Hey everyone - just a note on rants about politics: we've had a long-standing policy not to really allow any of them. So if you post one and see it quickly disappear from the feed, that's why.

We've gathered a lot of feedback on this and Tim and I both agree that Facebook is ridden with posts about politics and one of the more refreshing aspects of devRant is we've kept it free of that. It's also an aspect of Facebook that many people I've talked to really hate.

Thank you, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

Worst legacy code experience?

Well grab your spelunking gear and follow me down this rabbit hole!

It started early this year when our biggest customer asked us to send ETAs for deliveries. Simple enough, how bad could it be? Just need to add an ETA form for the drivers in their mobile app.  And yes, that part was easy, but then we had to go from our mobile app to our internal system.

Welcome to the IBM AS/400! Where time has stood still for two decades and the mainframe is alive and well.

The shitshow started in March and, spoiler alert, it's still not working.

We begin by dumping the mobile app data in to a table that an RPG program watches. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of RPG or a limitation on the brains of our RPG developers, but timestamps do not exist here. There are only varchars. There are also a multitude of formats for these timestamps, because that makes life more interesting. This program breaks frequently.

If by some miracle the RPG program processes the data, then the ETA goes to a table that's completely separate from the entity it belongs on. If the data is needed, it is JOINed. The old ETA field is now permanently blank.

Why, you ask? Because RPG programs need to be recompiled every time the underlying database changes, and half our system hasn't been compiled in like 10 years. God only knows if we *can* recompile at this point. We extensively use Synon/2E, which compiles to RPG, which can (and has) been hand-modified to fix bugs instead of fixing them in the "higher" language. So now if we try to recompile, we might be losing those fixes *forever*.

Naturally, there is NO referential integrity between this tables. There's orphan rows all through the system. There's also one-to-many relationships in tables meant for one-to-one. Also there's no unique keys. You have to combine multiple fields to get a (potentially) unique key.

Now, there's a series Synon programs that run every 5 minutes to check if any data needs to be sent out. These Synon/2E programs do *full table scans* of the database and check for changes. And, of course, they're buggy as shit.

But you can't debug it there, oh no no no, the output gets pumped straight to...

Wait for it..

A fucking COBOL program.

This COBOL program takes the data from the Synon/2E programs and puts it in a horrible format called X12. X12 looks something like this:

ST*214*000123456
B10*AB123456789000*012345678901234*ABCD
L11*1*QN
LX*1
AT7*X2*NS***20170610*140000*LT
MS1*SOMEPLACE*CA
MS2**ABCD123456
SE*0*012345678

This shit is why JSON was invented. Yes, that's what an ETA for 2017-06-10 14:00:00 looks like. The timezone is "Local Time", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

So this COBOL program has logs, which should make life easy, right?

Wrong.

Using the 'search and audit' function in the program dumps 90 char lines of text on the screen with no line breaks. Worse, the terminal can only show 87 of those lines, so you have to push Shift+F8 to move to the right by three characters. There's no way to search for the actual ETA events using the program, and while you can filter by reference number all this garbage is sent in 5 minute batches, so you'll get a dump of irrelevant data along with the thing you're looking for. Also there's no such thing is grep in this environment, or anything even close to it.

I have hundreds of these bad data transfers to debug, so there's no way in hell I'm doing this manually.

I never did figure out exactly where the raw data is kept, but apparently it's tucked away in one of a thousand tables associated in something called "multiple member files". It seems IBM tried the "schemaless" thing long before MongoDB thought it'd be hip, and like so many MongoDB projects this too ended up a shitshow. Multiple member files are now deprecated I believe, and IBM documentation + resources are sparse anyway so that's pretty much a non-starter.

But I did figure out that the "Print" function of this program can be called directly with a batch number... So here's what I do:

Get the dates of the oldest and newest bad ETAs I'm looking at. Find those two manually and note that batch numbers. Call the "Print" function with these batch numbers (provided the difference is less than 32,767 because yay 16-bit programs). Take the print file and convert it to a "PC-Style ACII" stream and put it on the emulated file system and ancient SMB server. Copy that file and parse that garbage to find the relevant events, and finally dump it to a CSV for quick and easy viewing.

That last paragraph took me a couple weeks to figure out. Fuck IBM.

Now, finally, after fixing all the bugs I found on our side, we've finally come to the conclusion that the data we're sending is good. But! The customer is still having trouble parsing it...

You see, they're having some problems with their IBM AS/400. There's a lot of old code that's supposed to parse the data we're sending, and they're just not quite sure why it isn't working.

I put a lot of work into trying to explain to you muggles what I do all day in a way you can understand (it's hard, trust me) and you still reject it as boring nerd crap. I'm sick of it! What if you told me working at that restaurant is "putting water on plates, wiping it off, and putting meat and cheese between slices of bread" and I said "wtf is that, and who cares?" Wouldn't that hurt your feelings, that I didn't even attempt to make a connection with you, friend? That I didn't even attempt to step outside my experience to meet yours? Isn't it equally insulting how far you have to dumb it down, just for me to lose interest entirely? And yes, I know that's not your specific task. That only proves my point further.

And why, exactly? Conceptually, you handle pre-digested poop all day.
_I teach plastic to think._ Sometimes it even thinks better than you do.
How is my job less interesting?
And what's more, why does EVERYONE seem to think so?

How do you expect people like me to keep your iPhones, bank accounts, and self-driving cars working if you alienate us like an alternate species for building those things? I mean really. You people treat us with a disinterest harmonious with homophobia. "Don't ask, don't tell." Except you do ask. And then you condescend as if working with my brain makes me less worthy of your attention than your exciting minimum-wage restaurant job.

Have fun with that, by the way.

Oh, and you're welcome for <object I fixed that wasn't really broken>. Maybe next time, just google it.
I know you won't.

An open letter to the guy that commented on my website:

«Function X does not work. This program is shit. I am going to uninstall it and tell everyone.»

I'm sorry that my completely open source project didn't work for you. The fact that I lost countless days and months and years working on it in my free time, without ever asking for a cent, just trying to do something good for the community, doesn't give me the right to release a feature that may be buggy.

You could have opened a bug report. But that takes time. A whole 2 minutes. I understand the urge to post such a harsh public critic on my website. That's why I was so calm and understanding when I replied to you there.

However, it's a long time I wasn't browsing devRant and I confess I felt the urge to tell you to go fuck yourself. And this is the best place to do it! I'd pay to know you. I'd love to see your face. Oooh you must be so confident of yourself. I'm sure you have accomplished a lot in your life. So here's my message:

Go Fuck Yourself Asshole

That's a lot of contributors

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

My views on the github/MS thingy.

I've had to explain in at least 20+ rants that some people might have legitimate reasons/opinions for disagreeing with this deal. I find it quite bad that I even have to say this but that aside for this rant.

Microsoft is a commercial company which does a lot for open source, that's a fact.

In my case, I mostly look at the part of Microsoft in regard to how they treat users and user privacy as this, in my opinion, shows for a great deal how trustworthy a company is.

It's publicly known that Microsoft joined the prism surveillance program in 2007 which in my opinion also meant selling out all users.
Next to that, through at least windows 10 it has done quite intrusive user tracking which I also see as a betrayal to its users.

I could go on and on about cases but I've made my point on at least microsoft.

As for github selling itself to Microsoft, this most likely means that it'll also be integrated within the prism network. That's my main point of concern as to why I disagree of this deal and have lost my trust in github for selling to a company which, imo, has absolutely no respect for its users' privacy and has ethics I entirely disagree with.

I still haven't formed an opinion on the rest of arguments out there as, due to a medical thing, I'm hardly able to focus right now.

You might agree or disagree, that's your very right and that's perfectly fine. Just don't say that I haven't come with an actual argument/opinion as for why I disagree with this deal.

After spending a few months on this site, what strikes me the most, is how unhappy a lot of programmers are.

It kind of makes me sad to see so many of you struggle with office politics bullshit everyday.

I have a confession to make.

I've never had a programming job, or freelanced, yet I have made a very comfortable living with programming and marketing for the past 20 years.

I make my living by finding niches where there is shit software, and creating a better alarm clock.

The first 5-10 years of doing this, I worked my ass off (throughout my twenties)
But during most of my thirties, I barely had to
work to keep it all up. I get residual income still
from stuff I did 10 years ago.

I'm curious if anyone at all would be interested in learning how to do this, quitting their job, for example, or, just having the freedom to write your own code without answering to anybody but your own customers. Many of whom you never have to talk to, they go to your site, they buy, and rarely ever send emails (if you do it right)

Everybody here has knowledge that is so bankable, yet they seem to just surrender to
asshole bosses and clients. It doesn't have to
be like that.

If you'd be interested in this, please ++ this.

I'm thinking of creating an online course about creating and marketing your own software, specifically for programmers like you guys. and girls.

I genuinely just want to see if there's interest. I hope that's ok.

I have this one friend who thinks he is a tech guru just because he plays video games a lot and started to study cs for one year. Now he got a job as sysadmin and it is funny to hear him brag about the job in front of non-tech people because he sounds like a CSI Cyber episode, just throwing tech words at the people and I know that he talks bullshit.
But I have to admit, he knows how to sell himself. Probably that's how he got the job in the first place because it cannot be his experience.
Yesterday he called me, to help him edit something on a linux server. I told him "To edit the file type 'vi FILENAME' and then you can edit. I have to go now, I have a meeting." :]

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

A lot of the people are complaining about working in inhumane conditions. I want to debunk some bullshit that I think is causing this.

Devs are hard to find. That makes you valuable. A good dev that actually works for 30-40 hours per week is extremely hard to find.
The relationship with your employer / client should be simple: you work, they pay. What you do NOT:
1. Do not take responsibility for other people's decisions
2. Do not internalize other people's problems (you've got your own, better stick to them)
3. Do not let ANYONE guilt trip you into anything that you're not indeed guilty of.
4. Do NOT work for an effective rate that's significantly lower than you know you can get elsewhere.

