've come the the conclusion that this job/team is sorta chaotic and tedious and there's no skill growth. Not learning anything new. Usually just something broken, integrate some new feature, build something that I've already built before but differently for this specific case. Nothing fun or challenging, or new.

And also tired of trying to be a "role model", make things right. I tend to like to keep things orderly, documented, well tested and clean but everyone else seems to just bulldoze their way to get whatever they need, leaving a mess behind... It's been like 2yrs already but the technical debt seems to be growing not shrinking...

Prediction of a future rant:

Guys I'm starting a Devrant addiction recovery movement.

I've become addicted since it fills me with delight to read all the rants.
It's so bad that my work has suffered.

The first step is admitting I have a problem

Actually it doesn't matter, all my projects get canceled anyway so noone noticed I stopped coding.

!rant
Linux experts, please read if you have time

Seeing all the posts ranting about Ubuntu, I'm starting to wondering : I have a laptop on Ubuntu that I set for my courses at school, I took Ubuntu because I could try at school with VMs, liked it and because between this and Linux Mint, I wasn't aware of all those distributions.

So my reflexion is : Since I've started my internship, which would be the final semester (I'm in last year of studying), I use this computer mostly for personal coding projects, which aren't ambitious and I sometimes use my Windows too, so my computer is a kind of switch-not-so-often.
Should I keep it to Ubuntu or should I try to install something else ?

I've heard of Solus, which got my curiosity, and Arch Linux, but this one is not want I think I need. But seeing all those distributions here made me confuse, I dunno if I should upgrade something that's a kind of placeholder for coding and do stuff when the Windows (which is my main laptop) is busy doing things.

Have any suggestions ?

Starting a javascript coding challenge @ devRant.

Challenging javascript problems will be posted on a regular basis henceforth inviting all coders & problem solvers to be a part of this challenge to contribute & learn.

Challenge#1 starts 26Jan.
Get excited for some

I usually find Fridays really exciting 'cause they mean the end of a long week of work and a nice weekend where I can just relax and chill or do whatever the fuck I want, And also because nothing really major happens regarding work happens on Fridays.
Till this Friday, my boss who I really respect and who I find a nice boss to work for starting complaining about the speed of an app we developed and comparing its speed with 2 other versions of that were built using different stack, different architecture and another environments. I explained that it's absurd to compare these and expect the same performance from 3 differents implementations.
He was not convinced and I just kept my mouth shut 'cause I don't want to explode in anger. Because of all Friday night sucked, felt all depressed, wanted to distract myself by watching a movie, but I didn't find anything that I liked, I remembered that a new episode of this series I watching will be coming out that night, when I went to my usual streaming website I didn't find it, and discovered that it'll be coming out on March 1st 😣.
I had no video games to play, didn't feel like coding. By then i realised that tonight will be another nigh where I would be crying myself to sleep... which happened.
I woke up this morning with a resolution that I will go out and do something fun.
Little did I know, my depression was still there, now it's 8pm, I spent the whole day in bed. I wish I had someone to talk to, I friends are all busy living and I didn't want to disturb them.
I have another chance to save this weekend by doing something on Sunday, otherwise next week will be a hard one with my current mental state.

Excuse any typos in my rant. I have no energy left.

I might create a coding course for people actually interested in learning how to program correctly (not Get Rich Quick Bootcamp style, not webapps, not magic Javascript incantations).

I have an idea on how to structure it but I worry it'll be too weird for most people to follow (starting from binary theory and then teaching machine code and then working upwards to C and beyond) explaining how a computer works along the way, showing the real errors with annotations explaining things, etc.

I've always wanted to teach in this format but I feel as though it's too.. idk, "useless" to most people? But I've never had a friend go through e.g. CodeAcademy and come out knowing how to actually make applications from start to finish without just hacking together random React components and hoping the frankenstein project works well enough.

The target demographic would be those either completely new to programming or just have a fundamental or web-centric preexisting knowledge, or maybe those who simply want to understand computers better.

Am I barking up a shitty tree?

