New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

I met my girlfriend cooking. She has no programming experience whatsoever and is quite computer illiterate. But that's fine as that's not something I need in a partner.

She regularly asks me what I'm working on. I'll try to explain it, and sometimes she definitely gets it, but sometimes she's clearly lost as fuck. She'll enthusiastically say things like "that's awesome honey!" To things that are just explanations. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Most of the time it leaves me in this weird confused state, like she's just pandering.

But I know she means well and wishes me the best. She's an amazing woman, and even if she doesn't get a single thing I try to explain, I'd much rather be with that than the "Why the fuck are you always playing on the computer?" Types of people I meet far more often.

Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.

Me: Desirability is not do-ability.

Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？

Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.

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

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

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

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

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

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

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

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

Manager: !!

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

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

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

Weirdest technical interview:

I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.

The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.

Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.

I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!

It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

So this shit happened today...

We were asked to implement a functionality on the device that allows it to go to standby mode to save battery power. Once the device enters that state, it can only be woken up by actual bus-network activity, and usually that means connecting a shit-ton of wiring harness and network emulation devices... Before implementing and releasing the device software that does this, we told that fucktard customer how difficult it would be for him to connect to the device without such a setup. He seemed to be fine with it and said rather arrogantly that we should implement the requirement as asked...

Well okay you cock-sucking motherfucker, you'll get exactly what you asked for... We implement the functionality and deliver the software...

Now this pile of shit comes back running his mouth on how the device tears down all its interfaces (to reduce power consumption) and he can't connect to the device anymore.... Well what else were you expecting you dickhead.
To make things worse for me apparently he runs to the manager describing his apparent problem. Both of them come to my desk.. With that fucking Bastard hiding his smugly mug behind the manager's back... He thought he was going to have the upper hand... Well guess what fucked piece of shit, I came prepared... I showed the manager how this was a part of the requirements by throwing that JIRA ID in their faces... The manager seems to understand but this relentless fuck wanted me to implement a "workaround" that would allow him to connect to the device easily... The manager almost had me implement that workaround, when I expose a huge security flaw in doing so. Guess what, now the entire team comes to my desk and start supporting my statement... To make it better they also tell how doing so will violate other requirements...

I've never felt so happy in my entire fucking career, when the entire team stood by me and watched that asshole drag his sorry ass back to his place

Dev: Hey that internal audit you asked me to perform didn’t go so well

Manager: It has too! I’ll get in a lot of trouble if it doesn’t pass.

Dev: Ok well it’s a lot of work to get it to a passing state, we have to dedicate a lot of resources to fix all these findings.

Manager: We don’t have any spare resources, they are all working on new projects! Why did you have to find things??

Dev: ….It’s a lot of hard to miss stuff, like missing signatures on security clearance forms

Manager: Ok can’t you just say that everything is all good? They’ll probably not double check.

Dev: I’m not really comfortable with that…Look all of these findings are all just from one member of the team consistently not doing their job, can’t you just address that with him and I can make a note on the audit that issues were found but corrective action was made? That’s the whole point of audits.

Manager: You don’t get it, if anything is found on the audit I’ll look bad. We have to cover this up. Plus that’s a really good friend of mine! I can’t do that to him. Ok you know what? You are obviously not the right person for this task, I’ll get someone else to do it. Go back to your regular work, I’m never assigning you audits again.

Just wow. I am amazed by what just happened.

A year ago my parents decided to switch from desktop to laptop for convenience. Knowing their needs, i bought them one without an OS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. The thing is that if you do a regular maintenance of the laptop once a year at their partner company, you get additional 4 years of warranty (this offer is amazing).

So today was the day I brought the laptop for this maintenance for the first time. They make you a profile on their support website where you can track shit regarding your device, super convenient. First thing I notice that the login page was not https. Awkward, but there is no sensitive data here so i let it pass. Naturally i forgot my password, so I requested a new one and guess what? I recieved it in plaintext via mail. A tech repair oriented company does this, my god.

I went there, gave them the laptop in question and got a piece of paper, where they wrote that the laptop is in their hands now, and the current physical state of the laptop, and blabla.

I got home and I read what the guy wrote among other things: THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT LEGAL.

How the fuck is Ubuntu not legal??? What the fuck is this shit? I sure as hell didn't torrent it or bought a booteged copy on the streets.

I just want to add my 2 Cents to the all this GDPR chaos. Because I feel lots of you are missing the point here.

When reading here about GDPR I hear all kinds of fair statements of how flawed it is and how it's mainly hurting the small companies etc etc.

I agree, at this state GDPR might actually be doing more harm than good.

However, I don't think that is what it is about. It's about going in the right direction. If you read/look over the course of history we've had several technological revolutions. Industrial, renaissance. They all start the same:

"This technology is going to change everything, it's going to solve all our problems!" It's something holy. Something that shouldn't be touched or regulated, only embraced.

But as we all know it wasn't all that pretty.

Industrial revolution was hard super underpaid, dirty work. Children had to work too. People were getting sick. Lots of alcoholism, depression.

And what made the factories start taking better care of their employees? Regulation.

Once fines start to come, companies will have to adapt.

We have to learn and understand that these systems like government, company, capitalism. They're built for reasons. They all exist for reasons. And only when it is in balance, things will flourish.

So I encourage you all to stay as critical as you are, but to give it a chance. To have a bit of faith.

It might just turn into something worthwhile!

Thanks for reading!:)

As a full-stack dev who has been looking for a full-time role for over half a year now... How the fuck can it be so difficult to land a job as a dev? I'm a passionate, capable, and proven dev; it shouldn't be this hard.

And why the hell are coding/whiteboard interviews the de-facto standard for deciding if somebody is worthy of a role? Whiteboard interviews are as inadequate and unencompassing a means of determining the quality of a candidate as asking a dentist how well they know the organ structure of the human body.

I've applied to an endless number of positions, so far-reaching and desperate as to even apply to international positions and designer roles instead of developer roles (I've been a graphic designer for over 13+ years). Even with this, most don't get back to you, and the few who do most often just notify you of your rejection. On the rare occasion I land an interview, my chances get fucked up by the absurd questions they ask, as if the things they are asking about are at all an appropriate, all-encompassing measure of what I know.

Aren't employers aware that competent devs are able to learn new things and technical nuances nearly instantaneously given documentation or an internet connection? Obviously, I keep learning and getting better after every interview, though it barely helps, when each interviewer asks an entirely new, arbitrary set of questions or problems....

Honestly, fuck the current state of the system for coding job interviews. I'm just about ready to give up. Why the hell did I put myself through 5 years of NYU for a Computer Engineering degree and nearly $100K in student loan debt, if it doesn't help me land a job?

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Root gets ignored.

I've been working on this monster ticket for a week and a half now (five days plus other tickets). It involves removing all foreign keys from mass assignment (create, update, save, ...), which breaks 1780 specs.

For those of you who don't know, this is part of how rails works. If you create a Page object, you specify the book_id of its parent Book so they're linked. (If you don't, they're orphans.) Example: `Page.create(text: params[:text], book_id: params[:book_id], ...)` or more simply: `Page.create(params)`

Obviously removing the ability to do this is problematic. The "solution" is to create the object without the book_id, save it, then set the book_id and save it again. Two roundtrips. bad.

I came up with a solution early last week that, while it doesn't resolve the security warnings, it does fix the actual security issue: whitelisting what params users are allowed to send, and validating them. (StrongParams + validation). I had a 1:1 with my boss today about this ticket, and I told him about that solution. He sort of hand-waved it away and said it wouldn't work because <lots of unrelated things>. huh.

He worked through a failed spec to see what the ticket was about, and eventually (20 minutes later) ran into the same issues Idid, and said "there's no way around this" (meaning what security wants won't actually help).

I remembered that Ruby has a `taint` state tracking, and realized I could use that to write a super elegant drop-in solution: some Rack middleware or a StrongParams monkeypatch to mark all foreign keys from user-input as tainted (so devs can validate and un-taint them), and also monkeypatch ACtiveRecord's create/save/update/etc. to raise an exception when seeing tainted data. I brought this up, and he searched for it. we discovered someone had already build this (not surprising), but also that Ruby2.7 deprecates the `taint` mechanism literally "because nobody uses it." joy. Boss also somehow thought I came up with it because I saw the other person's implementation, despite us searching for it because I brought it up? 🤨

Foregoing that, we looked up more possibilities, and he saw the whitelist+validation pattern quite a few more times, which he quickly dimissed as bad, and eventually decided that we "need to noodle on it for awhile" and come up with something else.

Shortly (seriously 3-5 minutes) after the call, he said that the StrongParams (whitelist) plus validation makes the most sense and is the approach we should use.

ffs.
I came up with that last week and he said no.
I brought it up multiple times during our call and he said it was bad or simply talked over me. He saw lots of examples in the wild and said it was bad. I came up with a better, more elegant solution, and he credited someone else. then he decided after the call that the StrongParams idea he came up with (?!) was better.

jfc i'm getting pissy again.

I hate father's day.

Reminds me of 2 things:

1. My father is a fucking asshole.
2. My ex wife makes it damn near impossible for me to speak to my oldest child. State seems to do the same shit ever other state does to mothers that do this: nothing, zip, nada.