There are indeed some utterly evil assholes out there that will try to manipulate you, into thinking that you're "part of the project", or that "you're all a team". Yeah, you are, but when it comes to making money, you'll only get the salary, regardless of how successful your work will be. THEY have a motivation to stay up late, to work extra hours, etc. You DO NOT. If you do that, and don't get paid extra, you're working for free, which means that you're not a professional.

Are you a professional? Then have respect for yourself, and bill for every fucking second of your time. Don't let the assholes think they own you.

As a professional, you MUST do EXACTLY what you're paid to do. No more, no less. Well, if you're feeling good about it, then you can do slightly more. And anyone that's demanding more, basically has no respect for you, and doesn't consider you a professional. That is the plain truth. See it as it is, and handle those scumbags accordingly.

There was a previous developer who my managers has told us was terrible and toxic. Yet due to terrible planning, he had everyone work for over 13 hours last Sunday.

I contacted this previous developer to learn his side of the story and learned a lot. I realize between their two narratives is the truth, but I see all the ways we've been lied, the ways this other dev was scapegoated and all the additional work that's sure to come.

I refuse to work weekends again. I refuse to work over 40 hours. I wish I could convince everyone else to do the same. No amount of money is worth making up for bad planning and management.

*Interview*

Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?

Me: What is that I'll be doing?

I: What technologies and languages do you know?

Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?

I: Any experience working on frontend?

Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?

I: Can you work with databases?

Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?

I: Can you do big data processing?

Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?

I: Any experience in cloud development?

Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?

I: Do you know CI CD?

Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.

I: Yes. Go ahead.

Me: What will be my position?

I: A full stack developer.

Me: What technologies do you use in your project?

I: We use all the latest tech.

Me: Like?

I: All latest tech.

Me: You mentioned big data processing?

I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.

Me: what do you use for that?

I: Java.

Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?

I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.

Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?

I: Just to know if you're familiar.

Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?

I: Flash

Me: 🙄

I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.

I: Are you willing to join?

Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.

Stop it with the Linux shilling already.

I'm 27 years old and I love Linux and git and vim just as much as the next guy (yeah fuck you emacs!). I have discovered this place as a room for discussion, advise, humor and rants of course, and I had my good share of giggles.

But lately it seems that every other Post is "look at me I installed Linux" or "hurr durr he doesn't use git" or "windows omfg kill it with fire". And to some degree, those rants have a good point and are absolutely right. However, most of them are not.

This is why you're part of the problem. Constantly shaming and ridiculing any technology that's not hip in nerd culture, regardless of the circumstances. This makes you look just as bad as the peoples you look down upon for writing their code in notepad++ on windows xp with McAfee installed. Even worse, from a professional point of view, it absolutely voids your credibility.

How am I to take you seriously and presume a fair amount of experience and out of the box thinking if all you do is repeat catchphrases and ride the fucking hype train. And yes, I know there are a lot of minors or peoples who are just getting started in the industry. But I have seen enough self-righteous hateful spews from peoples who claim not to be.

Anyway, this is getting long and I think I have made my point. Maybe I am just too old to be joking around that shit all the time anymore. But from what I have seen, I wouldn't hire the biggest part of you. Not because you are bad at what you're doing, but because what you say makes you look absolutely unprofessional.

But then again, this is devrant and I love you all. Have a great week everyone!

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

I am starting to get more pissed off than I should be by one particular type of rant on here.

Quote:
My boss/senior/coworker did not know how to do XXX even though he is supposed to have more experience than me. I had to fix his goddamn problem blah blah blah.

If you'd have that attitude on my team I'd be spending a lot of time trying to get you off of it. A team MUST help each other. If you think you're better than others you either teach them or get the fuck out. If you don't understand or know something that's fine and it perfectly normal to have others explain it to you.

So today I got let go from my job.

I've worked for this company for about 2.5 years, and soon after joining I became the only IT resource for software. I had to support literally everything after they fired the rest of the team, but I did a great job and have been praised by all the management at the company.

A few months ago, after a salary review and a frank discussion with my boss and his boss, they agreed that I am due for a raise. They had a massive project coming up with a lot of extra expenses, but I was told that right afterward they would be giving raises.

I spent tons of late nights and weekends on this project, and we were able to get it mostly finished about a 1.5 months ago. I was instrumental in the project (the rest of the IT team didn't even know how to set up simple DNS records). An email was sent to the whole company thanking me for all the work I put into the project.

A week ago, I messaged my boss to ask about the status of raises as he had told me they should be going out at the beginning of this month. He said there won't be any raises, and that's all I heard. Then today I get a call telling me that they are letting me go.

Let me get this straight: you led me on with talk of a raise just to keep me here working long hours for your big project, and then you fire me after recognizing what a great job I did? That's just sick. I have watched them treat other employees and partners unethically, but it took getting it first hand to realize how bad it really is. My teammates were in shock when I said I was leaving as they have all leaned on me very heavily.

Fortunately, I have had several offers come in over the last few months (2 this week) for more pay. I only held off because of the lies I was told about receiving a raise and out of a false sense of loyalty. I'm not worried about my future at all, just angry at the way I was treated.

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

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

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

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

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

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

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

After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.

All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.

I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.

For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".

I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

So I was at work and send to another location (distribution centers) and in the lunch break my guider for that day and I started a conversation about servers etc (he appeared to do loads of stuff with that). He recommended me all those programs but I didn't recognize anything so I asked him what kinda servers he ran. He runs a lot of Windows servers. No problem for me but I told him that I am into Linux servers myself.

Guy: "Linux guy, eh? That system is considered to be so secure but in reality it's insecure as fuck!".

Me: (If he would come up with real/good arguments I am not going to argue against that by the way!) Uhm howso/why would you think that?
Guy: "Well all those script kiddies being able to execute code on your system doesn't seem that secure.".

*me thinking: okay hold on, let's ask for an explanation as that doesn't make any fucking sense 😐*

Me: "Uhm how do you mean, could you elaborate on that?"

Guy: "Well since it's open source it allows anyone to run any shit on your system that they'd like. That's why windows rocks, it doesn't let outsiders execute bad code on it.".

Seriously I am wondering where the hell he heard that. My face at that moment (internally, I didn't want to start a heated discussion): 😐 😲.

Yeah that was one weird conversation and look on open source operating systems...

I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST NEURAL NETWORK!!!

But first of all, as I know you guys, it's spaghetti code and even I as a newb see places where I used too few-dimensional array or passed useless parameters or simply wrote too many redundant lines of code. I know it. I will make it MUCH better next time. Period.

But OMFG this made me scream from happiness today!! Just these few seemingly random numbers... I'm really done.. That's why I jumped into coding year or two ago..

And for some background, I didn't study any IT school, I'm just highschooler (general grammar school) who traded gaming for learning. Also my maths teacher teached NNs on university and is very keen to teach me, so that's that.

Now I wanna make the best out of it and I'm looking forward to write some well documented and flexible library, parallelized and everything (I'm gonna learn a lot in the process of doing this) better then FANN.

Maybe I'm gonna fail(99% probability but hey, I'm programmer beginner, I still think I can code everything I want). But if there is just one moment like when I saw this screen today, I'mma trade my life for it.

Sorry for taking your time guys, I was just genuinely stunned... A lot

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

New guy at work asks me for a code review. 16 lines added, and I have 4 comments, all about readability. Only the major stuff because I went easy on him. I even ignored a missing semicolon.

Guy comes to me and explains that code review is about if code works, not what it should look like. "You want me to write it your way, and we'll have endless arguments if that's how you do code reviews. But I'll do your requested changes." Reduces his entire code to two lines, which make a lot more sense.

Later, I ask him why he used "void 0" anyway. I was wondering if he's thinking of security aspects or if there's another reason. His answer: "because it looks cool and nobody else does it".

Oh boy, my fellow devRanters, I just signed an 4 digit monthly salary (that's a lot in Lithuania) job contract, I'm a future Unix infrastructure engineer :o

As per original concept of ranting, it's been almost two months since I wrote for the stickers and didn't get a reply >:(

Okay so this is going to be a rant.

My exams started last wednesday. I'm doing a study called Application Development and I'm in my 5th year now (out of 4, long story).

This is the stuff that's going wrong at the moment and it's getting FUCKING annoying.

- The windows computers were not installed that well so everyone had to downgrade from the last update which took way too long.
- We have to have at least 1-3 conversations with the 'client' and 'manager' for each document but the waiting lists are so long that we have to wait for about 2-4 hours in general (we had a total of 18 hours for the first task) so a lot of people couldn't even have a meeting about around half of the documentation. Having meetings about everything is a REQUIREMENT for a good grade.
- Some of the teachers are so slow that the meetings take way too long.
- Although documentation is important, we calculated that about 80% of the WHOLE FUCKING EXAMS will be documentation which is way too fucking much.
- Some of the grading points (like chapters you have to write in the documentation) ARE NOT EVEN IN THE TEMPLATES MY STUDY PROVIDES. Already had a moment where a teacher was like 'I'm missing this chapter?' me: 'It's not in the official templates?!?' teacher: 'stop right there. I have to grade you for this so is that your or my problem'? unbe-fucking-lievable.
- Some students get so many 'musts' that we are seriously doubting if we can get this to work within about 2 days (12 hours).

Sorry for this rant but I had to get this the FUCK out.

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

The coolest project I've worked on was for a certain country's Navy. The project itself was cool and I'll talk about it below but first, even cooler than the project was the place were I worked on it.

I would go to this island off the coast where the navy had its armoury. Then to get into the armoury I'd go through this huge tunnel excavated in solid rock.

Finally, once inside I would have to go thru the thickest metal doors you've ever seen to get to crypto room, which was a tiny room with a bunch of really old men - cryptographers - scribbling math formulae all day long.

I can't give a lot of technical details on the project for security reasons but basically it was a bootable CD with a custom Linux distro on it. Upon booting up the system would connect to the Internet looking for other nodes (other systems booted with that CD). The systems would find each other and essentially create an ad-hoc "dark net".

The scenario was that some foreign force would have occupied the country and either destroyed or taken control of the Navy systems. In this case, some key people would boot these CDs in some PC somewhere not under foreign control (and off the navy grounds.) This would supposedly allow them to establish secure communications between surviving officers. There is a lot more to it but that's a good harmless outline.

