While the world is busy changing their WhatsApp status, Facebook status, Instagram status...
I'm here, sitting before my laptop, looking at my build status...

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

LinkedIn is an alternative reality unhooked from the rest of the world, where hypocrisy and arrogance meet, creating Leaders, Experts and Analysts.

- Every company is an industry leader globally.
- Every offer is life-changing.
- Every normal person suddenly is an expert in his field
- Each candidate is an expert in time management, customer relationships, and software development priorities.
- They are all happy to share their achievements in a disinterested way
- They all deal with important issues, with great reflections on the meaning of life and reality around us
- Each written post usually starts with a question followed by a life experience
- Companies are dynamic, they change their internal processes on a daily basis

Please shoot me, I've had enough of this shit.

- Few companies are leaders globally
- The offers you make are traps and I always have to look for where the bullshit is.
- You're not an expert in your field if you've been doing the same thing for 10 years without moving your ass out of that chair.
- If you were a time management expert, I wouldn't have to call you every week for unresolved tasks, and I wouldn't even have to do 150 meetings to postpone the goals set. Exactly what is your experience with the customer? Because by heart shutting up and always saying yes is not a good way to get the job done.
- I have great news for you. Nobody gives a shit about your work successes. At most they're envious.
- If you really are such a deep and introspective person... how the fuck is it that working with you is hell?
- Copying a quote from a website and then building a narrative on it doesn't automatically make you a superstar
- Companies, especially the largest ones, take years to change and if they do it is because there is the economic motivation behind it, not because they are visionaries.

This rant was written by scrolling through my LinkedIn feed.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

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...

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

Changing default branch name from "master" to "main" is just one more entry in the already very long list of "things sane people must do because some retarded american woke up one day and decided to be offended".
I am so fucking tired of the entire world having to accommodate to the first-world-problems of some spoiled brat just because they happen to be american.

I am an I.T Admin currently responsible for the URS, Validation, oversight of outsourced development and deployment of a new application for our company...

I've been saying once a week now for 2 fucking months that this thing will be ready to deploy at the end of the week.

With enough technical knowledge I know the hell business people put developers through, the lack of contextual understanding of the Job between the two sides is insane.

(I mean holy shit when you tab through various fields, even that ordering needs to be explicitly programmed.)

I refuse to put the pressure on our devs that I am told too, I cant submit a request and phone ten minutes later to ask if itll be done today, people plan their lives, the devs have other clients and projects... what the mother of fuck makes us so special that they must drop everything.

On top of that all the testing I do over and over and over and over reveals some pretty huge operational risks and I keep making changes so as to not blow up the operations of half our company.

I am not saying my boss is horrible or anything but Holy Hell, most people just can't put themselves in someone else's shoes for five short minutes

I try to please my boss while trying to protect my devs from abuse and sadly it results in me being in the middle of two sides playing tug of war and it is ripping me apart...

Why can't people just be more understanding and communicate and understand better... But don't worry all you beautiful game changing, world improving devs... I will always have your back

Today was a day at work that I felt like I made a significant contribution. It was not a lot of code. Actually it was a difference of 3 characters.

I am developing an industrial server so that my employer can provide access to their machines to enterprise industrial systems. You know, the big boys toys. Probably in fucking java...

Anyway, I am putting this server on an embedded system. So naturally you want to see how much serving a server can serve. In this case the device in more processor starved than memory starved. So I bumped up the speed of the serving from 1000mS to 100mS per sample. This caused the processor to jump from 8% of one core (as read from top) to 70%. Okay, 10x more sampling then 10x approx cpu usage. That is good. I know some basic metrics for a certain amount of data for a couple of different sampling rates.

Now, I realized this really was not that much activity for this processor. I mean, it didn't seem to me that it "took much" to see a large increase of processor usage. So I started wondering about another process on the system that was eating 60 to 70 % all the time. I know it updated a screen that showed some not often needed data from its display among controlling things. Most of the time it will be in a cabinet hidden from the world. I started looking at this code and figured out where the display code was being called.

