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

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

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

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

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

It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

The Top 20 replies by programmers when their programs do not work:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"

And the Number One reply by programmers when their programs don't work:

1. "It works on my machine."

After a little I'm having huge issues with my new phone. No custom ROMs available.

Fuck this shit I'm going to try to port another Mediatek based ROM to my phone tonight.

I'd rather get a bricked device than working with this piece of shit vendor made android system.

The phone itself other the the software is very good though!

Umidigi programmers, go fuck yourselves.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

When I was in school I had some guys walk up to me and asked:

G: Are you Feeno?
Me: Yes, what's up?
G: We need our FY project on school management system done.
Me: Okay?
G: How much will that cost us?
Me: *confused because I was still a freshman. At that point the only programming language I knew was elementary qbasic. I couldn't even write a hello world program without the help of Google*
So played along because yes we're talking about money here.

Me: It will cost you guys N amount of money (*improvised deep voice*).
G: Okay. Fair price.
* Right there they transferred half the requested amount to me. *
Holy moly! This guys aren't joking around. I don't know shit! They clearly mistook me for a senior student whose first name is Feeno, to me that was a nick referred to me by my friends.

I'm in this one for sure and it's a do or die transaction cus I'm returning no fucking money. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted I return back the money to the students and admit I can't deliver the project they were requesting.
Fuck all of yah! I'm keeping this money. Same afternoon I visited the school library with the intension of writing the code using the help of YouTube tutorials. I didn't find anything useful for qbasic as I thought I could write a full fledged school management system using qbasic.

I was lucky enough to find an existing source code on Codeproject, God bless that Indian guy. The source was in PHP and the tutor gave a step by step guide to setup XAMP and MySQL. I really don't know PHP but I guess source code modification is a natural skill to all programmers as I was able to modify the code to meet the requirements of the students (i.e school name, logo and other minor changes).

Most of what I learnt in programming came from modifying the source of that project. I learnt how to connect a PHP source to a MySQL database, I learnt about functions and their usage, I learnt the basics of HTML, I really learnt a lot and I would say that the speed at which I learnt was proportional to the amount of pressure I received to deliver.

That was how my journey as a full stack developer started. By chance maybe.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

A motto for programmers who wanna think out of the box:

1. Fuck the system
2. Elevate
3. And fuck the rest 😉

Tooday
Movie sucks
Games sucks
Most programmers sucks
Buying a house sucks
Try to get a grocery under 200$ for nothing sucks
Have child with no future other then capitalisme sucks
Friends that don't take any news in 8 years sucks
Have a girlfriend that don't sucks sucks
Buying pricey shit and thinking i will survive at least 10 years and broke after 3 years with warranty sucks
All social platforms sucks ( other then devrant)
Working for a shit salairy and doing everyone jobs sucks
Lossing mind about idiots in our world sucks
My english sucks
You sucks
My water heater sucks
My landlord sucks
My budget sucks
My old 16 years old bike i use to go work sucks
Government sucks
House builder sucks at 80%
Bank fuck you everytime sucks
Taxes for any service sucks
Medical system in canada sucks
Educational system in canada sucks

Goes on each day i realize something sucks...

After three hours of emailing with a customer I can confirm that programmers are the worst customers.
Customer: We've found a bug in the system... <details>
Me: Thank you for letting us know, a ticket has been created and the issue is most likely to be fixed in the next release.
Customer: Please grant me UPDATE privileges in the live(!) database so I can fix it myself
Me: I cannot allow that. You have to use the client software for maintaining your data.
Customer: No, I don't want to spend my day clicking. I want to write queries.

We didn't reply to the last one yet...
If we give him access, then I would charge them at least 3x for fixing issues caused by him.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

Being a programmer is basically like seeing all the cool tech that you always wanted to work with slip right out of your fucking hands and being replaced by an old system that bad programmers have managed to fuck up completely beyond saving. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys trying to create a human out of decaying flesh, but when you question them, they look at you weird. It’s like wanting to create all these crazy cool animations and innovative experiences, but you end up spending most of your time trying to get a fucking image to line up correctly in marketing emails. My pride has been stripped from me.

Code FUCKING Rape!!! that kids is when companies throw lots of creative and talented programmers / coders / developers at a system and say FIX IT!

Absolutely the best quote from Tao Of Programming...

A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"

The Master replied: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao."