As a bonus, I got to tour an active aircraft carrier :)

I am 22 years old, at 18 I started to study systems and networks, I learned commands, network protocols, assembly and maintenance of servers, at 20 I started to study computer security, at 21 I started programming classes, I learned bash scripting , A bit of javascript and object-oriented programming with java, I fell in love with programming instantly, after classes I spent hours practicing new things, reading all the documentation of things I didn't understand and coding as long as I could , When I finished my studies I started to learnt android developing, almost a year ago, I made my own application, the first software I made public, it was a failure, I hardly had installations and most people uninstalled it, the UI Was ugly, the idea was not as good as I thought, after some bug fixes I started reading a book on C ++, I started to practice, it made me better using object-oriented programming, a month later, I came up with an idea, I used a lot an app, but I didn't like the way it was done, I wanted some extra features, something that was more useful to me, so I picked up a notebook and started drawing a user interface, I wrote what features I want and I started to develop it, one month later I published it, at the beginning almost had no users, but little by little it started to be used, after almost two months it reached a thousand users, I felt great, there were people who liked my App, I spent months working on new features, more and more people started to download it, soon it'll have 10000 downloads, currently I'm working on a new app, tomorrow (December 31) I will publish it, I hope there are many users who enjoy it.

And that's my little story.

Sorry for my bad English...

+++ Thank you for 1000+'s! +++

So guys we did it! We've reached our first big milestone!
This account was created about a month ago, and we are already this far!

Thanks to all authors (@DLMousey, @filthyranter, @baewulff) who are putting a lot of work and time into their articles and help this account to further grow in size!

To make this article at least a bit informative, here's how we publish our posts:
When I started this account, I hadn't thought of how articles were going to be published. Should I give the password to all writers? Should I post the articles manually?
Well, after I've started the devNews Discord Server, @olback suggested making a Discord Bot, that helps us to publish our stuff.
After surprisingly few hours, @olback already got a prototype working.
We have a special channel and whoever writes stuff in it, updates the current article. Later, I took on the work, @olback has done and switched to LowDB, to be able to let multiple users have their own articles they are working on and much more. (Like special signatures)
And that's how it is now.
We have a channel for draft, where we write our stuff and a channel for publishing, where the bot listens to what we write and then publishes the articles with a command.
That's all of it.

Thank you for reading!

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

!dev, story, just now

Got a dog. Beefy monster. German shepherd. Supposedly makes you feel calm and secure. Well, that's true. That boy scares a lot of shit and bricks out of locals.

All right. Night. The dog is sleeping as well as I am. GF comes back from work. 2 am, she is a doctor. Shit happens. "Hi honey, I totally forgot if I locked the car, could you please go and check it out?" "Sure!". What an answer for 2 am. But no problem, killing two birds with one stone. I'll see to our German monster irrigate some palm trees in the night, in this case he won't wake me up at 6 am. Plus there are quite an amount of suspicious people walking around. Nice to have a little horse-sized tooth-armed furball on the side.

"Ralf, wake up! Lets go."
No reaction
"Ralf?" Punch in the back
Opens his eyes
"Ralf, come on, let's go for a walk"
Closes his eyes
"Ralf! Get up!" Kicking him out of the bed.
Falls down on the floor and carry on sleeping.
"Ralf! WTF? Get up and let's go!"
"Yawn!"
"Ralf! Jeez! ..."
- 20 minutes later I managed to get him out on the street.

DO YOU KNOW THAT A DOG CAN LOOK AT YOU AS IF YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT? Well, they can! Sure they are.

Ok, keys in my hands. What did my honey say? "I left it on the parking lot at the tire place."
"Sure dear, go to sleep. I'll handle this for you".

"Tire place." OK, one just outside here. Nice parking lot. I Can't see the car. Pressing the button - nothing happens. Ralf immediately goes to sleep. 10 more minutes to kick him back into a moving position. Ok - there is another tire place just 2 blocks away. Same shit - no car.

Ok, google! Show me all tire shops around here. 13 of them. One Three! Freaking 13 places around here. And I have a donkey-sized animal to pull around with me. 1 hour later I remembered that there is that place where she parked like a year ago and I finally managed to find the car.

Button. Beep! Clunk!

Phew! After all this car WAS opened.
"You see Ralf? We did a great job!"
"Go f__k yourself, it's 3:30 am, I want to go sleep!"
"OK, let's go home!"

Finally, I'm going back to sleep. 3:45 am. Did I forget something? No, I don't think so. Fine. Shutdown...

5:00 am

Someone's cold nose in my arm.
"Hey, master! Guess what? I did not manage to pee on any of those amazing palm trees. Could you please get me out there again?"

"Fuuuuuu!!!!"

He is suffering there in the corner, waiting for me to finish this rant. And I'll show him some palm trees after I'll post this.

But just so he would know - humans can look at a dog like it's a piece of shit. Or like it's a blob of urine. Just a freaking portable urine production facility.

Jeez! What a night!

I learned some fun things today!

Fun fact! A lot of things rely on python!
Fun fact! Python relys on a lot of things!
Fun fact! Updating just python and nothing else causes your entire fucking arch to break! ... Wait that's not fun. Shit!

FML.

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Just my $.02:

One thing I think a lot of students/schools miss when learning/teaching, is that your code has to be *maintainable*. Your code is (hopefully) going to be used for a long time, so program it to make it not only easy to upgrade and maintain, but easy for SOMEONE ELSE to upgrade and maintain, too.

The best code to work with is the stuff that's been coded with maintainability in mind.

--- Github unveils another round of pricing changes ---

In a move that slipped under the radar with some surprising ease, Microsoft-owned repo wrangler Github unveiled yesterday (7th January) a new set of changes to their pricing model. Unlike the last round of changes that saw unlimited private repos gracing anybody with $7 in their pocket each month - The new round sees everyone on the platform receiving unlimited private repos in a move that's been met with some serious scepticism from the community.

The company's surprisingly brief PR emission (via their official blog) states that they've made 2 major changes, "Github Free now includes unlimited private repositories" - the catch being that you're limited to adding 3 collaborators, which appears to be a move aimed squarely at businesses attempting to operate without forking over the cash for an organisation.

In addition to this there's many vague statements about the kinds of scenarios that "are now possible" via "Github free", the kind of vague nonsense that makes trousers considerably tighter in the PR department.

It would appear that anyone who was previously paying the $7 a month is now a "Pro" user, The PR emission states that "Github Pro (formerly Github Developer) and Github team are also available for developers and teams who need professional coding and collaboration features".

It doesn't seem like you're being offered a whole lot for your $7 a month anymore - a move that would be considered by almost any other company in tech as a good thing, but given that it's Microsoft has been met with warranted suspicion and concern.

Or we could just be being a set of Donny Downers about it, who knows shrug

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

My gf was hinting at this, but DAMN that's a lot of ink 😂

Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

So here it is. I don't know what the f is wrong with you guys but you somehow got me to a whopping 2^12 increments. Thanks I guess. Now I can show off in front of my friends that I have a lot of internet points. Fucking muggles...

Also let me address a rising issue here on devRant and that is:

Stop bloody confusing this place with devHeyGuysWhatsYourOpinionOnXYZ?
For real people. That's not cool.

dontPanic's out

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

A lot of Project managers are idiots.
Here is what happened: I am a backend developer and was asked to replace some images on some website (not even sure this is supposed to be a backend task). So i did, changes went through review and then they were live.
A few hours later they come to me saying i made a mistake because the image has wrong color tone in one of the browsers (internally facepalming myself)... I didn't design the images nor made any changes to them... I just fucking uploaded the files that were sent to me... That's fucking it.
They blamed me for a design issue and how I should've noticed this issue blah blah blah... And i had to spend an entire fucking hour to explain to them step by step what i did, how i did it and why the color tone was wrong even though i am not a designer and my main tool is VISUAL FUCKING STUDIO AND NOT PHOTOSHOP.

The shit part is that the images were sent to us by the client, so really, it is their fucking fault not mine.
Oh, and they tried to guilt me by saying the client won't pay for this since the images are wrong.

Lost an hour to this bullshit.

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Visual Studio Code.

I've tried you because of hearing a lot of good stuff about you. I'd switch back to netbeans regardless because I love netbeans and I always try to use as little as possible from companies like Google/microsoft/facebook (and others) but what you're pulling right now is un-fucking-believable.

I've disabled ANY AND EVERY form of calling home I could (find) in your settings. Crash reports, automatic updates, metrics, you name it. I've searched all the fucking settings but I can't find any other home calling thing that's enabled and yet:

I'm monitoring every goddamn DNS request (through my own DNS server) and I'm still seeing calls to a Microsoft owned domain. Closed all my browser sessions and you as well and it stopped. Started browser again but not you, nothing.
Started you again: BAM. Calls to that damned Microsoft owned domain again.

If you can't honour my decision for disabling any form of home calls, go fuck yourself.

Netbeans, I'm back, I've missed you 💜

On every new job, there is always the Impostor Syndrome.

They know each other, they're all having fun and they're friends. They're super nice to me and include you in everything, but still a lot of the time they're talking about shit that I have no idea about.

And professionally it's not better. I'm new, I don't know how things work, yet everybody knows it like the back of their hands.

There is this irrational fear, this feeling, that I don't belong, that I'm an impostor, and someone might see through my mask for who I really am - a guy with no idea about what's going on, that doesn't belong, that's an IMPOSTOR.

It takes time to overcome, especially when in a foreign country. Once it's passed, I become more attached to my colleagues and my job if the hurdle was harder, than whether I felt right at home from the very start.

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

!dev

This is the one thing about Spotify that annoys the living hell out of me (yes, I use spotify, if anyone knows a good/working self hosted alternative, let me know! I've tried quite a few including funkwhale but they all failed for me).

I'm a raw hardstyle/rawstyle lover and listen to the raw duo Malice a lot. Now, what would the problem be here? Sometimes, there are several artists in different scenes with the same name. This is completely fine.