This is where it gets interesting. I didn't write this code. Another really good programmer I work with wrote this. It also seemed to be pretty standard approach. It had a timer that fired an event every 50mS. This is 20 times per second. So 20 fps if you will. I thought, What would happen if I changed this to 250mS? So I did. It dropped the processor usage to 15%! WTF?! I showed another programmer: WTF?! I showed the guy who wrote it: WTF?! I asked what does it do? He said all it does it update the display. He said: Lets take to 1000mS! I was hesitant, but okay. It dropped to 5%!

What is funny is several people all said: This is running kinda hot. It really shouldn't be this hot.

Don't assume, if you have a hunch, play with it if its safe to do so. You might just shave off 55 to 60 % cpu usage on your system.

So the code I ended up changing: "50" to "1000".

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

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

Looks like despite 20-30 years on the market all popular text / spreadsheet editors are still loading whole file to memory.

What the fucking wankers. WTF are they doing whole day besides changing menu layout and icon colors ?

Clearly development today is lead by bunch of idiots from marketing department accompanied with HR hiring social network self made models.
What a fucked up world.
Let’s add AI to our software but fails to open 150MB csv file.

Great job everyone. Great job.

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!

Teach skills, because the world of technology is constantly changing.

I'm honestly so happy and grateful to be in the world of web development. It's an amazing space to be in when you enjoy solving problems.

Consistently fast evolving and ever changing technologies means new and exciting problems are endless!

But I swear to all that is motherfucking holy, if I have to keep solving exactly the same problems over and over because the place I work at won't let me provide permanent solutions to old problems... I'm going. To. Lose. My. Freaking. Mind

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier

Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.

I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.

My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.

I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.

What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.

Please do not make assumptions..

When you create a world class e-shop and if you detect a person is browsing from some EU country, don't assume he's fluent in Spanish [?].

Aliexpress detects I'm from LT and I have no idea how to change my language. I don't understand spanish enough to find langg settings and changing the url does not work

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

Just learnt perfectly what the below joke means:

'I wanted to improve the world, but they wouldn't give me the source code'

I really don't understand why the world is full of obsolete processes that people fight against daily when changing things ever so slightly could take the weight of the world off their shoulders. The same thing goes for my work, I work in finance, and we use a remote app built in Windows forms (not xaml or wpf, the original forms) and it's insecure, slow, buggy, and crashes whenever you press ESC (yes, really). Even worse, I've offered to rewrite their whole network for nothing, just the improvement to people's lives. And they say no! WELL FUCK YOU FOR BEING A PLAGUE ON THE FUCKING WORLD! Why do people insist on staying behind the times when the world could be such a beautiful place?!?

whenever i tell my dad about a technology that is going way beyond our imagination and tell him about the consequences of it and how we should worry about that
then he watches some random tv show about internet security/cyber security and various algorithms (very abstract) which are currently changing the world and how we should care about our data and what the consequences of X technology is...
he be like: "oh is that true? that's interesting, how does that work?"
i'm like😑 dad, i already told you about that😩

ever had similar experience?

Yet another rant on cooperate world

The other day my colleague was telling me that he was with very senior architect (so called architect, who keeps on changing things on the fly) and when my colleague was telling that he doesn't have resources to work with, this senior architect opened up stash (Atlassian Git) and opened up profiles with names and was looking at commits in the git...and said "this guy doesn't have commits for long time...he is free"

WTF.... 0 0

Last night I looked at an Android app.
Going to put it bluntly, I don't like java much.

But Android takes it to a whole new level.
I was talking to our (SlimRoms) framework dev about how the database transactions used to take 400ms, and it was cut down to 10ms by, changing to xml with some kind of a reflector (so xml would be saved in the background).
This is atrocious. As a web developer, I live in a world where you can do thousands of transactions in that time (albeit on faster hardware).

So how is it that all of the abstractions in Android add up to a single read/insertion in Android (and I'm talking about an app written by Google) takes 400ms?

Every time I go in that channel to talk to them, I find something screwed up. Gah.

Let me introduce you to sys. admin + network admin + teacher at our school... She gave us "materials" to study for our school-leaving exams (called matura here - wiki that shit) so I looked at it and just had to comment everything that's wrong (and that's only the first paragraph)...