I decided to learn Flutter, because the idea of a common code base between Android and iOS sounds nice. I'm late to the party, I know.
So I install everything and start typing in the tutorial. TAB... two spaces. I absolutely hate that so let's change it. In the settings, it sends me to a FAQ which more or less says this is the way it is, deal with it. But I want my tabs to be four spaces, every code editor since the dawn of time could do this... I'M PAYING FOR THIS SHIT!!!!!!!
Ok, let's check the JetBrains website, I'm starting to lose my patience, but let's do it. At this point I should also mention that I'm feeling pretty stupid. I mean, I'm checking on the internet about how to do something which obviously must be obvious, why am I not seeing it?
I find a page on the official website. JetBrains' replies are along the lines of "Why would you want that?", "The holly wars between tabs and spaces are over", "Most people like it this way", "The overlords said this is the coding style to be used" (Ok, the last one was me reading between the lines). At the end of the thread, they provide a "hackish solution" (their words, not mine). Which doesn't work. Because why should it?
Not even when PyCharm's debugger randomly shat itself and I had to use print statements I got so angry. That was relatively fine, bugs are a fact of life, and the overall package is good, so I kept paying.
But now you're telling me that I cannot use what should be a common feature of every code editor just because you and the overlords know better?
Well, fuck you and the horse you came in on JetBrains, you've just lost a customer.

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

Just completed learning HTML from Jon duckett book! Feel so good. Wanted to learn coding so long. And I finally start. Starting CSS very soon. It's my first rant !! Reading rant almost more then 4 months from diff. Account. Just a newbie here. Saying everyone Hi😊 Doing #100daysofcoding !

A few years ago I had a Minecraft server and wanted to create my own plugins for it. I failed, but never stopped trying.

Did an internship at a software development company and got an Arduino as a gift; I was hooked - controlling stuff and seeing that stuff happens because of my code? Count me in!

Took classes in school that teach me coding and databases. I also taught myself a bit of C#, Java, C++ and PHP.

5 years and 3 internships later, I'm finally starting my paid training for the job as a programmer next year at the company that gave me the Arduino.

Gaming is what got me into coding, and I couldn't be happier. :)

I'm not a dev, but I want to be. There's a lot of ways to become a developer from what I can tell, but the one I chose was a coding bootcamp.

I was accepted to Thinkful with an Income Share Agreement and a Living Stipend.

I'll be in the full time Engineering Immersion cohort starting this upcoming February.

So I just wanted to share my small accomplishment. Wish me luck, fam.

First day of my first developer job is Monday. Oh shit. Nerves are starting to set in. What if I’m not good enough for the job? I mean I didn’t the coding assessment they wanted me to do. And passed. Which is why they gave me the job. But fuck man I’m nervous! I have never had a job like this before. And it’s remote after my first week. Oh shit.

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

Oh my, never was i triggered more. Of course i can only speak for my experience. I study software development as focus.

First off, the starting languages and or concepts you learn.
Why the fuck do they start with java and don't even really explain how instances actually work? Of course they don't. Because it would be way too fucken much for a semester to go over garbage collection, Instanciation of stuff, allocation in such an advanced system, etc..
How about starting with something not 50% managed by a vm?
Good ol' C. And now don't tell me thats a rough start. We all know about these subjects or exams where it's all about sorting people out. Who will be able to manage a whole bunch of shit or who should consider something else.
Yo dawg sick idea: how about sorting it via the will to achieve the skill of coding?
Nah but we make the exams around coding (by the fucking way done on paper, what the hell) such a fucking breeze, asking you how to convert hex do dec.
Meanwhile maths will make you cut yourself in a dark corner, after you nearly shot yourself because of some lame-ass business-subject.

Some kid on stackoverflow, just starting out in the coding world, posted his resume to the board and asked what people thought.
Immediately recieved 3 negatives and then had the post removed.

Pretty shitty community - we all started out once, just give him some useful pointers. What a miserable lot.

hi devrant!

about six months ago i posted that i was accepted into and starting at a coding bootcamp. next week is the last week of curriculum for me before i can choose to be a teachers assistant or finish my capstone project and graduate!

some basic info about the course i took:

- 6 months (3 months web dev 2 months CS 1 month capstone project )
- starts by learning the MERN stack
- includes noSQL and SQL dbs
- transitions into C and then python for computer science
- includes basic security info
- lots and lots of algorithm practice
- lots of job readiness stuff (resume writing, linkedin, etc, but i havent done that yet)
- lots of portfolio-able projects throughout the schooling experience
- previous cohorts have something like 40% (after 1month) and 70% (after two) job placement rates (rough estimate)

let me know if anyone is curious about anything related and id be happy to answer what questions i can! :)