Fuck today.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

RANT TIME!

Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.

I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!

I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!

This isn't really a Dev related rant, more of a life rant. Things have been going pretty badly for me lately, so I apologize if this comes across as complaining or whining.

This morning, I got in a car accident that totaled my car. It was a 1996 Chevy Camaro that I had been fixing up and restoring over the last few years and I had it running pretty well. The accident was my fault and I told the police as much, because I value honesty over screwing over others for my own benefit. Money has been very tight lately because my wife was out of work for the last bit of her pregnancy, so we ended up having to move to a 1 bedroom apartment that I could afford rent on my own. She also has a son who is now 13, so space is pretty tight. Money got even tighter once we had the baby. She's 10 weeks old now.

I've barely made the $1500/month rent on my own here, usually paying 1-2 days late because we're living paycheck to paycheck. Our lease is up at the end of July and they won't let us renew because of this.

The bad part is that I was driving a car that had expired registration because I couldn't fix it to pass the state smog test and my license expired two weeks ago. I haven't been able to afford insurance, so every time I drove, it was a gamble.

I'm now going to have to pay these damages out of pocket for the other car.

We're now having to move into my mother in law's house for about 4 months so we can get out of this financial hole we've gotten into.

I feel like I've failed as a father and a husband.

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.

Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.

I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)

To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"

I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....

No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net

I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.

Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#

This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.

Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.

Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.

Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.

Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.

Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.

Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.

Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.

This is the state of our current industry.

*Drops the mic*

"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"

There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.

One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?

If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?

Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.

How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?

What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"

The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?

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

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

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

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

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Just finished a 18 hour coding day (It‘s 5:30am here). I just realized that coding is one of the few things I really get in the zone (flow state). It‘s so awesome how I can forget everything around me and be 100% focused on what I‘m doing. And the best thing: I really feel relaxed now.

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Not really a rant, but here goes...
I want to personally thank each and every member of devRant! Here’s why. (First, a little boring backstory): I’m visually impaired, and stuck in quarantine like the rest of us. (Not totally blind, but y’all definitely DO NOT want me out on the roads driving,) I also work a Tech Support job which largely deals with macOS. Due to this eye condition, there simply isn’t a lot of shit to do while stuck in the house other than work and learn node.js. So my pastime has largely been to sit and read Facebook while not on the clock. One day, while working from home, I was so bored and pissed off, I googled “macOS fucking sucks” for fun, and found devRant! Your stories, jokes and rants have turned my life around! I’m no longer on Facebook. (I know, I know, but what’s a half-blind guy to do except read about COVID-19 and get more pissed off at the state of the world?) and you guys have inspired me to start learning new things and delve deeper into node, which I had put down for awhile (I’m at a kindergarten level anyway, brand new). Anyway, thanks again! I’ll refrain from asking stupid questions, I promise. But I need a TechSupportRant now...

I work for a small company with about 10 employees working full-time in the office. We all report directly to the CEO, Phil. When the pandemic hit, Phil went into full panic mode and had us all move our desks 12+ feet apart, wash our hands every 20 minutes, sterilize everything in between uses, etc. Nothing super weird, and better than having no reaction at all, but it was a hypervigilant process that made me expect him to be very accommodating when our state went on lockdown.

Boy, was I wrong. Our industry is considered essential so we’re still open, but Phil is being odd when it comes to working from home. For background, about 95% of our work can be done remotely. The other 5% would require about 15 minutes in the office once a week. I was the first one to pose the idea of working from home and Phil nervously agreed, but only let do it three days a week. My coworkers were given similar instructions but were “encouraged to come in every day, if possible.” A few of them do.

Since then, Phil has gotten pretty weird about the situation. He refers to people who are working from home as being “off work” (which is NOT the case, we are all working and available while at home, which he knows because he calls us for work-related things during work hours!). Today, Phil asked me if my coworker Travis was in his office, and I said Travis was working from home, and Phil replied in a sour tone, “So he’s not working then, great.” He has made similar comments about my other coworkers. When I’m working from home, he’ll call me and ask in a sarcastic tone, “What are you even working on today?” Or he’ll give me an assignment and end with, “Can you actually do work on this today? I need you working.” One time, he called while I was in the bathroom and when I called him back less than five minutes later, I was told that I “need to be available and not screwing around.”

The weirdest thing is that none of us has had productivity problems! My job is such that I can tell when anyone is slacking even a little and I haven’t noticed any issues. Personally, I’ve actually been MORE productive! And I’ve never been accused of “screwing around” while at the office before, so this attitude has baffled me.

He is so convinced that we aren’t working that he cut our work-from-home time down two days a couple weeks ago, and now it’s being cut down to one day as of next week – when COVID cases are higher in our city than ever!

My guess is that because Phil isn’t physically seeing us work, he assumes we aren’t working. CCing him on stuff to leave “proof” doesn’t work because he doesn’t read his email. He is also naturally a nightmare of a micromanager (and an across-the-office yeller) so not being as “in control” is probably freaking him out. But what is the best way to handle this?

I call this one the tester than knew too much.

Note: The server the tester is running on has a hard drive that is breaking down...

Tester: Remember the error I talked to you about yesterday?

Me: Yeah, what about it?

Tester: Well the server hasn't recovered yet and I haven't restarted anything...

Me: Well the application itself hasn't crashed so our monitoring application doesn't seem to notice that the service is in a bad state. The error seems only to have brought down certain threads within the application.

Tester: No, I think there is a different issue here and has nothing to do with that error, the application is still doing things.
*tails the log*
Tester: See?

Me: As I said some things are still running and are unaffected by the error.

Tester: NO! It has to be caused by the other error I had a week ago where my file got corrupted. As we said I removed the file, restarted it and it worked again, but had the same problem a day later...

Note: The problem is not related, this time the application is running out of file descriptors

Me: Well... If the problem is the same it would have complained about the file descriptors then aswell, not an I/O error.

Tester: Nope, I think you are wrong!

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FML

Too many night shifts.

But it's done.

After the last migrations my emotional state is... Questionable.

VM migrations between different CPU vendors and generations leading to segfaults because of unsupported X86 extensions.... Thx for doing that at 23 o'clock after 8 hours of work....

Forgetting a left over NIC in a virtual machine, creating a routing loop, leading to very erratic behaviour and fun things.

Someone forgot to check the '"Unique" box, mass spawning a cluster of VMs with same MAC adresses....

DNS fuckery since someone thought that reboot would flush the cache of an DNS server.... Nope most DNS servers have persistent caches. You'll have to flush manually.

And let's not forget the joy of the 12 plus pages of when and where to move VMs, harddrives and VLAN configuration.

Oh migrations are such a festival of joy.

Finally done with that shit -.-

After 10 years of thinking of getting into gamedev, I just joined a team game jam and it's going somewhere.

4 months ago I wrote a rant about how difficult it was for me to get into gamedev.

I guess I finally started because:
a) I'm not doing this alone
b) Another person takes care of the art

Regarding "a", computing, programming can be a very lonely task. I realized how much I missed the college years where I was paired up with other people to do something

There's something magical about being in a team.
You may not be a fan of your mates personalities. You may even hate their guts.

But working on something together, when everyone does the thing they should do, when things just flow... it's just magical.

When that happens, "all the bullshit goes away"™, and it's just you and your team sharing the same hope.

As for "b", I think I realized that, at least for my way of thinking, art (even in an initial, rudimentary state) is what ends up creating a game.

While I always tried to do it the other way around, first the game, then the art.

Maybe now I could dabble into pixel art and then use that as the thing that would define the game.

I was also an emotional mess for most of my 20s (and still kinda am, but not that much), so I guess that made getting into gamedev hard too.

Now, here's the negative part: the guy that does the art (and also codes) sucks balls at communicating and at git.

He takes a shitload of time to respond, doesn't address the things I state are important, doesn't join the damn trello, sometimes gives me some sass on his comments.
And he accidentally overwrote my changes on git three times.

The good thing is that he acknowledges his fuckups and fixes them.

I'm not really mad though. I'm almost 30, he's 20 or so.

When I was 20 I was a goddamn mess.
And it's just a week, and the pleasure of working with someone is far greater.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Best:
Really getting into Rust. It has taught me so many things.
1. Null is evil
2. Sum types are amazing
3. Compiler can actually have good error output
4. Multi threading is actually really scary if you don't have a compiler to back you up

Worst:
I had to deal with SSIS. It has also taught me many things:
1. No matter how 'mature' a product is, it can be awful. Simply dump a random error code, the user can figure out what went wrong, no need for good error messages.
2. The modern concept of the database is crap. It's a gigantic global state that is used by everyone and owned by no one.
3. Don't use tools that aren't made to be used with version control.
4. Even when you tell your team that it's bad, you will be ignored.

Just because YOU can't seem to get a grasp on the language doesn't mean the language inherently sucks and that literally the entire rest of the world is crazy for using it. It won because it's Good Enough(tm) and that's all it ever needed to be (and many of the things you see as flaws are actually big parts of what makes it exactly that).

Like, I'm not gonna go out of my way to defend a damn programming language 'cause that just feels stupid... but your constant bitching about it is tiring as hell, ESPECIALLY when the complaints you constantly state clearly indicate that you just don't have a solid grasp of it.