Apart from making utterly useless documents she also likes to think she is the best in the world and what she says is right and everyone is wrong. Networks that she builds crash 8 times a month, she can't install proper drivers and believes that open source and GNU/Linux is evil. (She also lives by herself, is around 48 years old, is a lesbian(not that it is a bad thing - just for context) and got one brilliant teacher who actually knew what she was saying and doing fired because she broke up with her)

Thinking about it - no wonder my classmates are all so confused and stressed... she can't teach and says bullshit like printers work with the RGB color space and when confronted she would shout that there are no printers that use CMYK, she has never seen one so they do not exist. (only to proceed changing CMYK ink cartridges in the printer)... I mean it's good for me because I get to teach pretty girls programming and informatics but I am sorry for the boys... Unfortunately I don't have the patience to teach someone programming and informatics unless they are a girl and I see a chance to evaluate that person's qualities to be a girlfriend.

I am SOOO fucking sick of being asked if our website and gaming servers are going to be GDPR compliant. All these game owners in a panic changing everything they do just to conform to this law.

Fuck GDPR. In all reality COME AT ME BITCH. The EU wants to grow a pair of balls and act like the world internet police? Bring it the FUCK on. You can't even stop pirating in your own country, so how the FUCK are you going to regulate and enforce this law on HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of servers, when your punk ass government can't even shutdown a single torrenting website.

Give me a fucking break, and shame on you pussies for allowing it. All you people running around scared acting like your private gaming servers are important. I give a shit less how much work you put into your server. I have put more work than most anyone else, but you don't see me trying to act self important as if my gaming server is some fortune 500 company.

Your server isn't important and neither are you. The government doesn't give a shit about your server so can we all just stop acting like this fucking matters. NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOUR SERVER.

NO ONE is going to come and sue you for not complying. GDPR is for business, and anyone that wants to argue no look it says right here it applies to all is a fucking MORON. Do you idiots stop and think or do you just believe everything typed out on paper.

THEY CANT ENFORCE THIS ON EVERYONE. They don't have the resources. So use your fucking heads and stop being so fucking scared of a law that has no resources to stop you. THEY CAN"T DO ANYTHING. EU and whoever made their polices, I DARE them to try and touch my server, I WANT them to start something with me, just so I can show the rest of the world why the Internet is still the wild west and why they have no power over me.

You think pirate bay is the only one who knows how to hide their server? You think pirate bay is the only one who keeps backups of their server to be able to re release in an instant somewhere else in the world? Bitch get real this is the internet, a place where a 5 year old can buy hand grenades from the Red Silk Road, and you wanna talk to me about your privacy? Go fuck yourself.

It's not my problem some douche bag went onto a site that used his personal information in the wrong manner. So how about you do what everyone else does and browse ANONYMOUSLY. But no it would be to easy for governments to make their own citizens responsible. Instead they have to hold all of YOUR hands, because you people are to stupid to protect yourself.

Wake the fuck up world, and stop being a bunch of whining little brats who cry for the government to bubble wrap your world so you can live safer. Natural selection is long overdue for a lot of morons still breathing air.

I learned to program with Game Maker, downloading examples and changing variables to see what they did. After that I wanted to make websites so I followed tutorials and just see what happened if I changed variables and functions. Then came High School where we had exercises with Java and just experimented with the possibilities.

Then in Uni I learned about OOP and Functional which opened even more worlds. After a class on design patterns and designing the architecture of a system, programming was never the same.

And even until this day, I haven't stopped learning better ways to code. Oh how I long for those days where everything is new and how I can build a hello world application and be truly excited about it! That is how I learned to program and why I won't stop anytime soon. 😁

I hate this feeling.

Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.

Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).

To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.

My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.

Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...

Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....

And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.

Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.

Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....

Those days.

I hate those days.

And I hate the timing of some people...

Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.

*gooozfraba*

And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.

Sucks to be in management.

You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.

To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.

Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.

*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*

Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.

*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*

Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....

"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...

You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.

For over 5 mins.

For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.

*Second round of whiskey*

Back to work after a wasted half hour.

What says monitoring?

Ah. Everything's working.