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

Hello,

Wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding stress management.
I am a sys admin of a continually amount of growing servers (now at over 130) and I do coding when I am not busy being screamed at by users. The stress is coming from the workload, but also the way that the workplace is running. The manager left, and now I am handling all his shit, and my own shit as well, and all his accounts have been handed over to me (accounts being clients here). The other IT guy who is supposed to help out with the server admin just finds other work to occupy himself, and I am losing my mind. There is literally an insurmountable amount of work that needs to be done, and it just cannot be done in the time that is allocated in the working hours. I am working overtime, unpaid overtime by the way, until 9/10PM at night to try and get through everything (*cannot apply updates and work on the app server while the users are live) and I am just starting to lose grip. I am taking my stress home with me (not taking it out on anyone), but I am not sleeping, not eating properly and even starting to dream about possible ideas to fault resolution when I sleep. I find that I am constantly tired, and it feels like a world is about to cave in on me. There is literally too much work to be done in too little time, and although I am more than capable of doing it (and will get it done, or the director will physically assualt me and accuse me of being useless, again) I feel that the struggle is just a bit too much.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to "wind down" or to "let go" just for a few minutes a day at least, so that I don't feel like I am on the job 24/7.

Thanks.

Unpopular opinion:

Coding on paper exams actually do help at beginner stages of learning to code.
It makes you at least think how to write things simply, without overthinking the problem, makes you familiar with semicolons (so all you stupid fks wont complain that it has taken you 2 hours to find missing semicolon (actually, who has ever encountered that problem, besides memes?)), makes you learn the syntax, just many benefits that spoiled OOP/FP starting kids cant see, because they relied on autocomplete so much.
God, I hate people who are trying to render things stupid just because they can't see the fking point -.-'
Losing my mind about who goes into "programming" and who calls himself "developer" is just fueled by that.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Google, please explain to me: Why the fuck would you create a hardcoded requirement in your libraries to use a plaintext json file with credentials to your API?

Credentials which give full access to all of the company email, addresses, cloud services, etc?

And why would you accompany this in your docs with example implementations which read as if they were an intern's first coding project — non psr compliant PHP, snippets of Go which won't compile due to type errors...

I'm starting to become convinced that the whole of the Google Cloud API was actually written by thirteen year old who found their parent's liquor cabinet.

Fuck this I'll build my own Google.

Shady business practices. You see a lot of stories of people getting fucked over on here. Companies giving applicants a "coding test" to get work done for free, or guys promising to pay when the work is done(and then bailing), deserve to be thrown screaming from helicopters.

Some quick advice for people starting out:

1. If it's important, get it in writing. Promises are worth precisely dick, unless it's legally binding.

2. Exercise caution in interviews. The shadier companies know a lot of applicants are desperate, and they take advantage of that fact if they're allowed to.

Not sure if I'm rambling at this point, but fuck it. 🤣

I want to rant about tech YouTubers. As one myself, I feel like I do an even exchange with my viewers.

I want your attention, I don't feel like I deserve it, so I teach you something coding related. You get something of value, I get your attention.

But that's not the case with most in this space. Idiots feel like they can spout whatever bullshit they think about.

They're all stupid with their stupid fucking titles and ideas. Let's review some.

Video Title: How much Javascript you should know to get in tech??
Anyone with > 2 braincells: WTF !!!!!

Video Title: How would I start over to learn coding if I could?
My Reaction: Nope, I wouldn't. The things that I did and didn't is exactly what my journey is and I would do it all over again.

And I get the intent, you're trying to put a roadmap for beginners but they're not going to follow exactly how you lay it out. And why are you trying to establish that there is a correct way of learning coding? Everyone learns at different paces at different times. It's a journey not a race.

Video Title: A day in the life of {COMPANY} engineer.
My Reaction: What do you want to show everyone? Your fancy office? Your perks? The job perks which 99% of other devs won't have?

Video Title: How to crack FAANG interviews.
My Reaction: Well, only the top 1% is going to get an interview anyway. You're not acknowledging the fact that the acceptance rate is < 1% in these companies. Creating a video like this creates false expectations in beginner's heads. And they only see these companies as their only shots of making careers. They dont consider startups or starting their own companies.