Spotify, however, mixes up music of the raw duo Malice and the rock/metal band Malice. I keep getting release notifications/news regarding new music/events from Malice but 90 percent of the time this is about the rock/metal band and NOT the raw duo.
It's also very weird to suddenly hear rock music while listening to my daily mix; the wrong malice is mixed in once again.

Yesterday I got an email saying "Check out Malice's newest release on Spotify!"

*OH FUCK YEAH*
*opens Spotify release radar*
*YAAA....FUCK*
That's the other malice 😡

Is it so hard, Spotify? Entirely hiding the artist results in the right one being hidden as well for me 😞

Today I'm going to work on my side project that I haven't touched in weeks.

I want to utilize Angular 2 which means I'll need to learn TypeScript. I also want to use the new .Net Core and EF Core 1.0. Oh and I want to handle authentication using JWT!

Wow, that's gonna be a lot of effort to get things off the ground... maybe instead I'll use this time to learn some new concepts. Maybe watch this episode of Fun Fun Function, or maybe this video on writing Assembly code for an app on Raspberry Pi, that sounds cool!

Actually, you know I should really teach myself dependency injection and unit testing for once. I'm so behind the times.

Well, really I should finish this book on design patterns first. Ok, where did I leave off? Page 20 I think... ehh... maybe I'll just work on my side project.

Tomorrow... tomorrow, I'll work on my side project.

Linus won't call out dipshitprogrammers? That's not good. There are a lot of dipsshit programmers out there. :/

"There were a lot of complaints about missing grades" well, yes. That's what happens when you make me grade all 60 submissions every week while I work 10-12 hours a day at my other job, on average.

Some of these have been mentioned already but here they are, these things make me be a bit better at programming (at least I think so)

• sleep, I love sleep and I think a good night's sleep can do wonders

• music, music theory which is a language in itself and playing an instrument which teaches hand-eye-coordination and also creates patterns in your head, but certainly teaches us that you need to practice a lot to achieve your goals, that it's hard for beginners but gets a bit easier with time

• solving puzzles and riddles, I've been a huge fan of puzzles from an early age, it is something that teaches us solving problems and creating strategies

• other types of games that are helpful are games where you have to find things in a picture or in an environment, this has trained me a bit on finding nasty bugs in my code or at least syntax errors

• googling: sometimes you find out something that is not really related to your problem, but you remember it nevertheless and later on it can help you with something else

• maths, yes, you read correctly, I'm not a big fan of maths either, but what you learn in maths is that there are certain procedures you're often repeating and that you're always building on your knowledge and expanding it, sometimes solving mathematical problems is fun too ;)

• getting fresh air - self explanatory

• listening to other people's life stories, this helps me generally in life, to know that I'm not the only one struggling with something and so on

And I probably could go on with a lot more things, but I think that's enough for now

I used to do freelancing gigs as a kid, maybe 5/6 years ago, I'd remotely fix software issues on fiver for 5€ which would pay for a game every once in a while.

Now, it was pretty common to get customers from all around the world, and I never had any issues whatsoever until I got a message from a potential customer from south Korea...

She had purchased a karaoke machine, but the software wouldn't add anything to its library making the machine useless.

Well, apparently the software was in Korean...

After a LOT of fiddling around I got it to turn into French, and I was able to try a few things and after about 3 hours I managed to "fix" the thing.

3 hours of headaches in Korean for 5€... That's when I stopped doing that and took up an IT education and became a dev, so much better, although I miss the gratitude I used to get from my customers when I fixed their printer connectivity issues from a few thousand kilometers away

So I saw a lot of people showing off their servers. That's the baby we setup for our uni project. :)

The day I discovered Schrödinger's lesser known paradox of simultaneously being fired and not fired.

This isn't really much of a dev story, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

About two minutes into signing into all my stuff, I suddenly was kicked out of everything. I tried logging in a few more times, and then suddenly started getting the error, "Your account has been disabled for security reasons." I couldn't sign into chat, and co-workers confirmed that I was missing from the company directory. My manager didn't come in for another two hours, and we couldn't get anyone else to answer what the hell was going on. So I was kinda panicking.

Eventually, we found out from one of our coordinators that someone else with the same name as me was leaving the company, and they had deactivated the wrong person.

It ended up getting a lot better. They told me that it could take up to 48 hours to restore my access (it took longer), so I found stuff to do so I could maintain my paycheck. One of those things was assisting someone with data collection and processing, where I eventually said, "Dude, I could totally automate this," and now that's what I'm getting paid to do.

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

So I am at the client's location for onsite consultation of their projects.
The HoD asked me to create an application to accept feedbacks from multiple points urgently. Although I was there just for consulting, I thought why not, I am anyway getting bored here.
So after explaining the functionality, she asked me, when can she accept a working app. I told her that it would depend upon a lot of factors, so give me till evening to figure it out.
When she insisted I told her, that it can take at least a month with all the APIs, logins, UI, QA etc. She was surprised and told me that she expected it in 4 days since the requirements can be fit into a single page of her notebook. (That's how she measures project duration).

I told her it's impossible, given that I am the only one working on it. So she told me that her team can do it in two days. I probably have more experience than her entire team combined, but still I thought they might know some simple magic or faster way, that I might not, so I asked her to discuss with the team and then decide.

After explaining the requirements, when she mentioned that it should be done in 2 days, everyone was kinda frozen. One of them said that it's going to take at least 4 months.

I couldn't hide my smirk 😉

Assigned to a new project team..

Using git, in a creative way. So.. "master" is "dev" branch, usually. Everyone can push their branch to dev server .. so it's "dynamic for us". Production branch is whatever, as long as the branch has the release version. Sometimes, the release comes from "master".. that mean "dev" in normal geek..

That's just Git. The source code is a saturated spagetti of Entity framework and Caliburn. It is littered with antipatterns, especially basebean. Holy Christmas and Easter that baseclass do a lot of stuff that has no place as a base class ..

Fucking frameworks, I'm gonna start to evangelize frameworks as the no1 antipattern.

MS SQL as the main DB, but is dumped to json FILES through a scheduled task to increase read performance on web.

There is a soap endpoint to expose the json files, fml..

I am assuming I was placed here to improve stuff, I have never in my life seen anything like this before.

There is a special place in hell for this repository

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

Can't tell what my most successful project is...
But according to GitHub Stars, my
most successful project is my RandomQuote Bot (@RandomQuote).
The story behind it is pretty boring:

One day little Skayo thought: "Hey there is no bot on DevRant yet, let's make one!".
Then he began to think: "But what should it do? What would be easy to do for an inexperienced programmer like me?".
Suddenly he got an idea: A Bot that posts a random quote everyday!
Yay!
He instantly started making it.
About a day later, it was finished.
"Let's bring this thing to live", he thought.
And there he was, quickly getting a lot of fucking ++'s...
This bot is like my first born child! I am so proud of him!

And that's the story behind the bot.
Very spectacular, isn't it?

manager: we had great feedback last week, real users were testing our app! However, we have noticed a lot of issues regards database performance and data replication...

me: oh, that's great news!! How many users? Like hundreds?

manager: no, 6 users so far

Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Once I've worked in a start-up located in an engineering university "incubator", so we had a lot of engineer-to-be students applying for part-time jobs.
One of these kids was hired by my boss who labeled him "highly technical, very skilled in IT".

One day, while very busy with my own upcoming release, I had to help him finding a bug in his (horrible) code.

Me: Oh, that's easy, you need to load the image from the parent directory
Guy: ...
Me: You know how to do this, right? You're 1 exam away from being a computer engineer
Guy: ...
Me: Ok, ok, don't worry. Just type "../" right before the path

The guy starts typing, literally, "dotdotslash" into the path.

I immediately stopped him, almost crying. Then, I asked him to go for a walk.
"Don't mind about your bug, I'll take care"

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

As a TL I had this interview together with my superior:

After the initial part about the company, the team and the projects, I started asking the tech questions

Me: what's your experience with PHP?

Candidate: I've been doing a project in PHP for the last 5 months

Me: ...ok. anything aside from that? In other company or freelance?

Candidate : no, just that. I'm not a huge fan, the current project requires it

Me: ...ok. *other tech specific questions*

Candidate: no, never used it, I heard these are awful

Me: *speechless* (I'm just asking for natal, linux and stuff)... ok. What salary do you expect

Candidate : *number that's fucking twice as much my salary after four years in the company* (we are pretty good paying company)

me: ok... do you have any questions (I'm about to stand up and walk away)

Candidate: I just want to let you know that I will be late for work, because of I have to drive my kids to work and will be leaving 2 hours earlier to get them.

Me: ok... a lot of us are having kids. Isn't there any other way?

Candidate: No. Also I'm planning on having like at least 100 days of sick leave because of my kids a year

Me: ok. Thank you, we will get back to you.

I had never ever been so much stunned like this time. I had no problem having so much requirements, but at least, please, be competent...

Many years ago when I changed to my second job, I had to do a lot more JavaScript work and upon Googling for a solution, that's when I came across jQuery. The idea of only having to write a few lines instead of multiple lines just to do a simple task was pretty exciting.

Plus looking through the docs and reading up about animations, I thought that was pretty cool and started playing around with it. Eventually I came to a project where I needed an interactive form and so I used jQuery to handle a lot of the UI work. My managers and the client were pretty excited about seeing how stuff can appear/disappear.

This whole experience thing is really killing me.

"We like you a lot and you seem to have a solid understanding of the core concepts but you just lack the experience we need"

I've heard that basic response from plenty of different potential employers. Granted they could be lying just to be nice but that doesn't help the situation either.
Like tell me where I am lacking and where to improve.

Yea I can learn on my own but they're a lot of things I will never think about touching or gain any knowledge of because it's not something I may ever need to dive into during just everyday apps. There is a difference in building a hobby app to learn and what goes into a full blown application handling thousands of users and all the data that can come along with it. Not to mention the kind of things that can go wrong when you have thousands of users on your app at the same time all doing different things. That's not something I can just have experience with. If I could just get in somewhere I can prove myself because then I will be doing it each and everyday.

Gotta keep grinding though, I'll get something eventually.

Wtf bs is this? Can't governments just stop trying to control the internet?