At least luck hasn't failed me.

Good server. Brave server.

Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.

The servers know your personality.

They're afraid. Terrified.

Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...

Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.

"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum*

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

After seven years of search, I’m dropping all my efforts to find a suitable concise ideology for myself to live by.

So what made me try to design it in the first place?

Simplified reasoning based on pre-calculated opinions? Your response is irrational instincts at first, irrational emotions at second and sometimes rational, but flawed and biased mind after.

Peace of mind? Constant search through such ephemeral matter is a huge stress itself.

Concise reasoning apparatus? World is changing and so are you, and I doubt that any concise system that isn’t based on absolute truth can withstand the test of time.

The interest itself to find such ideology? People try different kinds of reasoning from the beginning of human history and nobody was able to come up with universal solution.

A human being is a bunch of contradictions.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

You know, in my limited experience, I find the whole CS degree debate to be quite unnerving. I mean, if you can teach yourself to be a computer genius, I greatly respect you. You're really going placed. Sadly though, learning everything on my own is a bit of a challenge for me. I just find this whole degree-holding VS non-degree-holding conversation to be very confusing. I'm currently enrolled in a 4-year CS program. I personally have learned more there iny first week than I have in months on my own. Now I know all too well that development is often more of a craft or a trade than it is a typical procedural job, but I'm honestly really anxious because I have half of the world telling me to pursue a degree (which I am) and I have the other half telling me to gain experience (which I did). The thing that is stressing me out is the continual pressure to do all of one option instead of a little of both. My life is changing faster than the tech industry, and boy is it a bumpy ride. So unless there is good advice to be said regarding the path you take to become an amazing developer, why fight over the need for a CS degree?

I have a question for you guys and gals.
Why did you start coding?
For me, it was because I find the thought of making something that has never existed amazing. Truly amazing. Possibly changing the world from behind one screen is an exciting concept for me

At least pretend to have a reason for using checkboxes where the behaviour is obviously a single choice. I know I'm sometimes full of crap. I know I can waste so much time arguing for something I'm wrong about. At least I have arguments to support my approach, and I don't dismiss my mistakes. I don't need you to spend the next 5 minutes changing checkboxes for radio buttons in the mockup, it took dev 5 seconds to replace "checkbox" with "radio" and move on. However, I do need you to know what you're doing, even if it turns to be wrong.

I know this world celebrates people who can do things perfectly: models with perfect bodies, singers with perfect voices, sportsmen with perfect scores, students with perfect grades. I understand that's why you wish to try again so you can do it perfectly.

That's not what the world needs. The world needs people who know why they did what they did. It's drunk drivers who break down in the court, not serial killers. Serial killers know what they did, they know why they did it, and they believe it was the right thing to do; drunk drivers on the other hand had no idea what they did or why they did it, and they try to dismiss their wrongdoings by blaming them on alcohol, not getting a taxi, parking fees, the car, or some other circumstances.

So confront your bullshit for once. Stop searching for excuses to dismiss challenging ideas and prove you can defend your position. Otherwise, don't get angry when your "impeccable" ideas lose to someone who at least tries to defend their nonsense.

Saw a movie related to Data Security and Data privacy. The movie ended 1 hour ago and i am now terrified how my data is going to end up somewhere where it can be misused .Frantically removed all app permissions from my mobile. Wonder how many days it will last. But now after hearing such gory details , i wonder how i can keep my interests safe in this world. I am now even afraid to give my laptop for changing its battery.. Thinking of wiping all possible compromisable data. But dont know how to.

How will technologies like blockchain affect this ? Will it make it worse or is it trying to make it better..?

Create new possibilities in the digital world, moving "everything" into the digital world, creating new solutions as a service. A more connected world. Find a problem even though it is small and make it as a service, changing lives for the better.

Dear real estate industry,

if you define a horrible exchange format as CSV file. Then fucking stick to that specification or give me access to your horrible 90s style tooling so I can at least figure out why every crap tool exports in a slightly different way.

How in the world am I supposed to map your data if you keep changing the field count (which is the only way of validating an exported file).

You pretend to be innovative by specifying an industry wide standard but you aren't able to stick to it.

