Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is 2 strikes.

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

-- To be continued.

When I started programming Batch Files I decided to go big and and make an Batch Program with a fully functional UI system. Just when I had finished the first menu I kept getting a "goto was unexpected at this time" or something like that. I did everything I could to see about debugging until I finally cleared my calender and spent the next week debugging. A week of debugging goes by and I see someone coding in color rather then black and white at my school. I walk up to him and ask. "What language is that?" To which he replies "Batch". I asked him how he got Notepad to be in color and he simply pointed to the top left of the screen and it said Notepad++.
I get home later that day and look up "Notepad++" and download the first thing I see. I install the .msi file and I see a language bar at the top of the screen. Set it to batch, and drag my .bat file into the program to see six of my dividers are red bars. I look this up and see there's another spacing option "echo.", I replace my current spacers with this and the whole thing starts working. Fml, that's a week I'm never gonna get back

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?

Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.

some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.

BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....

"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"

Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?

Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)

"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.

Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.

Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

I have this one chick on Twitter that she used to be a fellow classmate of mine while I was going for my Bachelors degree.
She would always bitch and complain about how the teachers we had were horrible at teaching. I had to interact with her because of one assignment and EVERYONE in the team was good and well with the items, we finished it rather quick (build a terminal emulator) and we were just thinking about ways to make it look cooler. It was challenging to be honest, but everyone was so interested in it and had all the materials requires plus a very nice instructor to go with that would be overly happy to answer questions and provide additional content, the instructor in question made no book requirement for the class and provided instead free resources, be it video content or his own code on the matter to make sure that everyone got it.

Dude was amazing (most of my university instructors were truly fascinating or people that had worked for very interesting projects) and so when she complain that the guy "had no idea how to teach" I decided to investigate a little.

You see, she had NEVER taken any consideration that maybe you should advance your studies in the field, particularly in programming, by doing your own fucking research. No, the professor is not supposed to hold your fucking hand while you are trying to understand how a fucking function IN FUCKING PYTHON works, dude gave a full length lecture and the only retard that did not understood the topic: was you. He went to you to help you and instead you gave the man an attitude because for some fucking reason he was accounted for your own fucking stupidity. Motherfucker was there for more than 30 minutes trying to explain to this dumb chick the nuances of def hello(): return "hey there" and for some fucking reason you were too daft to understand that.......

The chick complained to us in the team how because of work she had NO time whatsoever to dedicate to reading programming or general software engineering materials......yet her twitter was FULL of book reviews concerning novels and self help books and bullshit like that.

If you are like that, and blame it on your teachers: fuck-you.

To this day she still bitches about the teachers from time to time, I legit told her once that she had no business attending a C.S degree.

Do you think you can get into Julliard without ever touching a fucking instrument? no. Do you think you can tell some Terence Fletcher-throwing-a-chair-at-your motherfucker to show you how to position your hands on a drumstick or what keys to press on a piano? FUCK NO.

If you were being DAFT on a ProGraMmiNg101 for which they picked Python to be the language to use and blamed your fucking stupidity to a teacher then yet again: FUCK-YOU

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

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

Long rant incoming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.

BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.

So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.

My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.

I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.

After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?

I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.

And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.

Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?

Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.

Just so done.

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

I was watching "hacker reviews hacking scenes from movies", and god forbid they brought a woman to do the analysis. A lot of butt hurt boys in the comments, that women left the kitchen and got into programming.
This aside, the combination of ignorance and arrogance was just wow. I mean, if you want to be a dick, at least back it up with skills.
Don't make claims about how "GUI is the single most important piece of any software". *laughing in embedded programming*

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

Many of you who have a Windows computer may be familiar with robocopy, xcopy, or move.
These functions? Programs? Whatever they may be, were interesting to me because they were the first things that got me really into batch scripting in the first place.

What was really interesting to me was how I could run multiples of these scripts at a time.