It's literally the closest thing we have to a free and fair society on the planet and that's with all the tracking and abuse of information going on. I think we need to start applying our minds to creating a decentralised network with p2p discovery routed through our phones if we want to keep any semblance of freedom of speech or privacy around for our kids. Routing traffic wouldnt use more than 50-100mb of ram and would probably use a lot less battery than Google does listening to our conversations or transmiting our location data so we wouldn't even notice. If only we could find a cable free decentalized way to get data across the ocean no one would be able to control it again, I doubt we would be able to shut it down either.

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

Agh, holy shit. devRant, I need some love.

I have successfully double-buffered the Windows console (cmd.exe) but all hell breaks loose when you resize the fucking window. The currently active buffer will receive the change in dimensions while the inactive buffer will not, resulting in the window quickly oscillating between the two sizes as the buffers change size.

That got me stuck for about a day. Today, I got it sort of working but it wasn't satisfying at all. I can get it to resize LARGER, but if you resize the window SMALLER, the actual buffer inside the window doesn't change size, so scrollbars appear and I have NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THAT. I somehow need to calculate, or use the API to find, the perfect dimensions (In rows and columns) for the console buffer INSIDE the window buffer for them to not have scrollbars.

And I just - -

I cannot gather the energy to do so right now.

I spent hours finding the solution to this bullshit and ONLY SOLVED HALF MY PROBLEM.

And stack overflow isn't exactly helpful. My problem is so specific that nobody even writes comments on the question.

I guess I need to calculate the amount of characters the screen can hold given the font size and the window size, but fuck, that's a lot of work to do just for something that probably won't even work anyways.

Well, off to the code editor again. Time to inevitably waste my time doing something that won't work.

Yay, programming.

So I was looking over some code(from the backend team, not his) my friend(frontend dev) gave me, to see why it was performing slowly.
It was a piece of business logic, that performed operations on the main db (~100GB in size, so not too big).
A simple operation usually took upwards of A DAY to complete.
A quick calculation of the big O number of the algorithm gave me O(n^3+n^2+n). One operation usually took place on n=1000. This thing ran on an EXTREMELY powerful server with a lot of ram and managed to do ~10000 operations/second of that logic.
Even with that, that's still ~27hours for one operation.

I managed to reduce that logic to O(2n), meaning that it runs in ~0.2 seconds, which feels good, but;

FUCK YOU, YOU INCREDIBLY INCOMPETENT IDIOT, WHOEVER YOU ARE, YOU MORON THAT WROTE THIS PIECE OF BURNING TRASH! HOPE SATAN FUCKS YOU WITH THE UNHOLY HIV CACTUS FOR ALL ETERNITY!
PLEASE MAY I NEVER FIND YOU!

Some people just don't fucking understand that their ideas are shit. Or even if you have a usable idea that you can't make money on it.

I was watching Shark Tank and these guys go on with the simplest maps API app. Pretty much a single table database for where basketball games are. Then putting it on a map. That's it. And they were asked how they plan on making money and the answer was "better user experience". All you have is a fucking map! It's pointless. You're not making money on that unless you do a hell of a lot more!

The thing that really got me was how they were congratulated on learning how to make it. Good for you, it's great that you learned some programming for that. But while you did the simplest maps API plugin, someone with some machine learning junk was told that it wasn't good enough.

Definitely Godot Engine. One of the greatest and easiest Game Engines I have ever used! Lots of great features and there are getting more and more!

The inbuilt programming language GDScript is really awesome too! It's a custom language built extra for the Engine, which makes it super easy to use and integrate! The syntax is a bit like python but better.

Because it's not as old as unity or unreal engine, it's not as feature rich. But I think that's okay. It allows you to get used to the current existing features, and then heading on to the new ones.

What I really enjoy is that, just as in this community, you can just talk with the creators of the engine. Asking questions, suggesting features and discussing things! They'll answer nearly everything!

Not to mention the graphics! They are really good and are nearly able to compete against Unity!

There's also a visual language you can use. Just like Unreal Engine Blueprints! Never tried it tho...

The scenes system is very easy to understand. You basically have a lot of "components" which you can use in each of your scenes. This also allows for making simple extensions!

All in all, a great engine! If you are a game developer I can definitely recommend trying it out!

Normal day with some guy that worked at the company. the guy was in his 11 month when this happened. and this was just one of so many wtf moments with him.

Me: hey man, you're gotta work with some frontend stuff, we need you to run mysql(for the backend) and apache. so install mamp, is super easy to get that working.

Me: please just donwload the pkg from this link and click `next` until finish.

Dude: okay, will do

-- some 10 minutes later. --

Dude: hey man I got a problem

Me: Whaaaat? you shouldn't, that shit never gives problem, everyone(literally) have that installed in their macs

Dude: it's true, I got an error, it says: `mamp it's not compatible with osx` ...

Me: oh man, that's so strange, mamp is likely made just for osx(and windows), and also we got all the macs with at least 1 version behind the latest osx. :(

Dude: it's true. I need help with that

-- now I go to the guy's mac and see the `error` message --

Me: hey, this says nothing like being uncompatible man, this CLEARLY says that can't be opened for *reads the error for him* . man, don't make things up, at least try to translate the error and give me the exact information of your `error`.

Dude: ...

Me: man please... I know you have your issues with the language, I do too, a LOT, but I use google translator if I can't read the shit. I can't sit here with you as your translator. -___-

Hey, people's of devrant!

You guys seem to know a lot about this, so I'm going to ask this question here..

Can i have some recommendations for apps to use (Android) that respect privacy and are preferably enctypted?

Things I would like:

Google drive / Dropbox alternative

Image upload

A nice looking image viewer / gallery (I don't like the Samsung one)

An RSS feed reader.

Google docs alternative

Maybe a calendar / reminder app

I think that's it. Also feel free to mention other apps that you guys use on a regular basis

Send over the entire directory for a WordPress site we completely overhauled with new plugins, custom theme, redid content with visual composer, etc. I tell him to backup his site and then put everything I give you as fresh. He tells me he can't just wipe out his entire site that's unacceptable. I ask him what's the problem? he rambles on and says a lot of words that don't really mean anything then says security. so I call him out on it, what security issues do you have? well we have users and permissions setup he says. I explain That I copied his users table over when we did the redesign, so it's the exact same stuff. so I say again, why can't we just replace everything? well that's just not acceptable he says. I ask him again, what EXACTLY is your problem with replacing the site since I already addressed your security concern. he couldn't answer me so now we have another conference call tomorrow morning with more people from their team. I'll let you know how it goes.

tldr; clients are idiots, call them out for the dumb shit they say and have no response.

How it feels to be an intern : "Omg I helped people making an app in reactJS I feel like I improved a lot in the past months"

How it feels to come back at school : "omg I have trouble writing a simple algorithm I feel so dumb I'm the worst dev in the world"

That's the difference of working in a team with a great mood and close to no-stress AND studying while having to deal with social anxiety.

The conditions in which I work have a huge impact on the way I feel about myself, my skills and basically on my motivation.

Me: playing with snake.

Sees c++ going outer space.

Me: me likey. *Forgets snake* starts learning c++.

I mean learning how to write good c++ code. I can write code in c++ like I do in Python but that's not how c++ should be used.

Not a lot of jobs here about c++ but I'm into it. The control over performance. Liking it for the same reason I like and use linux. Control

Hello DevRanters!
I'm at UNI, but I'm always studying by my self.

I got to the point where I feel comfortable to start learning the BackEnd part.

I did a lot of research, and everyone says different things, and I don't trust them, I would prefer to take the word from someone on DevRant. I really can't decide, not only because of the different opinions, but also because I can't waste time on some language that It's not going to give me future.

How should I go about this? In what language should I start learning the BackEnd side?

Some people say that definitely not PHP, because it's a bad language. But other people say "learn PHP the right way, because It's not PHP that's shit, it's the developers", and they say that PHP7 it's better.
What language should I start in your opinion?

In terms of programing languages I only know JavaScript.
And I'm learning SQL at UNI, so it would be nice to use MySQL or similar as DB.

Thanks in advance! 😀

Uno Questione:

I "Bought" a copy of O'reilly's Learning Python. How much of the 1200 page monster is actually necessary/good learning material? Anyway, have a snek.

Made my first Node.js Todo list today! Got myself a new front end design tool, Bootstrap Studio (50% off). Learned about REST, using Node as an API and MongoDB and Angular! Had a lot of fun learning and I would recommend it to anyone that's a Node.js beginner. I want to do a video tutorial series on Node.js, is that a good idea?

Cannot understand those who are frustrated with it.
Sure, one can feel frustration when some project is not going as they were supposed to go, but that is life for ya, boi.

Without wanting to offend anyone it feels like devs who complain so much either do not actively search for a solution and learn shit properly and cry their soul out afterwards or they do search, but cannot find anything.
Patience is the solution. Do not let yourself fall down and stay strong.
Even if it takes a lot of willpower, retries, inner pain, patience and non-sleepy nights, you will and can do it. I believe in you.

My whole life was basically a psychological disaster.
I have had and still have depression and a lot of short frustrations from time to time, too, but I do not cry it out loud.
My high school is fucked up. In every single aspect. I am doing all-nighters almost every day. With maybe half an hour of sleep to get school projects done on time.
I cannot just say "fuck you. I am not gonna do this shit" to school, because that would affect my grades in a negative way. Same thing applies to you, as an employee, too. But at least you do not need to be afraid of getting bad grades.
Bad grades->not getting the desired degree->bad chance of finding a job
In your case:
Bad communication with boss->bad connection->bad chance of finding a job

But is that really so?
I do not think so. Nonetheless, you still can have a good chance of finding a job, if you have proven yourself to others in a great way. Everyone has bad times. Even with their bosses. That's normal. Being bad with someone does not make yourself bad in general.

The job world will still accept you, but school won't accept you again. Whenever I feel like the burnout is about to catch me, I take an immediate break and go outside. Take a walk in the sunset. Go to the forest. Run with music playing loudly. Swim. And other things like watching the stars in the silence of the night.