This weekly is getting really popular with so many rants coming in.
Shows the extent to which real coders/programmers/developers are tormented by the incompetent education system.
Here is my two cents:
Students should be taught to build their logic on paper before jumping on to their keyboards.

I'm sorry but Laravel is for brainless programmers who wants to be spoon feed all the time.

Laravel is maybe fast to develop and easy to understand but its only because it is poorly designed/written.

That damn Eloquent, if misuse by ignorant or amateur programmer, will definitely bring a disaster to the whole system.

Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.

Fucking shit for brains authors that think the digital world is a fantasy realm where everything can happen just to aid their story. Out of boredom i watched "scorpion" today, a tv series about a group of geniusses which are a special case task force.
They got a visitor from the government saying the servers from the federal reserve bank were encrypted with ransomware. I already twitched when they said the economic system would collapse if the servers were left inoperational for a few days. Then one guy got to his desk and "hacked" the fed network to check... he then tried to remove the malware but "it changed itself when observed". But they got the magical fingerprint of the device that uploaded it. In the end some non-programmers created the malware, but it is super fast and dangerous because it runs on a quantum computer which makes it hyper fast and dangerous. They got to the quantum computer which was a glowing cube inside another cube with lasers going into it and they had to use mirrors to divert the lasers to slow down that quantum thingy. And be careful with that, otherwise it explodes. In the end the anti-malware battled the malware and won, all in a matter of minutes.

This is a multimillion hollywood production. How can a movie this abusive to computer science even air on television? Shit like this is the reason people still think the cyberworld is some instable thing that can explode any second. It's not, it's an instable thing that can break down any second. I remember "ghost in the wires" and people had surreal imaginations about the internet already. Shit like this is why people stay dumb and think everything can be done in seconds. If i ever should encounter one of these idiots i tell him i have an app that can publish his browser history by taking a picture of his phone and watch his reaction.
Time to shuw down the tv and learn vim again.

My first job was 3 years ago.
I was tasked to create feature updates for a referral system.
There were two programmers in that project , both had left the company before I started.
There left no documentation whatsoever. They gave me a copy of user manual as my guide. HAHA!
Half of the code was in code igniter framework(wasn't even familiar with it then), the other half was hard coded.
It was a total nightmare. Wish I had the guts to call it quits then and there. XD

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

i hate people who join the company with a engineering in computer science degree and then can't even setup freaking java on their system.
like that is one of the basic languages taught to programmers, how do you graduate CS yet not know how to setup java!!!!!
this idiot today tired setting up eclipse without java and got errors and comes to me saying your files are corrupt.... i ask what happens and he shows me a error message box saying cannot find java paths... and then says i keep getting this error!!!
like freaking read the damn error and fix it. you're an engineering graduate for gods sake!!!!

Linux certainly is the best. It works even on my slow 4gb laptop.

One of my family member's laptop running vista went dead today. Checked system, seems like only workaround is using repair disks with iso. Used this chance to finally convince her on moving to ubuntu.
Well, considering there wasn't even any comparison needed for Vista x Linux, she might just need to suit herself using libreoffice instead of winoffice. Just afraid she(not familiar with computers) might be bothered about the sudo here and there-thats something that takes time to get used to for non-programmers.

Well, changing someone's OS really is a great accomplishment. Kudos for myself.

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

So guys you all remember or know or will know how it is to be a student. Not that much money around, have to be responsible for the first time of your life and I don't know since we're all programmers here our Desktop/laptop that we invested our money on for the university is our life.

Recently I have found out that something is up with my laptop. My Ram should have been 8GB but it shows only 4. I almost fainted, I thought the seller caught an idiot (me) and sold it like that. So I decide, for some reason, to buy 2x8gb ram so I can have 16 since its the max support of the system.
I open the laptop and what to see but my laptop had 2x4gb in there.

Regardless I installed the new ones to find out what else but my PC is now showing just 8gb.

"Calm down Nick" I said maybe GPU uses it but no it only shows 4gb ram, the same amount the laptop came with so I guess it's integrated.

So now I can only think that the problem is occurred because my Father, dropped the laptop when I specifically told him to not have it in dangerous high places. I Googled around but everyone is talking just swaping the ram chips well yeah I did that 100 times, still the same.