So, the answer isn't for everyone else to "wake up to how shitty it is", it's for YOU to either expend the calories to understand it, or simply shut the fuck up with your constant whining about it. I'm good either way, but pick one already!

This is just a bunch of things I needed to get out that I’ve been holding in for a while now.

Recently I’ve found myself In this state where I feel so depressed, lazy, and just pressured to program in general. I feel like it comes from me dismissing my abilities a lot of the time and I get demotivated to do stuff but at the same time when I do sit down and code I get distracted so easily, I can get work done but I just feel like I’m everywhere.

I want to apply for positions but I’m in this duality where I both feel like I can or can’t do it, I feel like wherever I apply to will not be accepting to people that don’t have a big degree or a ton of work experience and that I’ll get fucked on it. I’m fucking anxious that if I do get a job they will be like “hey fucking do X” and I will have no fucking clue how to even do X, and I’ve had people tell me that they know for a fact I can do it but I still fucking can’t believe it because I just completely doubt myself because I have failed at things like learning certain frameworks or failing to make the things I want and having to turn to simpler projects first because I’m too overwhelmed by the scale and I didn’t do any thinking about it before hand.

I don’t know if I’m making sense at all, I always write out rants like this and I always just erase them because I fucking hate whining like this but I need to let it out before I go more crazy I’ve been holding so much in for a long time now and it’s not been good.

I just over all feel terrible, anxious, and unproductive and I want it to stop.

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

Our project at work goes live in 3 weeks.

The code base has no automated tests, breaks very often, has never had any level of manual testing

will not be releasing with any form of enforced roles or permissions in our first release now due to no time to enforce, however there is a whole admin api where you can literally change anything in our database including roles.

We also have teams in various countries all working separately on the same solution using microservices with shared nuget packages and they aren't using them properly.

Our pull requests are so big - as much as, 75 file changes - in our fe app that I can't keep up with it and I honestly have no idea if it even works or not due to no automated tests and no time to manually test.

We have no testing team, or qa team of any sort.

Every request into the system has to hit a minimum of 3 different databases via 3 different microservices so 1 request = 4 requests with the load on the servers.

We don't use any file streams so everything is just shoved in the buffer on the server.

Most of the people working on the angular apps cba to learn angular, no one across 2 teams cba to learn git. We use git so they constantly face problems. The guy in charge has 0 experience in angular but makes me do things how he wants architecturally so half the patterns make no sense.

No one looks at the pull requests, they just click approve so they may as well push directly to master.

Unfinished work gets put in for pull request so we don't know if the app is in a release state since aall teams are working independently, but on the same code base.

I sat down and tested the app myself for an hour and found 25 fe only issues, and 5 breaking cross browser issues.

Most of our databases are not normalised. Most of our databases make no sense. 99% of our tables have no indexing since there is no expertise with free time to do it.

No one there understands css properly. Or javascript.

Our. Net core microservices all directly use ef in the controller actions so there is no shared code there.

Our customer facing fe app is not dry because no tests so it was decided it was better this way.

Management has no idea on code state, it seems team lead is lieing to them about things like having any level of tests.

Management hire devs that claim to be experts but then it turns out they have basically no knowledge of what they were hired to do, even don't know what json is or the framework or language they are hired for, but we just leave them to get on with it and again make prs too big to review.

Honestly I have no hope that this will go well now but I am morbidly curious to watch. I've never seen anything like the train wreck that we are about to get experience.

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

Web development:
I'm honestly happy that my toxic "senior" colleague is gone.
- Didnt learn a single thing in the last 10 years. Used godamn serverside rendering with Jquery / plain JS for a highly interactive business Web Application. Yeah boii, save that UI state in the relational database, good job.
- Every error in his shit was the error of someone else.
- Manipulative as hell. Type of guy that is your best buddy to gather information.
- Blocked entire technical progress in the Web department by manipulating people. Understandable. I mean if your legacy shit is gone...
- Kept backend developers from doing their job with unjustified complaints about structures... etc to justify that he needed an insane amount of time to implement simple things.
- Cried for every shit to be documented to the last bits. Did never do any documentation himself.

Fuck these people, honestly.

So pretty much all my clients have decided they are done working or responding to emails until the new year. Normally this would be fine and dandy, but I work in an office that says I have to be there every day still, and all my projects are in a state of "Waiting for Client Approval" so I can't move forward on anything.

I've spent two days so far just staring at my work pretending to do things while browsing the web, but I'm losing my mind here pretending to work when I could be doing other things. I still have at least 4 days next week where I will be in the office hoping someone responds, either say something is broke or tell me to push it live so I can get my projects out of limbo.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

It’s time for me to thank people who, through their work, defined me as a person.

Thank you Terry A. Davis. You completely obliterated my whole narrative of “being incapable because of mental state”. Your example is the reason I’m privileged enough to type this right now, you’re the reason I survived depression. You showed me how to overcome FOMO once and for all by just doing what I’m supposed to as good as I can. Fame will come. And indeed, it came.

You’re not the smartest programmer who ever lived. Only humans can be programmers. You’re a superhuman. You’re not the smartest programmer. You’re just the smartest.

May you rest in peace.

——

Thank you Richard Matthew Stallman. You showed me that the good which also can fight is a thing. You taught me to be afraid of nothing. You taught me how to be an immovable object, no matter the unstoppable force opposing. Because of you I can freely interact with people and my illness has no influence on who I am.

——

Thank you Håkon Wium Lie. You showed me that the ways of overcoming and suffering aren’t the only ones. You’re charming yet uncompromising, empowering yet never reckless. Since we met, in any troubling social interaction my brain automatically thinks “What would Håkon do?”, and somehow it’s always able to find a solution that doesn’t involve the cruelty that always dictated what I said and what I did.

You can already stop doing good things because you’re surely going to heaven with other golden retrievers but I know you’ll never stop.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.

For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.

But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."

And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."

And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).

Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.

So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.

I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.

Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.

Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.

Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...

disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.

After spending my entire holiday vacation fucking around with the one language that really digs with my state of mind (Ruby) when developing and having to do some quick troubleshooting on 2 of our applications (Java and PHP respectively) I can honestly say: I legit don't want to go back to that ever again.

But money means more to me than my own personal biases. I have delved in some of the most HATED platforms that developers could normally ask for in terms of work. And have only done some very basic (fucking obnoxiously basic) consulting in terms of Rails, to the point that it might not be even worth putting on a cv. But fuck me man, if I could just fuck around building rails solutions for a living, from the frontend to the backend, I think I would for once be happy with the things that I work with with things more than monetary pleasure.

Y'all know your boy, I ain't no neckbeard, but I fuck with things that a lot of others don't, to me Lisp dialects and Smalltalk are gifts from dev heaven, and I have thrown out Clojure in production (my app is still chugging along just fine at work thank you very mucho) but in terms of pure web development, I have never been happier than when I generate a rails project and start tinkering around.

Sigh.......here is to hoping that maybe I will eventually open my own rails shop.

GWT.
Let me explain:
Tl;dr : someone fucked up, I took shit, it was a gwt project. In a sense I don't hate GWT because of the framework itself but because how I was introduced and forced to "work" with it.

Context:
Was working as a paid intern at a small company there were 3 devs 2 interns and one senior employee that only worked from home handling the shit ton of legacy VB6 code he wrote over several year and a boss with no technical knowledge. (Other unimportant people as well)
I was working with their DBA (cool dude) because I was writing statistic and report generating software.

Story:
The other intern was tasked of doing a gwt app that was supposed to use a input file.
Rather than asking the user to upload it with a file picker (I guess they exist in gwt I didn't got to dig in the framework) he was trying to load the file with a http request directed at the same host the app was running on.
It did not work.
Then his contract was other and the app was left in an unfinished state.
The boss then tried to have the app deployed, the remaining dev dodged the bullet invoking some bullshit because he was clearly incapable of doing it.
So it fell on me, couldn't deploy the app because it was not even close to working.
Tried to fix things and make it work.
Turns out he thought it would take me 3h to deploy when I clearly explained that the other guy didn't finish the app.
Boss got mad, threatened to ruin my studies and my future career.
Couldn't because my uni had my back.
Didn't want to see me anymore.
Couldn't break my contract.
Told me to work from home for the end of my internship.
I got 3 weeks early vacation and got paid, fuck him, fuck GWT, fuck his company.
Still got well marked for the internship as my supervisor was the DBA who was happy with my work.

Morality:
Don't let your intern unsupervised, don't let your main dev work from home when you don't know shit, don't piss me off and send me work from home.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

No experience with paid work yet, but for sysadmin work I'd mostly look at the environment and how the previous admin left the premises, and why they left. I wouldn't want to work with a bird's nest for a server room, that's got everything jammed into one clusterfuck of a god-function sort of server or something crazy like that. Separation of services, security, wire management, all those things matter because that's the state that you'll be working in, and cleaning up someone else's mess.. it makes my blood boil.