Video Title: Top 4 dying programming languages.
My Reaction: WTF !!! COBOL was invented in 1959 and there still is demand for it. And my blood started boiling when Tiff in Tech said PHP is a dying language. Like seriously????

Video Title: Top paying programming languages in 2023.
My Reaction: Please, come on. We know it's Java. And 99% of the viewers ain't getting that job. You're just wasting time listing out languages. By the time someone starts from scratch and gets to a position of getting a job, something else will be the new fad.

Video Title: What advice would I give myself when I was starting?
My Reaction: Really? You couldn't think about saying what advice you'd give to your viewers? Are you really that full of narcissism?

There are good techies though, it's just that I get angrier and angrier the more YouTube recommends me these stupid videos. Ah, my chest feels lighter now.

Coding distraction
To be honest - task distraction

1. Starting a task, you need to do
2. finding old code you want to refactor
2. Doing some improvements
3.Fixing the bugs created by prev actions
....
Task not finished
But that's kind of fun. Livin' on the edge

I've spent so many years not coding, I could never get over the initial hump, which was definitely a mistake. Mistakes are fine, we all make them. The best thing is to learn from them. On the plus side I've learnt firewalls, Web hosting. Windows domains, Azure cloud, virtual machines etc etc, skills which are hopefully very useful for Dev to have. I look forward to joining the ranks of skilled developers. If you are interested in development but are afraid to take the leap. Just go for it, start to learn and play with it. My recommendation for anyone looking for a starting point is a Udemy course called "The Complete ASP.NET MVC 5 course". I'm not affiliated in any way or advertising it. I just think it's brilliant and you get to the fun stuff really quick. You will start with the basics of getting and setting up visual studio. Also. If anyone could recommend other very good courses they know of I would appreciate it

Not a b2plane post.

I'm noticing a strange behavior of my body where the moment I go in the "coding zen" feeling the first time after waking up, my body wants to poop.

Previously I attributed it to me drinking tea before starting work.

But then today, I didn't drink tea. I woke up and started working right after, and still when I hit the "coding zen" feeling, my body wanted to poop.

Wtf..

procrastinative coding is a bad habit of mine. I've been using php for 10+ years and just recently got into laravel. I have to say I love it but at times I wish I could have learned the entire framework before starting my project some time ago. as I am coding I learn new tricks with laravel on how to do things and have to waste time and go back and change existing code... or tell myself "I'll come back to this after the launch".
I'm just wondering how other people handle taking on new frameworks

I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.

The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.

None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.

The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.

I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.

First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.

Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?

Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?

Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.

How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?

But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.

But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.

But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.

Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.

Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.

Does anyone else get sleepy immediately after starting to watch online tutorials for literally any coding language? It’s the cure for insomnia, I swear. I’m just trying to skill up but all it makes me want to do is sleep. Even standing up and walking in place doesn’t help.

Yesterday a met a self learned dev. He started electronics at 11 years old. He was homeschooled with no obligations at home. So he ended up doing about 10 hours of electronics a day. Until he got bored of it and realized he could integrate his own programes.

So he started coding 10 hours a day. He is really smart. I figured someone like that surely plays video games. So i mentionned path of exile. I love rpgs the new league is starting on friday， im trying to make exiled friends you know...

The guy tellls me he has no clue about the game so i ask him what games he play and thats when i heard: “factorysialimsntnaio” something. I was like “whaaat?”.

Its the type of game where you create your factory. You smelt， combine， make parts like screws and so on and build your factory.

Thats when i realized how some people will always be smarter than me ;)

I'm still looking for a job after more than two months. Never thought I'd say this but after all these interviews I'm starting to prefer live coding tests over take home assignments. You spend a few hours preparing by reading interview guides (the interviewers usually get their questions from these same guides) and then you either do well or fuck up but it's all over in a few hours and you move on with your life.

Week 1 Day 1

It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.

So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.

I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

I got accepted into the University of Washington BS Computer Science & Software Engineering program today! It's been a long road since starting ITT Tech 3 years agofor a BAS in SDEV, it closing on me, starting all the way over at community college, maintaining a 4.0, and now a bootcamper at Coding Dojo. Now only at least 2 more years to go! 😁🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃😩

My sis wants to career switch into being a dev.

Sis is a kindergarden teacher (great credentials, went through a rigorous program for all the best certs), divorced last year, has a 5 year old. She's a single mom making less than 30k, in Portland, OR -- not great. She's also just started her career/finished school this past year.