<storytime>
It was warm Spring day in the year of 2007, and my Science teacher at the time needed a way to get files from the school computer to the hard-drive faster. The amount of time that the computer was suggesting was 2 hours. Far too long for her. I told her I’d build her something that could work faster than that. And so started the program would take up more of my time than the AI I had created back in 2009.
</storytime>

This program would scan the entirety of the computer's file system, and create an xcopy batch file for each of these directories. After parsing these files, it would then run all the batch files at once. Multithreading as it were? Looking back on it, the throughput probably wasn't any better than the default copying program windows already had, but the amount of time that it took was less. Instead of 2 hours to finish the task it took 45 minutes. My thought for justifying this program was that; instead of giving one man to do paperwork split the paperwork among many men. So, while a large file is being copied, many smaller files could be copied during that time.

After that day I really couldn't keep my hands off this program. As my knowledge of programming increased, so did my likelihood of editing a piece of the code in this program.

The surmountable amount of updates that this program has gone through is amazing. At version 6.25 it now sits as a standalone batch file. It used to consist of 6 files and however many xcopy batch files that it created for the file migration, now it's just 1 file and dirt simple to run, (well front-end, anyways, the back-end is a masterpiece of weirdness, honestly) it automates adding all the necessary directories and files. Oh, and the name is Latin for Imitate, figured it's a reasonable name for a copying program.

I was 14, so my creativity lacked in the naming department >_<

So I worked with this guy for 2 years. Lets call him Fred. He came into the company and immediately inserted himself as a programmer lead. I asked him to talk to our boss to determine if he was in fact in charge of the devs now. Our boss said he is not in charge of anything. He continued to act like a lead. I was like fine, "you can play boss for now". He was actually very helpful to bounce ideas off of and knew a lot about programming in general. I enjoyed working with him.

Fast forward 2 years after he was hired. I come into work and notice he isn't at work. I figure he was taking a longer vacation. It was around thanksgiving. A week goes by. I ask another coworker where Fred is. Coworker, "Oh, he was let go." Apparently there was a conflict with our boss with Fred. The boss had to work the weekend to write a bunch of code Fred was supposed to write.

So I got paranoid and wondering if I was going to get fired. I didn't understand the specifics of why and nobody was explaining this. I had planned on working on some extra code for another coworker, but decided against this due to the recent events. I just kept working the task I was assigned, but I kind of got depressed about this. This hurt my productivity for a month or two.

A few months go by. I talk to the coworker about Fred. The coworker explains that Fred never actually generated any code that was usable. Some of the code this coworker had to fix. So the sum total of code was actually a negative amount of lines written while working here.

How the fuck do you stay employed without writing code as a developer? The guy was smart, and understood math way better than I understand it. How can Fred seem like he knows what he is doing, but not produce anything? This would embarrass me to be this unproductive. I don't think the guy was incompetent. He always contributed guidance and helped keep projects on task. My coworker thinks Fred was trying to be a manager instead of a developer. Why not balance that and be both? I get sick of coding at times and would love to just talk to people.

I am very confused how Fred fucked up a pretty laid back dev job.

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

Got demoted, got a pay raise and don't know how to feel about it. A story of how not to drink with your coworkers?

The story begins roughly 8-9 months ago. Me and this coworker (let's name him Tim) go out drinking after a Friday party at the office. We do some rounds and we're both smashed. Tim starts telling me how he's happy with life and that he's earning a nice salary right now. He told me his salary. It was the same as mine. Which was weird - He codes in a more hardcore languages than me and has almost double the time in the company as me. I think after some more drinking I've confessed that I make the same as him. This part is sort of a blur (drinking). I've gotten a pay raise(+30-40%) roughly a few months ago from that point backwards because another company gave be a much higher offer. The company I work for matched to keep me. Anyway, 3 months or so after the drinking,Tim is promoted to team lead, and me and a few other people are added to his team. Conversation slips and he told me his new salary - quite a bit more than me.I think it's safe to assume what happened.

The problem with that is that I was a team lead of 1 person (me) at that time, and I was managing my own time and my own tasks, was working with people individually. I was part of the weekly meetings with the CEO and other team leads. Being stripped of this title wasn't a problem at the beginning, as people still contacted me because of their problems, suggestions, whatever. A few more months pass (to now) and less and less people are contacting me - instead they are talking with Tim, and are asking of his opinion on tasks I should do, where he has no experience and roughly 0 lines in the programming language I code in. This is starting to piss me off.