Payment is important, and if the job doesn't pay well, don't take it. Or if they place a wee bit too much value in those expensive pieces of toilet paper called certificates, it denotes incompetence from the employer by being unable to gauge your skills on their own (and I get that there's time management involved, but come on.. how long can it take to have a conversation with someone to gauge what their skillset is). But the working environment in particular is of vital importance. If it's all going to be yours to build, great (and don't you dare to half-ass it -_-). But if it's already been partially done by someone else, they'd better done it well.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

What I'm doing now, writing a JS library for a simple kitchen timer (like, something that can be wound up, is ticking, can be paused, etc). Here's a list of neat stuff I've learned:

Polyfilling as a lib author (I decided against it).
Packaging the lib (using Rollup, ES6 modules are totes cool).
Using flow to add static typing in strategic places (started appreciating types in JS since reading up on functional programming).
Modelling state and transitions using an explicit state machine. (Fucking finally. There's usually an implicit state machine somewhere, only spread out all over the app...)
Using mostly side-effect free methods, being very explicit about when and why things are mutated).
Test-first/TDD (ish) using Jest and the awesome Wallabyjs.
Freeing up mental capacity by letting Prettier format my code for me (it was hard to let go but totally worth it).
Started using git.

Did all work on Ubuntu after pretty much a lifetime of Windows (initially to separate work from gaming) and finally swapped MS Visual Studio for Atom.

When it's finished I'm going to publish it on GitHub, which will also be a first for me. Might try out some CI platform while I'm at it.

tl;dr: wrote some js, felt good

Becoming member of a political party.

I met a lot of smart people, had many great debates about different issues, yet most of all: I learned how dangerous group dynamics can be. (It's insane how fast Us-vs-Them-group-thinking can manifest itself.) I learned to reflect myself (the hard way) and that if I want to convince someone, rational arguments is not enough if you are a dick about it and that sometimes the how you say things is so much more powerful than the what.

Basically, I learned a valuable lesson on how (not) to communicate. I still profit from that on a daily basis in my work as a developer.

(On the other hand, the whole experience made me rather cynical about the state of the world at large.)

I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.

We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.

How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.

I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.

Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...

Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.

Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.

Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Fuck it, fucking fuck it.

Consulting company, been here for 2 years, had some decent projects (surprise, only those that me and my coworker started from scratch), but OMG the fuck ton amount of bizarre code I've seen is just mindblowing.

Everytime I start on a project, spend days improductive because the stack won't fucking work.

We use some frameworks, but the creators of the projects said fuck it, why would we follow the framework guidelines if I can create a supersmart way that nobody fucking understands way of doing things. I mean, It will look smarter and so nobody else can touch this shitty code.

I hate that the most praised developer is the guy that created most of this shit, and his nº 1 skill is moving Jira tickets to the correct state, tracking time (PM's love this, I hate it) and blocking my fucking merge requests because I left an extra blank line, dangling comma or whatever the fuck else, he's like a human linter.

Dude, the code is a piece of shit, my dangling comma is not going to be the problem! And if you really care that much, setup a linter or something.

Fuck this, I'm quitting this week.

!dev

i think i need to control my emotions and expression around girls. things are going quite wrong and i am not sure i am able to interact with this beautiful gender correctly.

<misc: somewhat unrelated event. need to vent>

- got called out "a creep", "jerk", and "hypocrite" by this girl. she may be totally correct in calling me these but these words made me think about my behavior and therefore this post .

- characters? she: a friend of a friend, to whom i have met 3-4 times, in trips where we drank together, danced together nd talked till late night, among other people.
me : well me . based on previous allegations you can also label me as creep and hypocrite , but i would describe myself as an introvert, nerdy person who talks better on a keyboard than real life (otherwise i wouldn't be typing this post but whatever.)

- action : i made a comment on her insta story

- action details:
• we follow each other on insta. it was 12 am and i was in a half sleep state, scrolling the damn app before falling asleep
• saw her story with his 3 girl nd 2 guy cousins probably, so out of fun, replied her about how all of their specs look the same and if they all take out their specs from the same shop (cheeky comment, i know)
• she just erupted. from asking whether i also wanna buy from the same shop, to why am i talking to her, who gave you the right to compliment, jerk, hypocrite who can't talk in real life but compliments on keyboard, to creep and "stay away"
• I really wanted to say sorry at some point, but i kept making more cheeky comments in between. i was like , yeah she is my friend going through something and bursting her anger on me, she will come back and laugh, but she kept going towards hypocrite, jerk and finally stay away thing

• after that i knew i crossed the line and immediately got out of the conversation. i didn't apologize though.
• as of now am calm and don't mind the current situation of she being angry at a person who means nothing to her and me realising she is not a friend but a common connection . and till the time i was making cheeky comments, i saw her as my homie friend, so i am not bothered if she is angry
</misc>

I think i am a very needy person. i didn't have many friends in school time and i didn't had any relatives/cousins/siblings to get a lot of affection. a 25 yo horny virgin with no relationships till date does give a bad personality vibe from far, but keep in mind that i have mainly focused on personality growth and a conservative chsracter development my whole life. i do not act on my lonly feelings, but i try to be helpful and nice to everyone (which might be a suspicious/bad thing. just trying to defend my character, but feel free to judge)

every girl that talks nice with me, i get very helpful, nice and cheeky with them. most girls likes nd ignores these things, but some also get along, trust me and are willing to spend more time with me.

This makes me not only be more nice and cheeky with them but also start developing feelings for them and imagining my future/relation with them.

as of now i think there are 12 or 13 girls with whom i got into "vibing" (here, assume that vibing means me talking with them, cracking jokes nd compliments, meeting them alone ,etc. no adult stuff ofc), nd then after a few days told them directly or indirectly that i like them ( in a hope of getting some affection back i guess), getting rejected and still trying to keep the "friendship"

i think this needs to be changed. the people calling me creep, despo, perv , whatever might be correct in calling me those till now(based in my behavior) but i don't wanna be that.

i need to understand the girls might not want anything more than just a help at some point and then be done with it. I shouldn't be going out a limb and trying to get i to conversation/flirt/whatever.

i just am too emotional to let any person go away from my life just because our reason for interaction is over.
If I am commenting on a girl's post to whom i met on some trip, i will be commenting on a guy's post (to whom i met on a similar trip) too , in a similar manner,

if i see a post from one of my school's batchmates , and i find it nice/funny/weird, i will comment as if me and this batchmate met yesterday and not for 1 hr 10 years ago (irrespective of the gender)

and even after that if people are so intolerant, then maybe i am wrong and rather should start forgetting every person with whom i have spent less than 50 days alone.

hope this is the correct math and i could expect people with 50 days = 600+ hours of daytime to be enough to not see me as a stranger

I started applying for jobs. As I have over 150 repos on GitHub and 10 years of relevant work experience, the company obviously had trouble validating if I had some basic coding skills. That's why they decided to send me a coding "homework" task to build an app in React Native.

Basically, the task was building an app with 2 screens and one bonus where they indicated "doesn't need a UI". I spent half a day spinning up their project, installing XCode, their specific versions of Ruby, and around half a day building the thing.

Obviously, I wanted to demonstrate my technical skills, so I added a few tests, proper typing, comments, and so on. The project was in a good state, and on the "bonus" screen I quickly added a few components. Since I have a lot of things going on, I capped the amount of time to one day of work. I felt it was good enough to demonstrate I can build something like this.

A few days later, I received a response from the recruiter telling me they wouldn't move forward. She in depth explained that this was because of a missing key property. I did indeed miss one key property on the "bonus" screen, in the part that was not even part of the core task. This was a list of very few static elements, and the entire list only got rerendered when changing routes. Basically in this case, there would not be any visible performance impact.

The recruiter explained in the email that I was missing the eye for detail they need, and that I should "educate" myself more about lists in React. I made one tiny silly mistake in a one-day project, that a linter would've taken out (if this project had one). I've contributed to React Native myself and worked with React for almost 7 years now? Yeah, it's a stupid thing, but what is the point of these types of tasks? I thought this was to demonstrate my skillset, not to be called out on.

Either way, my question here is this: at which point does it become appropriate to send an invoice for the time I wasted on this?

Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.

But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.

This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.

I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)

So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.

If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.

My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️

I'm still studying computer science/programming, I still have one year to do in order to graduate (Master). I am in a work study program so I'm working for a company half of the time, and I'm studying the other half. It is important to mention that I am the only web developer of the company

When I arrived in the company 9 months ago, I was given a Vue project which had been developed by a trainee a few weeks before my arrival and I was asked to correct a few things, it was mostly about css. Then, I was ask to add a few functionalities, nothing really hard to code, and we were supposed to test the solution in a staging environment, and if everything was ok, deploy it to prod.

However, the more I did what I was asked, the more functionalities I had to implement, until I reached a point where I had to modify the API, create new routes, etc. I'm not complaining about that, that's my job and I like it. But the solution was supposed to be ready when I arrived, it was also supposed to be tested and deployed.

The problem is, the person emitting these demands (let's call him guy X) is not from the IT service, it's a future user of the website in the admin side. The demands kept going and going and going because, according to him, the solution was not in a good enough state to be deployed, it missed too many (un)necessary features. It kept going for a few months.

The best is yet to come though : guy X was obviously a superior, and HIS superior started putting pressure on me through mails, saying the app was already supposed to be in production and he was implying that I wasn't working fast enough. Luckily, my IT supervisor was aware of what was going on and knew I obviously wasn't to blame.