Trouble is, sis can be a bit unrealistic about plans at first. She "heard from some people" about making 50k+ starting wage after a coding boot camp. She wants to do this by the end of the summer -- she's never coded in her life.

I can't advise her; I'm in my undergrad c++ courses and I don't know the industry, but my gut tells me this is a bad idea.

Please advise.

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

How do you guys and gals combat RSI? Starting to get pains in my forearms... After a day of coding when I get home I have to prop the right hand side of my keyboard up to game as it gets rid of some of the discomfort...

Starting to code before making the wireframe or the design.

So i am basically blind coding
Wherever the wind takes me!

Starting to wonder if I don't enjoy coding or if the corporate environment is just draining the life out of me with it's constant monotony and monotone culture. I can't bring myself to be excited about this stuff, it's so boring. It pays the bills but it doesn't keep my eyes open.

This morning, I decided I'm gonna do some Android development. I opened Android Studio (closing 2 Firefox windows to reclaim enough RAM), launched the Android Emulator and then proceeded with my coding.
Since, I've almost finished a prototype app, translated a good 100 strings, had lunch, updated 2 server and THE EMULATOR IS STILL BOOTING!
My Android dev friend tells me this "just happens sometimes". WHAT?!?
I'm genuinely starting to think that good software doesn't exist anymore...

Hands on experience is the best. Lemme tell ya.

So recently a friend has been bugging (in a good way) me about getting to one of my projects. So, about a week and a half ago I finally got along to starting. I tried using existing FOS projects to mold together as my own, but that didn’t work. So I made it from scratch. At first it was frustrating because I didn’t know PHP, but now I think I got the gist of it.

Almost a week and a half now and quite the progress has been made, at least to what I had expected... now I’m addicted to coding. I hate food. And people. I love my code, no matter how terrible it is.

!rant but a question...

I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?

I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.

I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.

Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!

!rant
I didn't know that working with React will destroy my confidence like this, I know that coding is hard but being tasked to build a front end for a large project with React and use React Boilerplate (which is not for beginners) just a month after starting my first job as a front end developer is nowhere to be the perfect start to one's career.

the quarantine did not help, it made it worse, I have so much fear that I can't even see my code, I even wanted to write some simple side project to retake some confidence but I can't, I want to tell my boss that I can't continue but he's very nice that I don't want to worry him, and here I am having panic attacks and fear, not a fear of being fired, because I am prepared and I deserve it, but fear that I can't code any more, I am not a good developer, but it's the only thing I know.

I had low confidence before but not as much as this time, this time I feel like it's the end of everything, I keep staring at the screen for hours and I can't think straight.

I am lost and I don't know how to handle this, I became a bad father and a bad husband, I don't talk to anyone, not even my kids ...

as always thanks for reading me, I only have this community that understand me.

So I'm starting my a mandatory vacation today (for a week) because I can't carry over my remaining days.

What do I find myself doing this morning though? Reading and coding a personal project.

Vacation starting tomorrow. At last I can go to work doing quality design and coding without stress ;)

Git repositories? What is the best online for free

Android Studio + Kotlin

Hey guys
So, I'm thinking on starting programming again... slowly cause of Burn out

I'll be homesick now for a while and I want to start coding again.
I've been making Apps for Android in App Inventor, but now I want to make stuff that sincerely will be hard on a complete visual programming language.
So, I'll be starting to learn kotlin

My problem now is that I don't do any really programming for years, and most of my knowledge is from 1990's. I want to put my code in a git repository but GitHub doesn't have a free option and I can't spend money now, since I'll gain a lot less.

What are the best alternatives online, or tricks, like online VMs

thanks for the time

Once I helped one of my friends writing a coding project for an interview for him.

We worked out a solution in C++. I showed him all the class hierarchies, how the flow worked and so on.

The day after he told me he re-wrote it in C# as he was more confident with it. Fair enough.

He changed most of the names using camel + underscore notation, sometimes starting with a capital letter, sometimes not!

But the best (or, rather, worst) was to convert the class hierarchy in a big class with all stuff in it, called "CMother". That got me. This class had a couple of static methods that took a lot (if not all) inputs that somehow coincided with the member variables of another class and did some work with them (like a constructor of that class would do).