There are a couple other things to take into consideration as well - The company is hiring a lot of people right now. The whole structure for team leads changed a bit, more team leads then ever right now and new roles added pretty fast.

I've gotten a pay raise a few weeks ago though(10%~).

I'm not sure on how to react to this. Should I comply and just keep on working on these tasks? Or should I still keep contacting people directly on their requests and talk to them directly, take credit for the projects I complete publicly and the stuff I do as I was previously doing? Part of me wants to reroute all of the stupids questions people have to Tim, as he is now responsible for these tasks and get this weight off my shoulders.

I'm starting to shift to learning a new programming language and thinking of jumping ship. Thoughts?

! rant

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

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

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

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

It got worse. Much, much worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).

So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.

Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.

They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.

He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.

The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".

The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.

They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.

This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.

After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.

The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.

Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.

When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.

It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.

It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.

Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.

I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

!rant // deprecated but who cares

I just wanted to write down something i realized. I realized that that I stopped growing as an individual a while ago.

Being a student put me in constant stress situations. I had to do things quickly. Lern things fast, drop things I don't understand immediately, move on, and repeat. I think this corrupted me, turning learning into something that it's not supposed to be. Even making me reject other people's opinions sometimes, which disgusts me every time I think back to it.

When I started programming I'd always try to read the code, until i completely understood what exactly this code was doing. Something I stopped doing a while ago because of the mentioned time constraints.

But today I got the hit by the consequences (German: Ich hab Retourkutsche abbekommen)

I was implementing an algorithm today, while my partner was writing the main program, which acted as indirect test cases. And the errors were discovered one after another because of my misinterpretation. Or Simply put, my lack of knowledge. Because it was already late, we stopped soon afterwards but I wanted to solve this problem by tomorrow. I really wanted to get my head around this algorithm, so that i could solve it with confidence. After getting my head smoking I felt something I haven't in a while: the feeling of achieving something. Making me finally realize not only how the algorithm was actually meant to work but it also made me again realize what learning is about.

Use your damn head.
Don't look away from the problem, solve it! Learning is about challenging yourself!

Sorry for stealing away so much of your time. Like i said, i just wanted to write this down. Maybe to burn this into my mind, to keep me on the right track from now on. But I also hope that i could deliver my message to someone that needed it as well.

Also it's late and i should have gone to sleep long time ago. 😴😵
I just hope my grammar didn't suffer because I'd that

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

Today I was debugging some shitty code left by unknown developer whos linkedin account is dead and phone number left in contact card calls local pizza house.

I knew it qould be hard so i've made myself comfortable, gathered 5 redbulls and other items that diabetes people would kill for eating again.

After around 10 minutes i was already frustrated but i kept the pace. "Who is the best, little devie, you!" - I fooled my ego to keep up and shut up.

After around 10 next minutes my attention span has ended. Limbic system started injecting some hormones into my brain, but I remained silent.

First two energy shots were applied. I felt like hero again. Two minutes after I was debugging through some library that was written fo java and found out that it ahots some natives to a c lang lib called "mypreciouslib".

Oh flock, how can i debug it if ita compiled , I cannot do such things, Me be only junior dev. I started swearing, but silently.

Started ollydbg to see what is inside livrary, i searched through but i couldnt match anything it was like mess stirred with fecals of an elephant.

So I opened aida pro " with vitamins" cause obviously, our pm says "but you write in java right " so we dont need those tools right ? Fuck no.

Aida was better at least i could find some funcions calls, but hey, the progress. I was swearing out loud, with earplugs in. And by the time I've sweared all the things in company i got a reminder.

"Hey -insane- stop swearing, the children are here."-sayys pm, it is some kind of " family and work " shitfuck day.

So i asked them: " why wouldnt you buy this fucking tools for programmming for us , you wouldnt have to hear me fucking swearing" . then i realized that , colleagues in room heard all of it, and one of them, total fuckface buttlicker(dev without bit of knowledge) started something like "you are wrong, see how good our software is sellling". Pm was like smiling like he thanked him for buttlicking again. Not to mention he is officially retarded and i know his password to all our services cause he is so smart to put it into text file and then have sharing files in windows turned on.