To finally come to an end here...
Do not make yourself feel bad that quickly and try to endure the pain. This is going to make you a better and stronger person.
If you cannot do it anymore (hitting the borders of burnout), take your time and do whatever makes you happy and treat yourself.
Life is not all about work. Were you born to be a worker? No. Were you born to be a slave of others? No.
What is holding you then? Let go of all the stress (for a minute). You are free.

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

I know we have a lot of talented people here. Piece of advice, what ever you build, believe in it. See it through. No matter how good of an idea incompleteness won't get you anywhere.
After all every other day we all analyze different successful products and say "huh... that's nothing. Even we can do that".
Well thats the difference "We" can do that, they DID it.

See your ideas through. Stay motivated =)

I really don't get all the Musk fans. I mean, sure you can find some value in Tesla or SpaceX, sure you can think theses companies are truly innovating. But why give all the credit to the rich businessman who seems to spent more time promoting himself than really working on science stuff, and not to all the ingeneers and creatives who are really putting some hard work on every day ? All Musk is really doing is running a business. He seems to do that pretty well, agreed, but after all it's "just" that: business. He's not the genius, nor the creative. He has money and invests it well, that's all.
I don't get why so many people give all the credit to him, even here on devrant where it should be logical to find more people supporting the real brains behind the tech.

"He has a vision about the future, he's imaginative..."

- Well that's bullshit.

Once again: he has money, a lot, and a certain skill about how to invest it (and about doing some proper marketing too), which companies to buy, etc. That don't make him such a great visionary about the future of the human being, just a great businessman. I'm sure you can find millions of people around the world with better ideas about the future, but they're not in his position. They're not rich, they're not CEOs, they're mostly unknown.

Stop follow the stream by glorifying businessmen just because medias are talking lot about them. Instead, know where the real talent (and work) is. Give credit to Musk employees, not to him.

A useful guide of general rules for junior devs, while asking questions to senior devs.

1) If you're a junior dev, you're going to not know stuff. A lot of stuff. That's perfectly fine and expected. The more you realise you don't know, the more you move forward.

2) If you don't know something, duckduckgo it. If after at least 1 hour and a max of 2 hours of searching you still don't get it, ask someone.

3) If the senior dev just gives the answer directly, it means they think you should've already known the answer.

4) If the senior dev just gives the reasoning behind it, but not the answer, it means you should know most of it, but you can probably arrive at the answer with a bit more reasoning and it's a unique problem.

5) If the senior dev gives you the answer with an explanation, it's a very good question and you will likely get to learn something you didn't know already.

Replace senior dev with stack overflow and it still works the same.

I don't know if anyone else here uses kik but there's something that's been bugging me for a while
Occasionally (frequently) bots start a conversation with you (the typical "come visit my porn website etc etc), right? Now, this has happened to me at least 20 times now, and EVERY single time, the bot's profile picture has loads of translucent yellow stars edited in, and I have no idea why
I can't think of a possible explanation for this, and I've put a lot of thought into it
Attached is a cropped version of what I mean

IF YOU UPDATE AN ADM PLATTFORM FOR FUCKS SAKE DON'T DO THE FOLLOWING THINGS:

1. ONLY DOCUMENTATE IT IN A POWERPOINT

2. WRITE DOWN IPs AND PORTS ONLY ON A WHITE-BORD

3. MOVE TOOLS TO OTHER SUBNETS OR DOMAINS WITHOUT PROPERLY KNOWING THE WAYS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM

4. USE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS AS RESET OPTION FOR LICENCE-MANAGEMENT ACCESS IF NO ONE KNOWS THE PW

5. LEAVE THE COMPANY THE DAY AFTER THE UPGRADE IS DONE

Because the guy who has to take care of the upcoming problems is not going to like you!

BUT having to deal with all of this at once would not be a problem if your, so called team (30 People who work with those applications e.g. as test-engineers) would actually work together instead of having that "not my daily business, I am going to drink coffee" attitude.

Apparently I am the only one who has enough balls to see, admit, and report a problem to our leadership.
This always leads to Me fixing the issue...
....that's alright I am learning a lot...
...BUT IF A TEAM-MATE, WHO HAS THE SAME DEGREE AS I AM GOING TO GET, LEAVES EARY BECAUSE: "HE DOES NOT KNOW WHATS WRONG", IT TRIGGERS ME!!!

- The apprenticeship guy

PS Needless to say hundreds of clients have access to those systems and I worked through a shittload of official tool docs just to get to know the tools first...

My most personal rant to date...

The company I work for operates in an industry that might experience the next Kodak moment. The industry is really feeling the knife against it's throat at the moment. The company I work for is a dinosaur, so to say. And almost everyone within fight to continue staying as a dinosaur.

I am the sole dev of said company, and I am so alone. Not just literally, but also in thought and action.

I've been flagging the possibilities and dangers of the digitizing aspect we're experiencing for the last six or eight years (yep, I've been around for quite some time), but I feel that I'm not heard. I am that grumpy, sour manifestation of everything digital that they hate so much. At least that's what it feels like.

I am so fed up with this situation. But my options are limited. There aren't many dev jobs around, and those who've tried to hire me offered a salary reduction of about $12K, which is quite a lot. I've been offered jobs in other parts of the country, but I have family matters to tend to, so I can't move at the moment. I've looked for companies offering a job where I'm not required to work from the office, but in my country these seem to be far apart. I could go freelance, but I am too scared to do so. A stable income is neccessary to put food on the table for my family.

Sigh,

It's really hard trying to be a self taught developer. Not the work, but the constant lessons.

Today my boss was like you should do bachelors and then your job here is placed and stuff and now my family members were here talking to my parents about how I'm naive and should pursue bachelors.

I get it, they're caring but I chose this way. I took a year to think through my decision and the possibility that I might fail.

They're nice people. I like them and appreciate them caring about me but all of this preaching drives me crazy. I know I'll have a great life if I do bachelors. I have the passion and skills and can achieve stuff after graduation but that's not what I want.

I care more about my industry. I want to show self taught developers are devoted and passionate and can do stuff and not just snore off like most graduates that think they know so much but can't do shit.

No offense to people with degrees, if you got it that's good for you.

Honestly, a lot of times I feel like I should just go and use those 4 years and get a degree. But 4 years? I think I better spend that money on building companies. That experience would be much better.

Anyways my heart is getting heavy from all of this thinking. Need to rest.

For fucks sakes people.

Ocamms razor is a very helpful problem solving tool.

HOWEVER IT ISN'T AN EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING A PROPER ARCHITECTURE, OR SHITTING ON IT, HAMMERING RANDOM IFs EVERYWHERE, USING A METRIC SHITTON OF MAGIC NUMBERS HAVING A LOT OF REDUNDANT CODE AND ZERO DOCUMENTATION!
YOU CAN'T DO THAT "just because it's the simplest solution"! NO. THAT'S JUST UNACCEPTABLE. YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON.

GO TO HELL YOU STUPID SCUM WITH YOUR PILE OF CHOPSTICKS BURNING THAT IS YOUR CODEBASE!
But before that, would you mind touching these two wires definitely not connected to the mains?

A lot of devs I meet are pretty cool but a handful, including some on here, seem to think the world revolves around them and they deserve to have the ground dusted off in front of them.

That's fucking narcissistic and you need a reality check if you're like that. It's great you're passionate about your knowledge but you're not out here taking down terries and saving children from burning buildings, like calm down with the self righteousness

Just had to get that out after one too many "how dare anyone looketh unto me unless I request it in advance" posts. Like chill out, you're not that special 🙄

My problem with a lot of free resources/class assignments is we're being forced to make useless shit. For instance, an interactive textbook we use has some stupid fucking turtle assignments.

Why not make it something relevant? One of the first things i ever made was a Fahrenheit to Celcius converter. That's a real world application, since not many can calculate that math in their head.

A year ago I wrote a SDK on PS4 DevKit, and when I looked at the spec I was like "Wow 8GB RAM, that's a lot to play with".
But then the OS takes about 4GB, and we have some huge textures (0.5GB) , and pretty dense point clouds (some more RAM, ka-ching!), need to leave some memory for the application on top of the SDK...we ended up having about 0.5GB for ourselves.
I was really bummed out, and this feeling is pretty much identical to the one I have when I see my total income, and then what's actually left after taxes and all the other shit.

devRant broke the 50000 rant barrier... that's a lot of bitchin'!

Keep on ranting!!!

You know what, let me jump in on the "I hate PHP" bandwagon.

A couple months ago I upgraded my mail servers unattended. Roundcube got fucked for a couple of months, and I figured.. fuck it, I can still use Dovecot for authenticating with desktop mail clients like K-9.
Recently I unfucked it, turns out that it was an issue with the sock file in php-fpm. That's also when I noticed that PHP apparently hardcodes in its current version in the bloody socket file. Because why the fuck wouldn't you? It makes upgrades so much fucking easier!!! Said no fucking sysadmin ever!!!

And today I upgraded one of my mail servers to Ubuntu Server 18.04, finally, after a lot of hesitation. Bad decision, because now PHP got fucked YET AGAIN.
Again an issue with socket files? I have no fucking idea. systemctl shows no failed services (because you know PHP, why would you fail your service with an error message instead of throwing a meaningless 502 Bad Gateway, right?!!) and looking at the config files, well the socket file got its new php-fpm 7.2 file (still got the fucking version number hardcoded in) and thus I changed that socket file location in /etc/php/7.0...

devRant may just have been my rubber duck.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STINKING FUCKING PILE OF SHIT CALLED FUCKING PHP KEEP THE FUCKING 7.0 DIRECTORY OUT THERE WHEN YOU'VE UPGRADED, WITHOUT EVEN HAVING THE FUCKING BALLS TO RENAME THE MOTHERFUCKING DIRECTORY TO 7.2, IF YOU'RE GOING TO HARDCODE IN YOUR VERSION NUMBERS ANYWAY?!!!!!

Bloody fucking pile of fucking junk!!!!