In the end, the solution was eagerly deployed in production, didn't go through the staging environment and was opened to the users. Now, guy X receives complaints because none of what I did was tested (it was by me, but I wasn't going to test every single little thing because I didn't have time). Some users couldn't connect or use this or that feature and I am literally drowning in mails, all from guy X, asking me to correct things because users are blocked and it's time consuming for him to do some of the things the website was doing manually.

We are here now just because things have been done in a rush, I'm still working on it and trying to fix prod problems and it's pissing me off because we HAVE a staging environment that was supposed to prevent me from working against the clock.

On a final note, what's funny is that the code I'm modifying, the pre-existing one needs to be refactored because bits and pieces are repeated sometimes 5 times where it should have been externalized and imported from another file. But I don't know when and if I will ever be able to do that.

I could have given more context but it's 4am and I'm kinda tired, sorry if I'm not clear or anything. That's my first rant

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

Curious what you guys think about the creator of Node.js saying that he does not think Node is the best tool for servers and that Go is a much better option.

For me at least, I think it is great that people like him become aware of the shortcommings of the technology they devised, but wonder if it is such a good move to say such things (even tho apparently he is not the head of the Node.js project anymore)

I have always been fascinated by Node and the whole JS ecosystem. I think it did wonders for JS developers and it pushed the whole JS experience to a whole new level, but I am also aware of the shortcommings of it just as I am of the other environments that I use.

So, what do you guys think about his statements? Would you consider investing time in Go as a Node developer? Do you think that it will be possible to do a switch or would you rather stay in and advance the state ot Node development?

For the one I currently have. Spent about 2 weeks looking to get as much of my PHP skillset in the right place since I knew PHP was their main technology as well as JS, C# and VB.NET, we seldom use them tbh, and it is mostly extension or maintenance stuff, so I focused on PHP.

I was not panicking, I rarely ever do, but my body tends to disagree with my state of mind and I can feel myself trembling in certain situations, such as the interview.

The interview was on Monday and my last day of preparation was Sunday (obviously) so what I did was drank a lot of beer and played videogames, I just wanted to take my mind off things. I was, and have always been annoyingly confident in myself and could not understand why I was feeling so nervous internally.

Everything went away when the manager came to greet me, lovely looking gal with an awesome sense of style and a big smile, we clicked instantly and to this day the place is kinda like my second home, as hectic as it is to work in an institution of this size it is really my peace and quiet zone. The entire I.T department is a big family, before the pandemic we would go to bbqs together all the time, would go to a friend's ranch to shoot shit and just chill, parties and gatherings, it really is a nice place to be at and they take the "we are family" very fucking seriously, I fucking love it. The boss lady ain't here no more, but she recommended me for the position and well, here I am.

I severely hope everyone here finds the same kind of place, there are a lot of assholes in this industry and a lot of places that seem very into the idea of making you absolutely miserable with no chance of leveling up, I know because all other jobs previous to this place was the same way for me.

Have faith, keep them chins up, and don't ever fucking let anyone make you think you are something you are not. You glorious beautiful basterds!

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

So a co-worker of mine contacted me for help in her project. I was in no mood to help as I hadn't slept properly the previous day. But she begged me to help, so I obliged just so I could get her off my back and catch some rest after 2 hours, or at least that's what I thought it would be. But here I am, 10 hours later, having just finished helping her in her project, and now I have a really bad headache, just waiting to go to sleep, but my brain is betraying me.

It was a project that uses Tryton framework (based on Python), which I sometimes feel is fucking inconsistent. Things won't work as expected most of the time. Her boss (my ex-boss) is a piece of shit, and he wanted the work by the next day (i.e. today). And nobody else (not even the boss, who would have gotten this work done in less than half the time had he helped her even a little bit) was ready to help, because they all hate her for being a slow learner. All I had to do was get some data in a particular format in a text file using the framework. But the amount of tries it took just to get the data in the text files cost around 2 hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. Then we had to take breaks in between for reasons. But due to my agitated state of mind, I couldn't sleep in those breaks. Then I had to spend time tinkering around with ljust and rjust to get the right amount of padding for the data, which took hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. And then Tryton kept throwing errors in between which took some time to fix. But we finally completed half the task, and I am off to sleep.

As I write, my co-worker is still awake completing the work her boss gave her. It's around 1:46am IST. HER BOSS IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

Fuck Google! I'm trying to write a fucking parential app that I can install on my little sisters phone, because I won't download something that is meant to monitor activity on a child's phone when I am capable of writing one. Problem is, I test it on my phone which has Android 10, because I am not keen on testing with a slowpoke out of wood brick that the target phone is. Android 10 does not let you do a single shit that is needed for a parential software. You try to turn on airplane mode to prevent messages from arriving and such? Well.... nope, you can't. Okay... airplane mode is too drastic. Let's try turning off WiFi and Data. Fuck me, you can't do that either. I gave the app fucking system permissions and It laughs in my face when I try to access some simple shit like... WiFi state. Miserable. I wonder if it will let me mute the fucking volume on the phone. I guess It won't, because "You shouldn't set these things on a user's phone.". Well, fuck that. That's exactly what I need. That old brick does not have built in parental settings. Jesus.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Every day I try to show something new or cool to the people in my team. Not with the purpose of using it, more like to show them the current state of options and cool things to study. Yesterday it was clojure and clojurescript as well as regent. Which even tho I am not a master or even proficient at either....well I just wanted to show them. Lisp is very whiteboard friendly, so after I finished writing shit on the board this was the lead developer's reaction:

Lol this is fun.

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

Is it racist to don an Indian accent when an Indian scammer calls you?

I got a local call from South West airlines with a guy that had an Indian accent. Sure, local to my state. Bullshit. I was tired and didn't feel like fucking with him. Probably should have to keep him from scamming someone else.

After the call I started thinking of things to say in and Indian accent. Maybe next time I will mess with them.

Starting a new project, and learning to work with a new robot. But I'm living in a state of anxiety, so I'm also in a state of mental paralysis rn. Why do I ruin the best things I get in life by just being an anxious mess? 😑

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

why is it everybody wants to hire a head of a department all the time

like that's just super weird to me

wouldn't it make more sense to hire someone into a lower position, have them learn from head of a department, then get promoted because you know they'll head the department to your standards then?

but most posts want you to already be head of a department... and it's like, I don't know your department. what the hell happened to the last head of department? why do so many people need heads of department? why the hell are they choosing to get them from outside the company?

somehow none of this makes any sense to me
like I'm literally just so confused why people hire seniors and expect them to automatically know the way the company does things
it just literally doesn't make sense

promote your underlings? then hire more underlings to sus them out?
WHY ARE YOU HIRING SENIOR STAFF FROM OUTSIDE YOUR COMPANY, LITERALLY NOBODIES, AND GIVING THEM TONS OF AUTONOMY AND CONTROL OVER OTHERS IN YOUR COMPANY, THATS SO CONFUSING

worse yet I hear most people just lie when they apply so it's like... are you rotating irresponsible lying people through senior positions at your company over and over again, as they attrition your underlings and eventually get fired for incompetence?

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THIS ECOSYSTEM

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

IDK man, it took me a while to finally learn iptables and now switch to firewalld? Oh come on. It's not that I'm against learning new things, no. It's just that firewalld looks a bit.. crappy. If I get a server provisioned and run

firewall-cmd --add-port=53/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

and I get my ssh connection killed that's no good news, no sir! I mean come on, how can I rely on a tool this critical when a single line in its config file can make my machine inaccessible. Even better -- this config file is managed by that tool entirely!!! My commands passed all the tool's checks and they worked, but when I wanted to make those commands permanent and reload state from the config -- the tool starts spitting bile and blood and says "fuck off, it's my server now!"

IDK man.. It's just way too fishy. The good ol' iptables works very well and I'm kicking its retard younger brother out of the server.

shoosh you dirty pig firewalld, shoosh!

Me and the lead developer of my team gave a long and detailed explanation to our manager entailing the current state of a budge program our workplace uses.

This app has been bugging him for a while, he did not write it and has not been given an opportunity to rewrite the damned thing. Its a really...really messy application, and whilst it is a functional one it most certainly is NOT an efficient one since adding or moving things only incites more spaghetti mess.

We were laughing while giving our report, but both of us were crying inside. The main thing is, we both love PHP and the things he has built are very well structured and efficient, he has good technique, but will admit at certain caveats regarding the way he structures his dbs stating that he always has to do changes, which hey, its the nature of the beast, dbs change all the time. But our issue with php is the same: it lets beginners write monstruosities that are harder to do in other environments.

It really is a permissive language. But I reckon thay such lax nature is better left at the hands of the more experieced developers that know what they are doing.

Either way, we will restructure this motherfucker taking advantage of the new standards (which both of us are well versed in) and applying a more structured approach with a nice frontend interface (we be looking at Vue.js and React although we are considering Angular as well)

Gon be some good times.

Project leader did no work on our project (mainly due to not knowing how to do it), so he dealt with the problem by asking me to explain the entire infrastructure and setup to him five minutes before our call with the Director where he attempted to state all the things that "we" had done.