Needless to say, he didn't got the job

It was one of those "I need more coffee days"..
I was writing some checking function called "check" (now to clarify my company is not coding oop style so no classes etc.) And as I went on I included another file for some functions and what not. Pretty normal stuff right? Right. In that file I required there also was a function called "check".
Guess who tried to use the "check" function of the imported file in the "check" function?! Right! A Fucking genius aka. me!!
So I tried to figure out why the page wouldn't load and why the server was starting to lag more and more.
After killing all the apache tasks three times i finally realized what I did.
Took me 10 minutes to figure out that i was causing endless recursion. That day wasn't my best and clearly not filled with enough coffee.

PS: yes I know oop would have probably eliminated the possibility for this but I'm just adapting to the coding style of my company as I can't really change things since I'm just an intern.

I got really interested in computers from gaming. Starting back with dial up Doom games with my friends to Team Fortress Classic clan matches. I recently downloaded Diablo 2 to replay it. The C++ class I took in High School solidified my fascination with coding. I quickly moved on to learning web coding and creating my own websites. Now it's a job I love.

Unpopular opinion:

No one should ever argue over ANY coding style unless they're just starting out and thus have to come up with their organization's coding standards for the first time.

Once the standards are set, everyone should just comply with it irrespective of their personal preference. Or alternatively, include back-and-forth code formatting into the development workflow.

The only thing that's important is that by the time code is pushed into the codebase, it is formatted according to the defined standards so that the whole thing looks consistently written, which is basically the point of setting a coding standard.

Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.

Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.

Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.

Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.

Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.

!rant

I see a lot of people complain about uni degrees and stuff because they don't learn how to code etc. Is this really the standard?

I mean I'm only in fourth semester bachelor and had coding knowledge before starting uni. But we had basic to intermediate java in the first two semester, now learning how to write secure code and OS-Level stuff in C++, we had a module with practical Assembly coding all while still learning all the theory.

At the end of the first semester we had to write a terminal game in Java. I mean of course that's not "real experience" but if you dive in you definitely learn the basics you need to get started in real life.

Or am I wrong completely / just in a weird uni?

Craziest prep for interview :

Step 1 : Given sufficient time for the scheduled interview by any company, start by searching "How to prepare for Google interviews". Awe at the information before you and get all pumped up to jump in.

Step 2 : Starting with Algorithms, study each one and try not to mix any of them in confusion. In case you are stuck in whiteboard coding, close your eyes, take deep breath and visualize Don Kunth. If that doesn't help, well you are ruined anyway.

Step 3: Practice coding without internet connection, till you are able to write code while you talk about how the weather is really great today. Libraries and methods should flow like poetry. SO is sin.

Step 4: The X programming language which you added to your resume because you can write Hello World, head over to Wikipedia and read more about it just in case.

Step 5: Read some xkcd comics so you can impress the interviewer with some humor. You can try Dilbert too.

Ah, I have so many memories.

I was lab instructor at the local institute(it was more like tuition) where I had to train students for programming (C, C++, Core Java).
And my debugging skills got enhanced too, It was like I had to just look at the program and I could tell all the errors, it happens to everybody I think because our brain just find patterns un-consciously and it later becomes like one superpower.

No doubt there were a lot of bright students even brighter than me. Actually, that was my starting point where I broke out of my shell and started playing with coding a lot.

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

When you swap day from night. Sleep starting at 5:00AM , and wake up at 3:00PM. And do stuff (coding , others) until dawn. Which makes me like a vampire.

I'm starting to feel like coding is too much boilerplate all the time.

I've been thinking about why, and I think (and I'm trying to sound humble here) it's because I'm usually honoring the SRP. But this entails this enormous drawback of enormous amount of code!

Don't get me wrong, I'm usually glad with the design I end up with .... but only after what seems to be hours of typing

Anyone recognize this problem? Suggestions, comments?

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)

Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.

Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.

Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.

Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".

Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.

If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.

We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.

Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.

Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)

Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.

....

Et cetera et cetera.

1) Starting long running process on a Windows test computer.
2) Switching back to working computer and coding.
3) Switching to the test computer to see how the long process is doing and sees the Win10 reboot screen saying "We are getting a few things ready for you..."

Just gotta love it when MS decides when it's a good time to reboot. :-(

I really need some advice.

So the company I have been at the last year and a half wants to give me my first compensation evaluation at my two year mark. It makes me feel underappreciated and just unhappy, so I'm starting to look elsewhere.