My current new boss is pretty awesome. When he arrived, we were a lot of juniors dev crumbling under pressure. He directly went to product team and to sales team and totally reduced our workload to something acceptable.
He values sane work environment a lot, and I think that's what make a good boss

why do i have an iphone?

well, let's start with the cons of android.

- its less secure. this isn't even arguable. it took the fbi a month or something (i forget) to break into an ios device

- permission, permissions, permissions. many of the android apps i use ask for the not obscure permissions.
· no, you don't need access to my contacts
· no, you don't need access to my camera to take notes
· no, you don't need access to my microphone to send messages
· no, you don't need access to my saved passwords to be a functioning calculator

- not being able to block some apps from an internet connection

- using an operating system created and maintained by an advertising company, aka no more privacy

- i like ios's cupertino more than material design, but that's just personal preference

pros of ios:

- being able to use imessage, at my school if you don't have an iphone you're just not allowed to be in the group chat

- the reliability. i've yet a data loss issue

- the design and feel. it just feels premium

- if i could afford it, ios seems like a lot of fun to develop for (running a hackintosh vm compiled a flutter app 2x as fast as it did on not-a-vm windows)

so that's why i like iphones
google sucks

Damn that's a lot of hours every day. He/she has top 1 on Wakatime leaderboards.

Good job, whoever you are.

(Oh, and guess that a Mac CAN be used as a dev machine 😉)

So there's that project with my coworker. We splitt up the classes, 10 to be implemented by him, 10 by me.

Fast Forward to 4 weeks before deploy.
Coworker: Your stuff logs a lot of stuff. It's not very clear and a liiittle to verbouse. 5 entries per second? Too much!
Me: Okay, you're right. Let me fix that.

2 Days later I look at his logs at runtime. He logs EVRY SQL statement and their results! In a batch that processes a 10'000 of customers!
He points out: That's useful stuff and it's not that much. It's needed for debuging.

My face: 😦

Finally after a couple of years, we finally finished our game for... Windows phone. When we started the only real choice was to develop in silverlight.

Now silverlight has been discontinued and microsoft released uwp, no real help to convert to uwp (I know mobilize bridge exists, but it is not very good) since many features does not exist yet in uwp :/

But hey that's expected right? But couldn't microsoft at least ensure performance of silverlight apps on win10 mobile??? We have used a lot of time optimizing that the game runs smoothly on crap phones on wp8.1, but highend phones on win10 lags....

Thanks microsoft for taking a change :/

I love one particular old game. It's called Port Royale (the first one). Why? Because the game crashes a lot. Players know that, devs knew that. It's so old and unknown to people who haven't played that devs don't even fix it. But, but... why do you write it here?

This game tought me autosaving! Yeah, they have autosaving in [5, 10, 15] minute intervals, but the game is so fast, that even a little change you do will cripple your whole economy. Not to mention the saving mechanism is partially broken (or that's what the log says, fml). By broken I mean it tries to autosave, but sometimes it crashes the whole thing, just because it can. A game with special effects - crashing in _intervals_!

Because of this lovely game I have a habit of saving and staging (or even commiting). Maybe they should be proud for making such a bug. Saved me once again a minute ago when I managed to crash Emacs with Python. :D

The thing I like about arch linux getting messed up is that it's a really cool exercise. For someone like me who doesn't have a job rn so whenever arch gets messed up somewhere I find it motivating (+ a lot of fuuuu) to fix a problem. People say "be ready to spend time fixing your OS". That's exactly the shit that made me learn about the OS. All the commands and linux stuff I learned were because of Arch linux.

Thank you Arch Linux.

Btw I use Arch if you hadn't figured it out.

Last night, after reading one of my computer science textbooks, I couldn't go to sleep because I came to the realization that computers will never be able to think like humans. Because a machine does what it's told to do. It is incapable of thinking outside of the box. What will need to happen is that parts of a human or some biological organism, essentially the squishy stuff, will need to be combined with a computer.

What I mean to say is that computers are good at answering questions in an absolute way. Essentially, you give it a problem and it will click away at it until some output pops out. Yes advanced AI exists, like Alpha Go. But again it's only doing what it was programmed to do. Looking at ways to play a game and answering for that question. In this case, playing a game of Go. I'll guarantee you, that not once did it stop to ask **why** it was playing Go. It was simply__just__ playing Go. But that's it. That's the limit. We give machines data/statistics and we let me them give us an answer based off of that data or input.

This is how I imagine intelligent machines will come about. A biological brain will be combined with a machine. The brain will be doing alot of the questions, and the machine will do a lot of the calculations. Together, they'll be able to answer hard questions. The heavy calculations will be left to the machine, and the heavy thoughts will be left to the brain.

I mean technically we're already doing that. But imagine a machine/brain computer that does not sleep, can't get sidetracked and will never procrastinate. That would be a scary machine.

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.

I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'

I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out

>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '

now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!

How to make that clear!

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

The great epic continues!

I just want to start off by saying a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who commented on my last post about this situation. You were all incredibly helpful. I fucking love you guys!

JoshBent, Bitwise, Michelle, FrodoSwaggins and PerfectAsshole I will tag you glorious humans so you know I love you.

Anyway, the saga continues. It turns out, there was a second contract alluded to within my initial contract that only became valid once I was a "senior member" which I became after the previous senior abandoned ship.

I am stuck until January, legally. I can be sued for damages if I leave before the contract with the client ends and I can be held personally responsible for anything that occurs due to my leaving before completion of said contract.

So basically, I'm fucked. That's the gist of it. Thankfully the company I was supposed to be leaving for have been really amazing about it all and have said that they'll wait until I am officially, legally able to leave. They offered legal advice as well.

My current boss hasn't paid me for last month yet, he basically refuses to talk about the incident, the other managers are angry at everything and want to talk but don't want to leave and two people have already quit on the spot this week.

I'm in a very confused mindset currently where I'm happy that I know where I stand, I'm angry that I'm basically a prisoner and I'm confused as to what I should be doing. I feel like I should be doing substandard work but it goes against so much of me.

I'm sure I've left a lot out but I just want to keep those interested updated and to vent a little.

!rant

I see a lot of crap about junior vs senior devs nowadays. I think the distinctions are small.

In reality senior devs have been burnt more in the past by their own mistakes or have seen mistakes by other people. That's about it.

What other distinguishing characteristics have you found?

Seriously...!? That's a lot of sex! (Windows user here)

*cracks knuckles*

Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.

So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.

Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.

Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.

I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

I watched some of markipliers videos back when I watched yt

I felt down and like I wasn't giving my best and stuff
Searched for "markiplier inspiration"

Marks video "believe in yourself" is just that
Inspirational af

Say what you want about him, I guess there are people who think he's about the money or stuff, but no matter how you look at it he is a good guy.
He makes you laugh when you need it (if you get the idea of watching his videos)
He has a kind heart, he is a fucking inspiration on himself, inspiration in person.

Comparing myself to myself, I still think I can do better, but that's also what he encourages, set your own goals and just try to be a bit better than yourself
Only compare yourself to your past self.

I may not be as great as I want to be, but I am a lot fucking better than I was a year ago.

And that's what it's all about.

I'm gonna try a bit harder as I go, I wanna BE BETTER as he says, I am going to be fucking better.
It won't be instant, but I'll try.

I hope some one who reads this crap will get inspired a bit as well.
Believe in yourself, and know that others believe in you as well.

...His hair looked better in blue.

I have this coworker who praises himself or being vegan an caring a lot about the world and his health, but smokes and drinks quite a lot. He also is very friendly with everyone but then he privately complains about them with me and goes back to be friendly.

I could ignored this behavior until it started affecting me. Now he is just passive aggressive with everyone, including me. The kind of guy who sends a slightly bitter comment with a wink at the end almost everyday. The kind of guy who will talk to you non-stop like he is your best friend and next morning don't even look at you. The one who will try to teach you some lesson whenever you say something publicly (which he did tons of times and ended up fucking up because he had no idea what he was talking about).

I feel like ignoring him from now on no matter what he says, because he is only waiting for the perfect opportunity to make you feel like a not caring human being so he can keep standing out and controlling everyone. Yes, if you ever try to organize something, he will make sure to criticize you.

So... that's it.

One thing I've learned in the past year. Never start working on a task that's based on a lot of assumptions.

You know what really grinds my gears? When people criticize a programming language but uses edge cases and stuff that can be avoided by using the tried and true "don't be an idiot". Take for instance JavaScript, a language I like and a language that has a lot you can criticize. But I feel like a lot of peoples criticism isn't warranted.

What's that? No ints? Use parseInt or Math.floor.

What are you saying? == works in strange ways? Yes, that's what we have === for.

Type coercion is wonky? Think it's weird how string + int works differently than string - int? Wanna string with number + - + - - + - - etc? Don't! Don't add strings and ints, don't subtract strings and ints. You can't in statically typed languages and you aren't supposed to in dynamically typed

Adding arrays and objects, arrays and arrays, objects and objects etc. is inconsistent? Why are you trying to do that?

Adding floats together gives odd results? Now we're getting somewhere! And Mozilla responded to that with a method called toFixed.

Declaring variables with var doesn't always work that well? Use let and const

Then there's this weird attitude that some people I've met have, where they will complain about the module system and how "well you rely on the community for those packages" as if it's a bad thing. And then coming with the "well you don't know what the (open source) packages do internally" as if I (for the most part) give a shit. Then they'll swear by companies like Zend or Microsoft as if they can't just stop supporting the languages they use. Maybe it's just because I like community content more because of video game mods.

Wanna criticize JS, then there's plenty to talk about. Like the built in date object is basically shit. Or how in NodeJS you can have node_modules in your node_modules. Or how classes don't really have the best syntax. Left-Pad. And so on (it's too late for me to be able to remember much more).

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

A colleague just committed his username and password in git. When I kindly informed him, he told me that there are a lot of things on whiteboards around the office that should not be there. Oh, if that's the case, committing your credentials to git is fine.

We all make mistakes. But your response to them is everything.

We have a new hire, and he doesn't know much so he is receptive when given feedback on better ways to handle a situation...Or at least, he appears that way. Until the next time and he didn't listen at all.