After his spiel of detail-less crap I explained exactly what was going on, and how I had done it, and the Director seemed far more interested to speak to me.

I'm an intern and the PL has been there full-time for over a year.

I said "I think that meeting went pretty well! He seems happy" after the call and was totally ignored 😂

Intern 1 - 0 Lazy, patronising, rude full-time employee.

TL;DR: If you do fuck all, let the person speak who knows the project inside-out; don't try and get in there first or the hard worker will then go into way more detail than you under to prove their worthiness!

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

This is PART 2/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering course years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 6: After the previous drama MT built the groundwork for the project without allowing us to intervene for a week. When he finally disclosed his code he gave us tasks and I was stuck unable to run the new project, due to the friction with MT I asked SR for help which took a couple of days. MT accused us of not wanting to work and claimed he’d just do everything himself. I continued working on the task improving MT’s code and committed the work, which surprised MT and told me I didn’t have to do it. He ended up complimenting my code and complained less about me as a result.

Rant 7: MT kept giving SR flak for not working and took him out of the repo, which I promptly forked just in case he tried anything scummy. SR was indeed working on certain things, but he wasn’t listening to MT’s demands, there was no team coordination. I had to act as a proxy and push some of SR’s changes myself while informing him of the state of things.

Rant 8: When MT finally added SR back and some of the tasks were cleared up, FT didn’t cooperate. She seemed to have zero initiative and always relied on MT to tell her what to do, which didn’t include coordinating with SR to get the front-end templates running. I tried getting them in a group chat but it didn’t work, she just ignored him.

I learned a few things from that.
1. No matter how smart or experienced someone may seem, sometimes people are just petty or take things too personally.
2. Top students are sometimes too focused on their grades and disregard depth of knowledge and work quality.
3. A bad team at college can somehow make something acceptable if everyone works on things that add some kind of value.

So I salvaged some computer that was about to be thrown out by IT because it works perfectly fine and would be a waste to lose.

The (current) problem is, there is no built-in wi-fi adapter so I had to order a usb adapter to plug into the machine.
Fortunately enough it supports Linux but cones with a cd with the _source_ of the driver in it and we are supposed to build it. Now what's the problem with that?

First problem: building needs all sorts of build tools, starting from gcc and make. Since it's a fresh install, though, I _cannot_ install those normally because -- you guessed it -- I don't have a WiFi connection, which is why I needed the bloody adapter in the first place, so I spent hours trying to fetch the binaries from the apt register using another computer and bringing them over via USB.

Once that was (more or less) successful, the next problem came around; Second problem: the instructions clearly state to run make, but there is no fucking makefile anywhere so that obviously fails spectacularly. What _is_ there are some bash scripts so I try running those.

Now, just when I think it's finally done (one of the scripts has been running for a while and seems to work) the compiler dies with an error: the fucking driver won't build for the current kernel version. And not just that, but it is clear nobody is using basic things like include guards because gcc kept screaming at me about the same macros being defined over and over due to header file re-inclusion. Like, seriously? Come on!

Long story short the fucking adapter is going back to the seller, let's see if the next one I order more civilized.

Ok finally, I can tell now.

There's a college project I'm in with 2 more people that uses Python and AnyLogic (separately).
We also need to write some LaTeX, so as I was already using PyCharm for the Pyshit, I used it for the LaTeX and for Git.
I used it for Git too because I didn't know how it used Git and was worried that if I used the console it didn't recognize something or glitched out or something. And what the hell, it's a mature IDE, what could be so hard or possibly go wrong?

I had to re download the repo a couple of times because between pushes, pulls, merges and commits something happened and the repo ended in a weird state.
These are all the things I do:
Add, commit, create branches, merge, push, pull and delete branches.

So, I hadn't opened in some time. The last time I tried to bring something from another branch, and stayed up late to finish something. I was waiting for my classmates to join the call when I thought something like "Hey, I should commit what I did until now, it worked great.". When I examined the IDE I found out I was in the middle of a rebase or something. I start clicking buttons to at least try to commit. I press "Skip Commit". I lose everything.

What the fuck‽ As you can see in the comprehensive list above, I never do something similar to a rebase. Apparently when I tried to merge a couple of branches, the stupid IDE thought I tried to do a rebase and never asked me to finish it. Why do something I have never asked? Plus, why haven't you prompted me to finish the operation? That's so stupid. I'm never trusting IDEs again.
I was so lit for losing so many hours of work I did a couple of weeks before, I would have to think it and do it all over again because of something I never asked.

We spent an hour looking for a way to recover the lost code.
Why an hour, you ask, if you can use the Local History for that in PyCharm?
Because none of us had used it before and the articles we found said that you had to open it from the toolbar. From the toolbar it was greyed out.
Then I found the option in the contextual menu of the files. Recovered the LaTeX files but on the AnyLogic files, it was greyed out.
I had to open the Local History of the folder containing the AnyLogic file.
And that was that.

I almost faint.
Fuck Python, fuck PyCharm.

META-LUCK: A Pseudo-Ontology Of An Authentic Future

* * *

I think in the not-to-distant future we will abandon the idea of authenticity (messaging, corporate responsibility, ethos) in favor of other factors, such as cost. We won't abandon it and replace it with fakeness, so much as realize
that we don't, as a society favor it at all, not in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense like in relation to things like cost.

We will either abandon authenticity entirely, or alternatively, transition to a world where authenticity is the highest valued quality, being adjacent to truth.

Heres why. Authenticity, like all social qualities, can be 1. mimicked, 2. simulated,
or 3. emulated.

In the first case, a corporation, product, leader, organization, or other, apes authenticity simply by its knowable, external features. It mimics the sounds, like a jungle bird copying a jack hammer to scare away predators or attract mates.
There is no understanding, let alone model, external or internal. The successful mimic
is little more than a lifeless, unthinking puppet.

In the second case, the attempted authentic simulates authenticity: That is, an external
model is formed, or pattern, that is predictable, and archetypal. It may have an internal
model even, a set of policies and processes for deciding the external-facing behavior.
But these policies and internal processes and models are all strictly outward facing. It is purely pathological in its goal, desiring only at minimum to achieve *externally attribute* authenticity (public opinion) rather than those internal changes that generate the true perception of the public--a perception not of surface behaviors and shrewd calculating policies and processes, but as a quality of authenticity for its own sake. This is in some sense the difference between the mundane and the atavistic, that the benefit, while not definable strictly, is assumed as a 'matter of course', culturally, within the organization or individual or company. It is to say, a *quality* of the thing, that *generates* outputs of a certain character and nature, rather than a *goal* that is attained 'after-the-fact' by behaviors generated for *other* than being authentic.

Here we reach the limitation of definitions.

Finally, we arrive at the case of number three, the emulation. We have in part already described it, but lets try and summarize a bit.

The Authentic is an *originator* of behavior and outward appearances, being an internal quality of a person or organization. It originates behavior, rather than being the goal of behavior and outward appearances.

Its benefit is assumed, though not always nameable or definable, even though this sounds naive, superseding other factors like cost and profit. As such the authentic does not emerge in a cost-focused environment, not readily, not often, and not cheaply either.

It is in some sense an experimental state of being, of goal-seeking only after-the-fact of "being true to ones origins" is established above and beyond those goals--setting and achieving only those goals which ultimately align with the origin and intent of the authentic.

Acer vs MSI Laptops.

Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...

When testing things..

Product Description: Expensive Imported Turkish Pen

Product Image: A bag of Snickers

The "asdfghsjgllhdk" text doesn't look very appealing.

Ugh, don't even get me started on the state of modern communication! It's like we're living in a world where everyone's attention span has been replaced by a goldfish. I mean, seriously, have you noticed how people can't seem to put down their phones for more than two seconds? It's like we're all addicted to this constant stream of mindless information, and it's driving me insane!

And don't even get me started on social media. It's a breeding ground for narcissism and superficiality. Everyone's so busy curating their perfect online personas that they've completely lost touch with reality. Likes, shares, and comments have become the currency of self-worth, and it's just pathetic.

And don't get me started on influencers. What exactly are they influencing, anyway? A generation of kids who think the height of success is being Insta-famous for doing absolutely nothing? It's a joke! We're valuing the wrong things in society, and it's messing with our priorities.

And let's talk about the sheer amount of misinformation out there. It's like we're drowning in a sea of fake news and alternative facts. Critical thinking seems to be a rare commodity these days, and people are just swallowing whatever narrative fits their preconceived notions. It's infuriating!

Oh, and let's not forget the endless stream of notifications. I miss the days when you could go for a walk without being bombarded by a constant barrage of beeps and vibrations. Can't we just have some peace and quiet for once?

I swear, if I have to endure another conversation where someone is more interested in their phone than what I'm saying, I'm going to lose it. We're losing touch with the real, meaningful connections that make life worthwhile, all in the name of technological progress. It's time for a reality check, people!