How should I prepare for interviews? Cracking the Coding Interview, then Leetcode (free), then Leetcode paid (Pro), then ??? I am frontend so I don't deal with BSTs and such ever.

Any advice would be appreciated on how to proceed with my career.

Wtf!? Clowns wants to, again, move me up the ladder. They don’t care. I am starting to think they have an evil plan for me in play here. Step 1) promote so high that noone really knows what the fuck I am doing. I am just name on a paper. And in the meetings. And then, 2) fire my ass

Have not accepted this job position. Yet. But I’ll guess I’ll take it. I can always go back to coding. Haven’t coded for a year now!

I think there must be some sort of evil play here. Am I that incompetent?

Do I want to be Chief Supreme Structural Architect Commander? Wtf!? Clowns…

All bow for the Chief Supreme Structural Architect Commander! I got principles and guidelines! Pff…

Silence so I can hear myself think and then just write the first line. It's hard to start, but once I get going it is even harder to stop.

Sometimes I'm afraid of starting because the codingzone switches my brain into an Asperger patient. I just can't socialize afterwards. So if there is a evening meeting morning coding is a no-no.

I got admitted into University a few weeks back, unfortunately Universities in my country dose not allow students to take CSE unless they have maths and physics in their A levels even though I had computer science in my A levels and did a lot better than my friends who had maths and physics. I asked them if there was any way I could change my major and they said no. So unfortunately i have to study management information system now and that's the closest subject i could find related to computers the i was allowed. I envied all the students I met there since all of them were studying computer science and they didn't even know how to code . These are the very students who change their major from CSE to BBA . The education system in my country is fucked up ;-; . But that isn't going to stop me from coding right now I started learning java and after I'm done with that i plan on starting to learn lua. Anyways I'm planning on giving another A levels on maths which I'm really bad at lol. Also I don't really know much about management information system i just went with it because all the other BBA majors seemed boring to me and I was too bummed out to research on the subject.Anyways wanted to ask if it is possible to get a job as a developer if you're self taught in South Asian countries?

What (realistic) requirements would you need to run windows 10pro OS with kali linux on a VM for pentest/ coding environment ONLY. no gaming etc. ?
Im starting my software development school soon, and im needin a new laptop.
Any requirements/ good to know appreciated from you old time code gods

I'm starting to think about putting two of my interests together: chess and coding. Does anyone has some good reference on how to start getting into it? I'm looking in particular for good theoretical references. Thank you 😃

How do ppl just keep coding. I can't stay on it for shit. Anything that comes to mind will distract me and keep me from starting or working on.... It sucks, its not even like i dislike coding. I actuay enjoy it once i start but games wirh friends n shit always take Priority for some reason :(

DevGoals 2019

B awsome as usual and chill have fun wth coding not limited to working hours.
Make coding my prority one hobby... Then the rest 😉
Starting wt contributing to an open source project...

Not starting coding with beer or coffee☕🍺

I've gotten started with web dev in the past and learned HTML and CSS and started learning JS but I never could understand what I could use for a code editor to practice and pretty much forgot all of that stuff. Now I'm trying to learn Python, but what's pissing me off is paying for a phone app that doesn't teach you to write code in these lessons, rather interactive multiple choice questions and "put this in the right order". sequences. This is not learning for me, this is informing. Which is info I don't retain. And If i'm paying for it why is there so little to these lessons? Barely covering anything. I've done every lesson Mimo had for python but it didn't really explain the practicality of what it was teaching me and they skipped a lot of shit. Changing the pace of the lesson from Print this and that and heavily explain the most basic stuff 3x over to only explaining the more advanced stuff one fucking time.

I would really like learning python while being walked through a project as a lesson. Teach the terminology, structure, application, process, rinse and repeat, and outcome all in one. With a project target to look forward to. I need a goal to keep my interest.

So far all I know about python is its a programming language used to create Youtube. And I'm trying to learn it because I keep reading that its the recommended starting line. But I need to be able to visualize what this code can be used for. Explanations in terminology I haven't been taught yet just frustrates me. And I read everyone's posts and see many people mention being frustrated, but I haven't even started coding yet. Feel free to comment and redirect me to page that can help. Links are appreciated. Nay, encouraged!

Which development standards and coding styles would you recommend in a development team? My colleague @jacoKotze and I are starting to get larger projects at work and 2 more developers soon (juniors with little to no experience), so we'll need some coherence soon.