Tl;Dr I'm freaking out because theres something up with my laptop

once upon a time, i get interviewed by a software vendor. i am applied for system analyst because i think i have to level up from previous works as programmer, then i passed the test. after that i get interviewed for the second times and they told me i could start to work immediately. at first day i did programmer tasks instead of analyzing systems flow. i thought it just for exercises more my analytical skill through programming. i did it for 4 months until they add new employees, some of them are system analyst and they are fresh graduated. we chat and ask them about their experiences and they told me they are not programmers or system analyst before and no test!. i dig the info more deep, and i found they could get the job because they are graduated from bonafide university. until i resign i still a programmer and i hate to work at software vendor anymore because their corporate clients are all suck.

I've been infcted with writing awful, sinful, obscure code, so others can't read or change it.

Recently i got my first full time job as a programmer (yay). It's with a company with 15+ year old system and they are currently upgrading it. But it's driving me crazy with the massive mess of old and new code. However it only gets worse! Instead of making it simple and nice to read, they want it over complex, just to get something from the database i have create at least 5 fucking classes and endless SQL code, the old system didn't requier any SQL or the creation og new classes, WTF. I've become a sinner, of corse i use the old system, but i do it secretly, and i obscurify my code so others can't understand. It's shameful, but i'm afraid to confront the older programmers, they've spend too much time in the system and they've been in the business for a lot longer than me.

Strapi...

So much promise let down by poor documentation. Adding custom commands is not in the docs but is supported in the code.

Spent 2 weeks through trial and error trying to get custom commands written to import content and its been a pain in the ass.

When your documentation is written, give it out to novice or intermediate programmers with minimal exposure to your system. Note down their issues and improve the documentation.

Hell, why not add a form to submit feedback on the docs to a dedicated team of writers.

Anyone here good with Strapi who could assist?

added a sixth point to "core principles" of the os/language i'm designing:

6. hard crash on as many errors as possible because programmers are retarded pieces of shit and fuck them from both sides at once with three baseball bats in each hole at the same time. either fucking write your program right or go fucking fuck yourself you fucking lobotomized incompetent pieces of shit.

because fuck this fucking bullshit. your lobotomy will either make the whole system crash or you'll learn to not be lobotomized you fucking retarded pieces of shit.

oh, and the error message is gonna be "OH NO! THE CREATOR OF [program name] IS A RETARDED LOBOTOMIZED MORON WHO CAN'T WRITE CODE FOR SHIT, so now he fucked up your whole system by his utter incompetence... Restarting..."

Here’s Today’s book, a little late in the day but we had a storm here and lost power. Powers back

Anyway Programming Pearls, this books isn’t so much a tutorial book, or like “how to program book” it’s more an influential book and thought book. Similar to the mythical man month book.

It’s short book little over 200 pages, of short essays on problems that have irritated programmers over the years. Hence the amage to pearls as a pearl is developed from grains of sand that irritate oysters. This book is a collection of irritants of programmers. (No not the social or business side of things) but technical problems we all face.
These articles are compiled from the original postings that occurred in the Communications of ACM journal, back in the late 90s.

This books offers workable solutions to these “pearls”.

Think of this like one of the precursors to what we have now as stack overflow .. information was shared via journals since the internet wasn’t available but not so much question then respond like we do more of hey I had this problem here’s the solution sort of system.

It’s the type of book, when your bored and you don’t want to read some “how to book” you read this, just like mythical man month and others.

This book references items from knuths books. As well as references to others.

So here’s to the pearls the plague us all.

My 2 cents on different OSes to use.

I think Linux is best for running servers and services and having long run times with little issues (when its Console and not GUI based.) But I have a lot of issues with using its GUI distributions like Ubuntu and it feels kind of unpolished in that area.

I prefer macOS for its GUI as it actually works and has far less issues than Windows GUI and is (IMO) better than Linux GUI's by far. But macOS just doesn't feel like it was designed super users and it can feel like its holding you back a bit. Also you have to use Mac hardware which are amazing machines, they are just overpriced.

I prefer Windows for its GUI and despite its problems, it is very well designed for super users and has very well designed remote desktop features and scalability (although it is a pain to maintain.) Windows works well for connected company systems.

In my opion:
Linux: Servers, databases (no GUI)

macOS: Designers, photo/video editing, IT/programmers and general use as a standalone (not part of a company system).

Windows: IT/programmers, super users, general use but better than macOS at working together in a company setup, but macOS is better at being a personal laptop or PC.