!dev

I hate every private package delivery service!
I ordered two things from the same shop. The first delivery came on Monday and because I wasn't home I got a notice which said I have to get the package from the pickup shop right around the corner. So far, so good.
Second delivery should come on Wednesday. I wasn't home again, so I got a notice to get the delivery from the pick up store....30 MINUTES AWAY!
Because the delivery should be quite heavy, I organized a friend with a car to help me.
At the pickup store I I got the package and it wasn't as heavy as I expected.
At home I opened the package and noticed that stuff is missing. In my order email a discovered, that there should be two package.
Slightly pissed off I drove back to the pickup store to get the other package, but it wasn't there.
Because the the delivery guy brought it to another pickup store...30 MINUTES AWAY IN THE OPOSITE DIRECTION OF MY HOME! WITHOUT A NOTICE!
And of course the shop was closed at this time :[
This wasn't the first time stuff like this happened with private delivery services. I cannot understand why people are ranting about the state postal service and prefer those private companys.

The website was down.

She called me 5 or 6 times and mailed me twice that amount, asking how long it would take to get back up. Each time I answered that I did not know, that it was my job to figure out what was wrong, and that solving a problem doesn't have a fixed duration.

What I thought was that the updates on her emotional state of regret were not helping me to resolve the issue and cost me time. Why do people inflate the price of things they are going to pay for by asking for what cannot be known?

In the end it was just a shitty shared host having flipped some switches. It was their own damn fault for picking it over our recommended provider that keeps us informed about all them switches. Such as disallowing SymLinks overnight.

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

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

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

The level of stupid is too damned high.

Friends asked me to help him fix a few bugs on a website, i have seen some interesting things in my day, but if I ever met the dev who built this site, throwing him off the empire state building would be a kindness.

For some unknown effing reason, this blithering moron thought it a good idea that the logo only appears when the users are logged in, not only that, but touching the hamburger menu button ALSO only works if logged in, at least the twat waddle could have hidden it way, but no, just makes it non-functional.

IDIOT.

Exploit development is a really great topic.
The best decision I have made so far.
I tried to do that sort of thing 8-10 years ago, but that was the script kiddie me... To that comes that that my attention span was very low. That is showing the state of my low will power.

You really got to hang in there to go further.
Without extreme will power, you simply won't make it. You will become very frustrated. That's normal. Just never give up on it. Keep retrying. In the end it pays out.
It has a steep learning curve, but in the end you learn so many fricking things.

Manager getting snippy with me coz one of the 2 urgent things I'm currently working on hasn't been deployed. This is on top of the outstanding changes to the last 3 urgent projects I worked on that have been deployed in a working but imperfect state, the urgent thing I got distracted by and the urgent thing that's next for me to work on.

Someone got a "this is fine" pic?

For whatever reason my Nvidia card is not showing my desktop after a reinstall. I've installed the drivers, ran the xconfig script, and even manually gone in there and edited things. It still won't boot.

This is why the state of Linux needs to get better.

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

Screw Joomla. And screw the agency that put together these sites. I'm almost impressed, I can only assume from the state of things that whoever worked on them has successfully created multiple websites by smashing their face into the keyboard and hoping for the best.

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

Went on this 2 day business show...

Next to me a 100 inch tv... 4k quite awesome jittery video at points ? Codec or cable is wrong...

What was on the right of my stand ... To the cake.

"How to make money online"

He proceeded to state things like I now have 20mill my dream car etc ...
*Me trying not to laugh\be disgusted*

His power point ... Well a 10 year old can do better looks built in 1995

People were buying into it ! How the fuck does someone who has apparently 20mill give such a shit design to people and they listen...

I seriously wanted to go on and say... Don't listen to this fraud this, piece of shit snake oil salesmen.

But I didn't... And.. I regret it. On the bright side ... My stand had the shortest setup in the whole place bet by far the best websites!

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

!Rant

Not sure where else to ask but here, as I am an unsocial creature; But I need new music!

My general favourite type of music is anything from any of the wipeout games, 90s techno style, think of the backing music from the film Hackers, and that's pretty much my vibe 90% of the time.

You guys got any suggestions? I can't be the only one here into deep techno/progressive industrial techno whatever you can call it I am really unsure!

things like:
prodigy, 808 state, wipeout style, possibly borderline on keygen/chiptune type music depending how its done

Thanks guys! *hug*

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

Okay so, I’ve recently started going through our products’ security postures and their teams’ related practices and processes. I knew things were in a bad state, but I have to admit I’m a bit anxious at how bad things are… and it’s not like nobody cared or anything, quite the opposite; the teams are quite motivated about cyber sec. It’s just that they don’t know what the fuck to do and where to start even if they did.

Okay, that’s my job to figure out the roadmap to improving their security posture and processes and help them implement it. If it wasn’t bad enough that there’s half a dozen products whose cyber sec roadmaps I need to prioritise and manage somehow, I heard this week that due to some organisational rearrangements, the number of products under my stern guidance will nigh on double at some point very soon…

I need a team. Give me a team.

Love going to out-of-state programming courses on the company dollar!! Went to Germany, Denver, and Rochester, NY for Codesys training. Hate PLC programming but it's fun traveling and learning new things.

think I had my first burnout

so exciting

I couldn't sleep last night and obsessively worked all day. couldn't pay attention during dinner / relaxing before sleep with people. everyone went to bed, I didn't. ended up getting up and working then trying to sleep, repeat, like 6 times. morning came, neighbours running saws and shit, eventually slept 2 hours then 1.5 hours, if even. then worked more. good morning. fuckit. then got really pissed at everything for like 4 hours and wanted to be left alone any time a person got close to me, BUT KEPT WORKING, stressing. until I realized holy shit I'm fucking miserable

now I think I'm crashing

IM SO EXCITED. I've never been so obsessed about my own incompetence at something before. I've never had this. this leads me to believe all burnout is due to people trying to fight their incompetence maybe?
people always tell me I work too much and all that but I never understood cuz I like it. maybe this is what they meant though. in which case I'm mad at all of them for incorrectly identifying my emotional state in the past grrrrr. cuz they'd use that as an excuse to rope me into doing things I didn't even find enjoyable because supposedly it was "good for me" but I thought it was fucking lame. fucking hell

People always say thet you should not quit your job before you have the next job lined up, but what if you plan to do freelance? This is my dilemma.

A bit of context (rant).

My current job is my first official job. Small company, VERY HIGH staff turnover rate. I have been here for 2 and a half years. My commute on a good day is < 20 mins, and money is relatively good.

During the last 6 months, all devs above me resigned, which lead to the system maintenance being passed on to the few devs left. Our biggest system is a legacy system (Windows CE), and new clients are actively signed up and new features requested. The codebase is not even worthy of being called spaghetti, changes break every client, I need to wash my hands every couple of minutes. Seriously, I would rather maintain obfuscated code. It is like a bunch of highschoolers wrote the system, though I think they would have done a better job.

Management is nice and understanding, but the state of the codebase is killing the spirits.

I fill my nights and weekends moonlighting to keep my mind off of the 'daymares' at work. I have never been a team player, and thrive on my own. I have been thinking quiting and going full freelance/contract the last couple of months. Should things not work out, I can always go job hunting (see issue in par. 1)

Not my 'first' but the first outside of stupid little toy projects.

I got an internship back in 2016 while I was in 11th grade. Mine was sort of a college doing community outreach, so yeah, not really impressive of an internship.

But my manager handed me a Micro:Bit. At the time, there were like 1000 in the U.S. the U.K. was brainstorming, including them in school curriculums. My manager just told me to experiment and see what I could do with it.

Minimal requirements Minimal guidance outside of ideas now and then (he had doctorate students to manage so I get it lol), so I started just doing stupid small things with the micro python, the language the minimal back then documentation reccomended, like a 'lowest of poly' crazy taxi thing.

But by the end, I hacked together some HORRIBLY written C++ to get 2 of them to communicate. 1 always powered and gets a state from the other at regular intervals. The other is powered by a hand crank and sending the direction of the crank to the other.

I forget what the end goal was. But it was fun to learn, and thinking back, I did a lot in just 8 weeks

My manager gave me the first Micro:Bit on my last day. I don't do anything with it anymore. But it's a fun memory.

It was also around that time I found DevRant and needed you guys to knock my ego down a few pegs when my head over inflated, lol.

My power supply project is almost completely done (it's in a working state but still needs some finishing touches) but I procrastinated with it for nearly 2 weeks. The reason being that the next step (making a side panel and soldering some 3600W AC lines to the ones inside of the unit) fucking sucks. I've done that soldering of 4 wires (3 inside lines, 1 coming in from the outside) before, and I honestly can't think of many things that I've cursed and sworn on as frantically as I did on this. This time of course being no different, plus some unstoppable coughing and stuffed nose, just because my body felt like acting up. Can't say that I had a good time.

But that's not really the point of this.. it's more about the procrastination part. It isn't really procrastination as in just being too lazy to get around doing something, is it? It's more like the reluctance to do something that you know is going to suck really bad. And even now I've only quarter-assed it (well probably half-assed, quarter-assed would've been the crocodile wires between the inner and outer AC lines.. just dangling on the floor, waiting for someone to step on.. beautifully dangerous, deadly almost.. just the way I like it :3)... Anyway, how do you get the "umpf" to do something that you really dislike and don't want to do, without waiting for 2 weeks to finally get around doing it?

Cool project, cool people, but everything-just-works™ code makes it hard.