Tabs v spaces is more of a joke, looking for opinions on other things please.

!Rant but kind of a rant.

So I’m currently throwing around the idea of building a messaging application for iOS just to practice coding and what not. It seems like I do a lot of work on it like making sure the login screen works and other stuff but I get burned out pretty easily.

Any tips on how to not get burned out as easily when starting a new project?

If you guys help me with suggestions 😁
I'm good with angular, and using ionic for mobile apps, i used to like it buy it's turning to be pain in the ass
I want to move to react native, should i start with reactjs or go directly to react native ?
I already started reactjs and it's starting to look weird for me ._. (Dont judge me i've been coding in angular the last year and a half)

when we started this project for a customer we are working on we had a training about how their BE and FE is working, their coding style and so on. FE is in Angular 4 btw. During this training for FE we were about to create our first component. The trainer: "Ok, let's generate this component." He opened some very basic project that they have as a starting point, selected a directory, crtl+c ctrl+v, manually renamed everything. "There you have it. We successfully generated a new component!" 😳😵
We are still generating them like that 😅

Hey guys, I'm just starting to get addicted about coding and stuff, and I do some research, is it possible to make our own mining platform using sourceforge ? I mean, Satoshi must start from something to make Bitcoin right. Anyone ?

By trying out everything, and starting projects but never finishing any of them.
And talking about coding in dev forums. (Yes, this was before SO and reddit)

Starting yesterday, I'm going to study a total of 400 hours over the next 3-4 months on coding, system design, and behavioral interviews. My goal is to 2x my current salary (currently make almost 6 figures) and get out of this shitty company. I want to make it big and say that my studying was all worth it.

Wish me luck peeps. I'll come back in dues time to let you know how it all went.

!rant
Ya boy is now officially an intern! I'm starting next week, everything is sorted except one thing: we have to bring our own computers and basically get to use whatever software we want. I've got a fresh install of Mint and was wondering what IDEs or editors everybody here uses (and recommends), since I only really have a bit of experience with Atom and Netbeans, and I don't think I'll be able to get away with coding in Notepad++ or Gedit here.

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot

!rant

Looking for help starting with DevOps.

Does anyone know of a site or forum where you can talk about general coding/scripting patterns rather than just asking specific questions?

Bear with me, this may be a bit longer than most posts here.

I'm a self-taught admin/tech working with one colleague (who's also mostly self taught) at a high school, managing both clients and servers.
We've been doing most things manually bit I'm looking into converting as much work as possible into more of a DevOps setup, with Powershell-scripts for multi step tasks.
I want to do this for a number of reasons. Having a script doing a number of steps would cut down on time spent on individual tasks and minimize the risk that a step is missed or, perhaps even worse, mistyped. Also it's important that I actually learn what I'm doing, why something works and why something fails.

As and example, I have a powershell-script which moves a student from one year to another (basically they have user names with a two-digit prefix based on the year they started and a suffix with two letters from their first names and four from their last names) if they need to repeat a grade.
It basically renames the account in the AD with the correct year-prefix, changes the samAccountName, renames Home and Profile-directories on disk and changes paths on the profile-tab in AD, moves the user into a new OU and security group etc.
It works as intended if the user account to be renamed exists and there's no name conflict with the new name. But I'd like for the script to validate that there's no problem with user names, source and target security groups and OUs etc. and eventually split the script up into smaller clearly defined functions for better readability.
However, I don't want someone to just write the script for me, I'd prefer to be able to discuss script flow and come to my own conclusions and solutions.

I remember when I started in programming, I literally copy/paste a typical "hello world"...
It failed to compile.
After a exhaustive investigation, I found the huge differences between VB6 and VB.net.

!rant
Being a while I was here fe. Guess I have had nothing to be angry with, at or by. I have not really being coding lately (well I have but for like 2 hours or less a day) maybe because I overworked myself in the past months and finished up most of the backend requirements for the startup. Quite bored with the project lately. Now I just manage the team and make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing. I have simply being at home watching animé and floating through my days. Planning a trip in a few days to hopefully get me out of this unenthusiastic funk as I am starting a new job next month and would love to be of top energy and motivation by then.

Starting my Java developer position this week. Turns out it involves absolutely no coding... pretty disappointed, but I'm just starting out. What do?