Today I'm working on the front end to match his API calls. I ask him about a list of options for one of the fields, as he didn't provide that info initially. No worries, there was a lot, easy to miss. He responds with a list of ~100 options, which he copied and pasted from, I'm assuming, their documentation. I tell him that's too many options to hard code, as there is an easy chance to have an error or for there to be one added or deleted, and ask if there is an API endpoint to get the list.

He then asks if I need the key and value, or just key. I tell him if he needs the value(human readable) then he can send me just the value, otherwise both. He says he just needs the key, so I let him know that I need both then, as the value is human readable. He says okay.

He proceeds to make the endpoint, I test it. Then I look at the code he wrote. Not only did he not send me both, he just sent the keys, but he hard coded all 100 keys as opposed to making the call to the external API.

Sorry if I'm just ignorant but: I see a lot of rants about designers expecting pixel perfect implementations of their designs. Is that for real? In my world there is hardly ever pixel values at all. It's not paper publishing. It's web, things have to scale. For an iOS app where you have a few known screen sizes - fine. But web? Come on...

And that's without even going into CSS or browser quirks.

Tuesdays at work suck. This is something I've put a lot of thought into.

Take Monday for instance, we love to hate him, when it comes to Mondays we all know the score we tell Monday where he can go and he takes that and owns it. He knows we hate him and we all know where we stand.

Wednesday is hump day, not great but we know we're halfway through the week. Thursday gets us a little excited cos we can see the end of the week.

Friday is the one we've been waiting for and we love him, Saturday and Sunday are bliss.

Tuesday... What's Tuesday got? It's just a day, there's nothing going on with Tuesdays.

Well except this week, in the UK we had Monday off as a statutory vacation, so this week, this week Tuesday is the day we love to hate, he's now got all this beginning of the week rage directed at him. The other days are unaffected, Thursday and Friday still have their thing, Wednesday still marks the half way point.

Monday has buggered off and let Tuesday be something for a day, I don't think he can take it. If he could Monday would probably go into retirement. Monday probably has more hatred directed towards it than Katie Hopkins (and that's saying something).

In short, no, no I do not want to get out of bed and go to work today, but I will, cos that's just what we do, but fuck you Tuesday.

Fuck you with a bag of spanners...

...Sideways...

...With habanero sauce...

... And a pineapple.

TL;DR: What's cool about your company or what you'd like to have in your company?

I work at a small company (<50 employee) but it has some time around (I'd say almost 20 years or so).

The thing is, the boss here is cheap or inattentive or outdated or all previous options. This translates into a company stuck in the 90's management ways. Well, maybe late 90's.

So we don't have a lot of 'cool' or nice things here; and I've been thinking of coming up with a proposal of a progressive update of some things that gives us (the employees) some sort of identity.

For example, I think that small things like personalized notebooks or post-its or t-shirts give the employees some sort of sense of belonging. We don't have any of that. The only thing we have are business cards and I find them completely useless since I don't visit customers and all my communication with them is via email.

One thing I find very cool is when one employee starts in a company, in their first day they get a 'welcome kit' (example picture): notebook, pen, cup, t-shirt... It may look like stupid shit but it's way better and more motivating than the "Sit here and that's it" welcome I got when I started here.

So I wanna do a proposal of this sort of things that we can adopt, and I wanna know what do you find cool in your company or what would you like your company did so you'd feel more confortable or 'proud' (maybe that's not the word) of working there.

Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "

Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.

What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.

I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.

Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();

Just been offered an almost 30% pay rise from my current shit company. This along with more benefits (equity), time off and the boss being around a lot less along with much more freedom...

... I'm not sure what to do. The pay rise alone is enough. I'm young and in this shitty economy that's no small amount of extra help. I could get a mortgage with that. Finally own property.

Should I take it?

Today is the day I try to use single quotes only. Have always used double bc I think they look better...but damn that's a lot of wasted time going to shift! I could've "made the world a better place" already!

Looks like it's time to update the old CV... Christ have I really been here for 8 years.

It's been fun, the most fun time of my life but with new owners breathing on everything stuffs starting to fall to shit.

To use a SysOps analogy there are category 1 - critical warnings ringing in my ears.

I can accept a lot, but I'm genuinely concerned for the future of this place, and after trying to fix things for long enough to realise the new owners are the ones drilling the holes in the ship it's time to sink or swim, and I don't feel like sinking.

To quote billy Joel,
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
Mama if that's movin' up
Then I'm movin' out

I was asked to add full page takeover announcements to a website, even though there's a perfectly reasonable announcement system already in place.
I objected on religious grounds - doing that would undoubtedly get me sent to developer hell (also knows as COBOL).
But the client wasn't convinced so I made them a demo. I immediately got a message back saying "wow, that's a lot more annoying than I thought, please remove it".
Of course all of this was done in a separate branch, so this blasphemous code would never be in my master commit history.

Proxmox team, go fuck yourselves.

Now I'm sure that I'll receive a lot of flack for this, but hear me out.

I've tried Proxmox and was quite pleased with its web UI. But I hate how much it locks me into their own little ecosystem.

I want to use btrfs on my drives. Why is this impossible, yet the hack that is ZoL is your obvious alternative? An alternative wherein I can't even compile and run my own kernel, because then ZoL suddenly fails? And don't you tell me to compile your stock config, when it's well over 15GB large in your source tree.

Proxmox is literally the MacOS of Linux distributions. Which was even more so made clear by me being called an idiot by possibly wanting to run Same on the PVE host. Because why on Earth would sysadmins want to?! Why on Earth would sysadmins be competent for wanting to?!!

You know what? I'll just convert those Proxmox servers to Arch and say fuck you to all the bells and whistles that's Proxmox' web UI. Because at least Arch allows me to make my own fucking choices, limited only by what's supported by the Linux operating system.

Perhaps Proxmox will consider btrfs stable in 2021. Because you know, despite it being stable today in 2018, Debian and Proxmox alike live 3 years in the past, i.e. 2015. I hate the Debian ecosystem because of that, but boy do I hate Proxmox even more so. Bloody fucking piece of shit it is!!! 😡

As a person from low-paying country, how do I reconcile with the fact that for the same work, and the same 8 hours, I get 1/3 of what a person in Germany does? In my previous team (same company), one of my teammates was from Germany. The same team, the same work, but he happened to earn a lot more.

This bothers me a lot sometimes. I have seen people requesting to be transferred to another country, and being denied, presumably because of the salary difference. Then, the person leaves, and someone in Australia gets hired. So, rather than moving a veteran person of whom you know fits your company culture to a higher-paying country, you let him go and hire a newbie in an equally-expensive country? What the fuckity fuck?

And to my friends from high-paying countries, especially managers: you don't have to feel bad, but have some common decency. If you come to my country, do not say "oh gosh, everything here is so cheap," or "the dinner for the whole team costs less than buying my family of four a dinner back home." That's offensive as fuck. If that's the case, fucking give me a raise you cheap fuck!

Just shipped my old pc off to a datacenter with 28TB worth of spinning platters in there (12 drives) and now enjoying the benefits that ensue. That's a lot of space for a pc I have had for 11 years.

!Rant

So FedEx delivered a 20-30lb package to my doorstep... I had a lot of trouble just getting it inside, I imagined carrying it all the way...

Am I weak or are those guys superhuman? or maybe that's the downside of being too techy? We're soon all become weaklings?

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

So, just pulled another all-nighter..

On our platform I switched a quite big customer to another stock keeping system to pull them into automatic FEFO handling etc. Just a better stock keeping system overall.. I made it.. *self hi-5*

Evidently the crons caught that change, and CLEARED ALL THE STOCK LEVELS as they're now managed by said system...

Had to pull the counts, locations, expiry dates and lot numbers from the history table and old database fields, add them to an Excel sheet and then add all gathered locations by hand back into the new system, whilst also setting the new settings for them.

39 unique products that were gathered over 190+ sku objects... (Somebody didn't get object oriented, or was trying to KISS themselves, clearly...)

That's 6 hours of extra work for a stupid fuck up.. Oops? (:

I remember that there is a lot of things I want to buy/try
+I want to buy a car and tune it the way I like it
+Try pro racing
+Try snowboarding
+Try longboarding
+I want to buy a flat/house
+I want to buy cool tech
+I want to travel by car
+I want to open my own business
+I want to support my parents when they will need it
=Shit that's a lot of money, I need more

Well, I need to improve my skills to be better and vecome more valuable at work to get better salary
And I need some cool project idea that I can implement and sell later

That's an interesting life, you know. I want a lot, but that really motivates me to become a better specialist and that's not a problem - I love to code, I love IT sphere. So that's going to be an exciting journey :D

why the fuck do these mother fuckers have to give information to the ones responsible for designing the fucking application on the approval fase so I have to redesign some areas and spend a lot of time doing shit I could do once...
and that's not new information... no... I could handle it... it's fucking things you know since your fucking birth!!! fuck you and your shit talk!!!

Got back home from my last therapy session. Situation was kind of strange. I had only done about two sessions but my therapist told me they wouldn't be a good fit for me as I have a pretty good grasp of what my issues are and what I want to do to fix them.

Thing is, I'm an introverted person. And I work with people who are much more extroverted than me. And that's not really surprising, most Americans are to a fault extremely extroverted and it drives me nuts.

I hate their gas guzzling trucks and suv's that haul almost nothing so they can go to Walmart to buy shit they don't need. I hate our advertising with it's whoring to the public. I hate our media for being shallow as fuck. I hate our politicians who whore out capitalism to the lowest fucking bidder to get elected.

I do like some American companies though, and we have a lot of pretty locations you can see. I like Minneapolis, I'd probably like Seattle and Portland too but I've never been there.

I don't know. I think I'm at a breaking point in my frustration with living in the States, and I need to decide next year if I want to make a call to leave the country or decide on a different state to live in. Someplace that's far less conservative than Iowa. I'm single, I could manage to make a major move change without it affecting anyone but me.

I'm feeling a bit tense. I just want to write code and calm the fuck down a couple levels.

Sorry if I've been pissy. :(

So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).

The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.

We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.

We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.

In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)

The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)

I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)

Feel free to ask about anything concerning it!