Every component has its own logic for the things that are already made, every table has its own filters and those filters are the same piece of code in every component.

I'll complain about this shit tomorrow as today I spent my day making a fucking table work, can't even copy the shit as it has its own intertangled logic that doesn't make any fucking sense.

Yesterday I ate Bolognese, today I'm working in one.

Lol the funniest thing Iis that dude who wrote this piece of shit is gonna review my code, can't wait for that call.

And yeah useMemo() on every fucking function. Functions pulling shit directly from state and returning it straight away...

Literally this:

const filteredData = useMemo(() => { return stateData }, [stateData])

Ok, what the actual fuck.

The weirdest wtf was that typescript is used as it should, like every case covered correctly. Not sure if gpt or just dumbasses working on this pos.

really surprised Gatorade isn't sued because it actually basically has no electrolytes in it and it wouldn't rehydrate you

but it's known for it, it advertises it on the damned bottle
but it has no goddamned electrolytes (or rather the things we consider electrolytes when humans say you need more electrolytes)

because citric acid "can conduct electricity" it has electrolytes!

but you specifically need potassium, magnesium, sodium, calcium 😒

they do have some sodium and a TEEEENY totally insignificant amount of potassium. and a SHITTON of instant sugar.

I impulse bought some on a sale because my blood pressure was so bad I was gonna drop at the hospital which were unhelpful twats, and it helped I think simply because I was in such such such a bad state (and the doctors just telling me I'm pregnant instead of checking me was pretty fucked up, too), but to restore balance to my body I need something else that doesn't give me fucking diabetes because it "rehydrates" wtf

and citric acid fuck who knows what happens to that. it has no potassium, magnesium, sodium, or calcium molecules in it. which I figured maybe it got decomposed into them but nada

I was at the pharmacy and spotted a bottle specifically claiming "electrolytes" right beside the pharmists and it similarly had no actual electrolytes and instead citric acid and a bunch of weird flavouring shit. how can these people sell this garbage. humanity is disgusting. they should be sued

I have an interest in methods to make myself smarter. At times some ideas seem to be just out of my reach. I don't always know the reason why. Eventually with persistence I am able to figure things out. However, I always wonder if there are techniques to learn things faster, better, more completely, with less struggle, etc. Would being smarter help with this. I wondered, "Can I create a program/method to increase IQ through training?"

So I found an interesting book called "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard J. Haier.
Very quickly I was engrossed in this book. It is written in a very accessible way and slowly trickles in the jargon. The book is basically the culmination of 40 years of studying the subject. The main point of the book is: you cannot increase your IQ through techniques and tricks. The only realistic avenue for increasing IQ is through genetics. Your IQ is based upon nature, not nurture. This is a result of the data, not opinion. The writer of this book follows what the science is telling him. This was not what I wanted to hear. He also went on to explain that the statement "You can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough." He said this is false. Some people, no matter how hard they try, will not be able to get past certain limitations in aptitude. This statement will probably make a lot of people mad, but the data led this researcher to this conclusion. Though I sense he found this disheartening (my opinion). I know I did.

So after reading this book over the weekend I am a bit perturbed that there are not recognizable techniques to increase IQ through mental exercises. Websites all over will say otherwise, but it isn't a thing.

What to do? I decided I am going to find ways to maximize my potential. I will create a set of mental exercises that help me use what I got to the full potential. I know when I see different ways to think about things I get a bit better at solving problems. So learning and experience is still a way to improve your intellect, if not IQ. If I feel like I have made progress in this endeavor I will definitely share.

If you have any interest in neuroscience then I recommend the book I read this weekend. It is very accessible for the reader not versed in the subject. I knew virtually nothing about the topic and now I feel I have a good grounding in the state of the art. It has some neat info on some potentially better approaches to AI as well.

F U browser vendors!

Why is it, that we have specifications for HTML, JS, CSS, etc and we have browsers for more, than 10 years now AND THEY STILL CANNOT MAKE SOMETHING CONSISTENT THROUGHOUT EVERY PLATFORM!

An event is not being triggered somewhere? No problemo. An extra event there? Nay, still okay. Inconsistent state for the same operation on different platforms? Cool, simply cool!

But instead of fixing these shitty things, they introduce bullshit on top of this, like a media element requiring a user interaction to be able to play content.

Spent 4 fucking weeks trying to implement this motherfucking feature and in the end after 15 failed implementations it turns out that my first implementation was good. Turns out this other devs fucking feature had a bug (he forgot to add two lines to clear current state and to update current state again). Motherfucker.

Took me over 100 hours to debug that piece of shiet spaghetti codebase and I had to go through grief stages few times to the point where I started questioning my own damn ability

Sometimes it sucks not being able to go step by steap and think in a linear way. I guess if I followed the breadcrumbs I would have solved it sooner. But poking around things and trying out random solutions was like going through a maze blindfolded until I got it right but I guess thats how my brain works.

Running a small company. All of us work from home. I am a designer and coder in one person, but now mostly taking care of cash flow, work done etc., while I have my dear girlfriend as only designer and an old friend as only front/backend developer. We are doing mainly small presentation websites on drupal, and a lot of webdesign.

Now I want to ask more experienced devs here. As the "main guy" I am responsible for everything running smooth with clients, money flow etc. But I am constantly running in a serious problem with my developer.
He most of the time gets the job done. But it is as fucked as possible. It looks good at the first view, but when you check the code... Oh god. Not only once he wrote me he did the job and when I checked it, it was like 50 percent done and rest was let untouched. He is using the oldest approaches in css as possible. Most of the time setting fixed widths even when I told him not to do so. Thing is, he knows how to do it properly, but he rather set the fixed width for all the devices than write something more scalable (imagine fixed width buttons, now imagine a website with 5 translations and now imagine how it behaves on mobile phones).

I want to be in a state where my dev writes me he did the job and I can INSTANTLY pass the changes to client with a trust of good done work. Without checking constantly all the work after him. Or it is normal and it works like that everywhere?

As to mention, I think he is pretty good paid and this is not money problem. It even does not look like he is demotivated or anything. When I speak to him it looks more like he is lazy to learn new things and lazy to do a good work. What would you suggest? Thanks

Started adding new MVC project to main solution at work. Started getting assembly reference errors across the projects during testing. Figured I might as while update the few assemblies that are complaining instead of trying to downgrade to maintain the current state of things. Shouldn't take too long right?....8 hours of staring at configs and running and rerunning nuget commands to get all the versions lined up across 120 projects....thank God we have extensive unit and integration tests...

Chinese remainder theorem

So the idea is that a partial or zero knowledge proof is used for not just encryption but also for a sort of distributed ledger or proof-of-membership, in addition to being used to add new members where additional layers of distributive proofs are at it, so that rollbacks can be performed on a network to remove members or revoke content.

Data is NOT automatically distributed throughout a network, rather sharing is the equivalent of replicating and syncing data to your instance.
Therefore if you don't like something on a network or think it's a liability (hate speech for the left, violent content for the right for example), the degree to which it is not shared is the degree to which it is censored.

By automatically not showing images posted by people you're subscribed to or following, infiltrators or state level actors who post things like calls to terrorism or csam to open platforms in order to justify shutting down platforms they don't control, are cut off at the knees. Their may also be a case for tools built on AI that automatically determine if something like a thumbnail should be censored or give the user an NSFW warning before clicking a link that may appear innocuous but is actually malicious.

Server nodes may be virtual in that they are merely a graph of people connected in a group by each person in the group having a piece of a shared key.
Because Chinese remainder theorem only requires a subset of all the info in the original key it also Acts as a voting mechanism to decide whether a piece of content is allowed to be synced to an entire group or remain permanently.

Data that hasn't been verified yet may go into a case for a given cluster of users who are mutually subscribed or following in a small world graph, but at the same time it doesn't get shared out of that subgraph in may expire if enough users don't hit a like button or a retain button or a share or "verify" button.

The algorithm here then is no algorithm at all but merely the natural association process between people and their likes and dislikes directly affecting the outcome of what they see via that process of association to begin with.

We can even go so far as to dog food content that's already been synced to a graph into evolutions of the existing key such that the retention of new generations of key, dependent on the previous key, also act as a store of the data that's been synced to the members of the node.

Therefore remember that continually post content that doesn't get verified slowly falls out of the node such that eventually their content becomes merely temporary in the cases or index of the node members, driving index and node subgraph membership in an organic and natural process based purely on affiliation and identification.

Here I've sort of butchered the idea of the Chinese remainder theorem in shoehorned it into the idea of zero knowledge proofs but you can see where I'm going with this if you squint at the idea mentally and look at it at just the right angle.

The big idea was to remove the influence of centralized algorithms to begin with, and implement mechanisms such that third-party organizations that exist to discredit or shut down small platforms are hindered by the design of the platform itself.

I think if you look over the ideas here you'll see that's what the general design thrust achieves or could achieve if implemented into a platform.

The addition of indexes in a node or "server" or "room" (being a set of users mutually subscribed to a particular tag or topic or each other), where the index is an index of text audio videos and other media including user posts that are available on the given node, in the index being titled but blind links (no pictures/media, or media verified as safe through an automatic tool) would also be useful.