The other one told aloud, that we would be much better with some debugging tools that are better than fucking eclipse if we have to work without code.

PM told us that he will arrange a meeting. At that point I didnt care any longer. I just fired myself, fuck them.

Please saint Stallman give me hope and joy of programming from my teenage years. Uhhh..

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)

*Shit is expensive*

How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.

That got me into server administration and bash.

After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.

*Shit is buggy*

How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.

Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?

And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.

And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.

Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)

My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.

Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.

Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).

I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.

Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.

It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.

At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.

Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.

Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.

Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him.

Are there any fellow devranters who have shitty working memory and have trouble focusing? Basically people who have ADHD/ADD? I got into programming because I love solving problems and am able to hyperfocus for weeks on projects, but outside of work life seems to be a mess :/ Can't even remember simple facts if they don't interest me (don't have that much dopamine).

Could you share some advices on how you managed to treat ADHD/ADD or basically improve your memory?

I mean there is the obvious: sleep, exercise, good nutrition (cutting out dairy, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, smoking).

But maybe there are other ways to do this without using drugs such as ritalin/concerta?

My Gripe With Implicit Returns

In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.

Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.

This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.

Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

!rant, but not sure if it's a question either.

I've kind of run into a wall when it comes to programming lately. I'm following this course on Udemy for Python, but the next section (that I need to do to be able to continue) uses (outdated) bokeh stuff, and I don't know enough to be able to figure out how to get the same output without much hair-tearing and frustration.

To clarify, the videos uses bokeh.charts, but then there's a note added that says to use bkcharts, which is still outdated, so it doesn't help at all. I did contact the course tutor about it, and he is aware of it but he's got a lot of stuff going on, so I don't know when he'll have time to fix it. In the meantime, I'm stuck and severely lacking in the intellectual stimulation that is programming. :(

I -have- been trying to work on independent projects, but my problem is mostly that I just don't seem to be a frontend kinda guy, so I end up with only halfway-finished stuff. Does any poor soul here have advice on where to look, or (less likely) even have time to explain some stuff?

Not a rant but wanted to get some thoughts from everyone.

I have health problems and unfortunately just had a seizure a few days ago.... Below is directed at my managers. They are nice guys and when I do get back I need them to accommodate although I feel the entire team should be run like this.

Now taking a step back, I see I need to reestablish my way of doing things/mojo. I cannot handle constant chaos and changes. I have to be in a calm, relaxed environment where I can think and enjoy coding: finding and building solutions. That's the summary of how I got into programming and learned to pick things up.

Furthermore, the ideas of the Phoenix Project and what I've shared over the years are actually what I need to be able to perform and excel. Probably the same for everyone and a good way to preempt burnout. It's just in this case, I am the first to go. I cannot be jumping around all the time and need to establish a comfort/expertise zone (but I do and can extend out when given enough time and opportunity).

I'm thinking the EU team probably operates like this, in a calm and orderly environment, less the rare issues.

Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.

So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.

I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.

In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).

I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.

But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.

I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.

Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.

I'm still a beginner for programming, I got the basics (for JavaScript) down but I don't really know how or where to use it, like loops(for, do while), return, and stuff like that.

Going through the books and online exercises they just make you do the basics like loop a number 10 times to print out 0-9 or something like that. And the return keyword I usually forget about because I've never been told how I can actually use it for something.

I want to learn how I can use all of these and when I can use them, is there any books, videos, or courses I can look into? I'm sorry, this is probably a Sinbad question but I am just trying to get as much help as I can

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT
WHY IS THIS CLASS SO FUCKING FULL OF INCORRENT INFORMATIONS?????????

I've started university last year ( 2017) and I got a class named "Basics of Informational Communication Technologies" and it's so freaking bad...
The book is obviously just an english book translated to our language and signed by the proffesor. I've been trying to study it right now but it's so frustrating and I'm just 15 minutes into reading. HTML is not a programming language, viruses are not always under 4 kb, source codes are not always based on classes and so on....
Not to mention so many badly explained stuff that could be explained soooo much better and simpler...

How do I deal with this?