I personally use Linux for our email and web servers. Windows for our company computers (designers use Macs) and I have a Macbook as my own personal computer.

Who here works at Apple in the Finder group. OMG, would you please fix shit? Finder has been such a bag of insects for years.

1. windows don't right-size to any reasonable minimum in icon view when there is one row of icons

2. text color of files and folder names no longer adjust to accommodate background color changes. Setting the window background color USED TO result in white text of the files and folders displayed in that window. Now it is Black-On-Black oh so readable 🙄

3. stop re-locating 0,0 in the god damn folder icon view. Finder items in grid view cannot, by themselves, get disorganized off the grid.

4. Stop moving the god damn folder/disk window locations between open and close

5. stop resizing the god damn folder/disk windows between open and close.

6. stop destroying the contents of clipping files. I get so tired of losing data to mac-unix programmers who think they know what the f they are doing at the file level. Resource forks were rocket science you just could not understand and you have really rolled the clock back on macOS file system to Stone Age 1980s tech.

Oh my freaking gosh! Okay so im "lead tech" on the robotics team. Ive come up with several ways we can improve our system. I had it all planed out and calculated but when i run it by the teacher running the team, EVERY SINGLE FRICKING TIME they shoot it down and they say "that just adds another layer of complexity" and I just want to yell because sure its a bit more complicated but so the fuck what?!?!? It works (theoritically according to math) efficiently and more efficiently than what their doing which is almost unknown to me because why the fuck not?! And omg i sware my entire team has the attentionspan of an ant because any time i need them to explain something, they get dustracted with whatever the hell they get distracted with and they NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP. Any who other than that being super annoying thats not the point. Point is, the fucking teacher is afraid of making things a bit more complicated for no good reason and ever idea i have they shoot it down so (even as lead tech, and main programmer) i feel extra useless and im not gonna be here next year, so idk what the fuck there gonna do when i leave. (Like seriousally, im not even being conceded, ive been programming for several years. The other programmers have no idea what there doing) but if they dont learn that complexity isnt bad this team will NEVER get higher in the competition.

This aesthetics in physics that is hard to explain to someone outside the field. How beautiful for example that you can express the whole classical mechanics in just 1 equation and electro magnetism in 4, that sense of symmetry and clarity they express. Essentially in what Einstein and others believed: that the universe is a orderly place not chaos and that its rules can be understood by our crippled minds.
And I think there is a similar notion in code. As physicists are driven to more general and powerful theories that shall some time explain all interactions of matter that we know of, programmers, I believe, strive for similar ideals: brevity, conciseness, generality, abstraction, powerfulness of your symbolic system - one line of code to end it all.

Currently studying.
I feel like degrees are quite valuable. It is basically the university vouching for you and that they think you are qualified within an area. This is quite valuable.
Through work, I have seen some horrible shit in production, therefore i think it makes good sense for a company to ask for some "minimum requirements" which can be verified by an institution like a university. Not saying that all who graduates are good programmers, they just have the minimum required knowledge and skill that the university demands in order to vouch for them.

I believe that on average the "average bad programmer" from a university will be better than "average bad programmer" without degree.

Plus, if you have a decent education system in your country, you shouldn't have to pay for you degree.

It looked nice on my CV ... Hmmmm actually the only useful thing was learning how to design a system.
Programming is matter of practice...
Designing however you need some educational background.. see some amazing programmers with equally horrible designing skills ..!

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

!rant
Hello everyone
Do any of you python programmers have any tips for simple projects you can do to learn python?

I am mainly a backend/system engineer comig from C++, slowly picking up rust and have been using bash as my scripting language so far. bash is nice because it is so fundamental in the linux world but you just dont get very far with it and its usually not pleasant to write.

So I would like to learn python, though I have no idea what I can do to practice it, so that I can just quickly whip up a script the next time I need something done in the file system or want to write a simple parser for something.

Do you guys have an idea of something small (not necessarily useful) which makes use of pythons strengths? Just looking for ideas here, so stick it all out 👋💕

A new company I work at just revamped their website but decided to keep their live chatting system. LiveZilla.

What a piece of shit system. Forums are a ghost town, and documentation is crap. Full of bugs. Programmers' nightmare

To C++ programmers, do you think the new module system be useful to most (updated) codebases?

Any c++ embedded system programmers here.what kind of work do you do ,what are your daily tasks etc.and what boards do you use