Fuck you, and the one guy "developing" the specification. Seriously... One guy has the responsibility? Do you really think that's a good idea.

Get your shit together!

Yours,
every developer working in your industry

(Note for dfox: I love this place and i would really like to have all my posts/ ++s/comment data available to me . Current system does not allow me to see posts more than some months old. is it possible? I hope devrant is not deleting old posts)
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Stream of thoughts coming through

#justAthought 1
If you feel you are mentally unique (Not in retarded or disable kind of way, but having a different view of thinking, a different perspective, not-a-sheep-in-a-herd kind of mentality) , then you PROBABLY ARE, its just those who are not that mentally unique will find your thoughts absurd until you are proving yourself to be a successful person.
Even though you feel something is wrong in a current situation, and you can put some valid points in your argument, there would always come a point where your personal failures or average-ness would overshadow your valid points (kind of personal experience than a thought :/ )

#justAThought2 (Disclaimer: i am no fraud guru or priest, just a 9-5 curious , sleepless student-cum-professional)
I sometimes feel that the only good, meaningful goal that i could think for my life would be : to earn enough money to set up a small experiment environment , where I would initially take, around 25-30 people for 1-2 years. It would be an environment with totally $0 value for materialistic things like money, jewels, property,etc . Everyone is living free of tensions of basic services like food, clothes, house, taxes, work to live etc. Together we all will be collectively doing just these things: Making ourselves healthy , and more kind, spiritual towards other humans, animals, plants and environment, and thinking of ways to eradicate the value of "value".
We have already reached a point where we are generating even more harmful Technology than useful tech, how about changing the way of thinking and taking a small pause? I know a lot of people would be reluctant to do any work in such environment, but i believe one day or another, every one of these people has to come back to their usual jobs , but this time, not for money but for humanity.
Do you think this kind of environment is possible for the whole world? Because today most, if not all thinks that money is the ultimate goal. can we change that, and would that change be good?

#justAthought 3 (Disclaimer : 1. Its my mom's thought/whatsapp status , i kind off liked it. she is super religious by the way ^_^! | 2. more relevant for india/multi religious countries 3. for Indians: kind of thought from movie "oh my god")

There should be a regional law during so called "acts of god"(floods, earthquakes, other natural disasters) under which the donations given to religious places(temples, churches, mosques,etc) would be used to provide relief to affected areas.

VSCode. I used to be a WebStorm guy, but at one point I found out that I could do like 85% of the stuff in VSCode, and switched over. Things I still kinda miss from the JetBrains ecosystem:
- the elaborate refactoring
- the built-in navigation across the file and the project
- the really clever expand select and go to open/closing bracket (VSCode is kinda getting there, but for expand select it honours camel case words and that can't be turned off, it's weird with HTML files with inlined JS or CSS; for bracket jumping it must rely on an extension)
- the way that everything within the UI is predictable and navigable with keyboard only (tried opening a dropdown in VSCode without having a specific keybinding for that specific dropdown? In WebStorm it was Alt+Up/Alt+Down for any dropdown that has focus IIRC)
- the visual way of changing a colour theme (in VSCode you have to guess what is what before modifying a value; by the way this is an idea for an extension that I might research)

What I like about VSCode:
- the speed (although it can get slow with large files; on the other hand JetBrains IDEs are not that slow except for the startup, given that you're not working on a potato, but here we are)
- its extensibility and very active extension development (and the fact that it's rather easy to write your own extensions, although I haven't benefited from that very much)
- the ease of syncing settings (the Settings Sync extension and now the built-in mechanism introduced I think earlier this month)
- it's free (so I don't have to pay for it myself or nag to my employer to issue me a license)

I've tried Sublime and it's hands down the fastest thing I've seen (it can open a 100 MB text file on the shittiest computer you can find and edit it efficiently), the problem is that it's not so rich in extensions. I've tried vim, nano and whatnot, but I'm far from that, just not my cup of tea. I'm okay for the occasional file edit while SSHd somewhere, but that's all.

In an ideal world we'd have something like Sublime's performance with VSCode's ecosystem and JetBrains', well, brains...