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

hey guys i need advise.
I currently got a job that i love with a lot of freedom. but the payment is not good and i am concerned that the company won't be there in the next 5 to 10 years.

I am a 25 years old, self taught programmer and my current employer is the only one I ever worked for. Recently I browsed xing and found a company which searches an employee with exactly my skillset (they need someone for a specific ERP system in which I am damn good at). The company is half an our away - my current job 20 minutes away. Also I think because the person they are looking for is rare because you need technical knowledge of windows and doors and you need to know how to administrate this erp system plus knowing some programming stuff.
There is also a very big company 10 minutes (walking) from home where I could apply. I think at this company i would start lower but could maybe study and working for them with higher expectations in long term (just google Hettich in germany here in the village this is big)

The problem I currently have is the following. If the company I work for is closing in lets say ten years, then I am 35 without a degree. I have a girlfriend - want to marry her and getting a child.

I have holiday now and i will apply for both companies. I feel very uncomfortable doing this because the company I work for is the company of my granddad. I don't have the balls to tell him that even if i get a raise that does not solve the 35 years issue.

Well, first of all I will just apply. Lets see how much value I have.

But I thought that asking you all may give me some other input to take into account. What are your thoughts on this?

PS: just a formal "sorry for my english" and thanks for reading

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

Cross post from /r/cscareerquestions

Hey guys how are you all doing!?
I got into university this September (Computer Engineering & Informatics).
Although I've been programming java since I was 14 (github.com/zarkopafilis), discussions with a friend who is a dot net guy and has been working full-time C# for 2 years now got me thinking.
Alright, Java's good. I've learned to love and hate the language. I also like Spring Boot and whole this ecosystem of stuff including Scala and the other Java based languages. Currently I'm in the proccess of completing some personal project of mine.
Alright, here's the big question: Assuming I am going to graduate (and start working) in 5-7-8 years (Masters, PhD - who knows), which language would you suggest I stick with and start learning? - for backend programming of course.
Don't tell me JavaScript. Although I don't like it I've digested the fact that I'll have to learn some of it for sure.
Currently that's what I'm thinking: Invest some more time learning how the JVM works (and probably keep improving my code quality). Also learn some more stuff regarding Spring Boot (and/or Web Services in general). Then advance onto Scala till couple of years pass. In that time I shall keep improving my SQL skills.
On the other hand I may start learning C# along with .NETcore .
Sidenote: Personally I prefer statically typed languages, that's why I dislike stuff like js and python although I occasionally find myself fiddling with small projects like some laser tracker written with python + opencv.
Sorry if this reads like a big disorganized dump of thoughts. Thanks in advance! :)

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".

If you are reading Coding for dummies book to learn software you are doing it alllll wrong lol ... Please while I appreciate your effort and willingness to try but no.. just no.. put the book down that book won’t teach you shit.

Same thing if you are one of those folks who got conned into believe “you can land a programming gig by signing up and paying for this 6 week course!!” Bullshit.. I like your initiative but there’s soooooo much more than that and it won’t even touch the surface. You will end up believing a false reality that you think you know what your doing but you don’t know how much you really don’t know. But like it doesn’t even scratch the surface don’t even attempt Get a job after those courses or coding for dummies book. You will be laughed at..

In fact I almost want to buy the coding for dummies book to have it in my collection of software books to not read. Which I will say is very small. There’s more really good books than really bad.. and obviously plenty of average. But the bell curve lands above the better half.

So I've been working on a project that has gone to shit, scope isn't clear and deadline is too tight. Developers get dropped into the team to "make it work"

Currently I think it is unavailable to succeed within the deadline. But this got me thinking, how do you actually save such a project? Could a good project lead save a chaotic project? If so... How? (And more importantly to me, how does one become a good project lead, do I need 10+ years of programming experience?)

I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.

My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.

I got my first computer when I was 16.

Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.

Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.

My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.

My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.

They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).

They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.

I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.

Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.

long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"

TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!

I just felt like saying as I'm not sure how prevalent this is but the reason I got into computing and programming is essentially this, I want to change the world and make a better society and to quite frank I honestly believe that what you make and it's impact on people is far more important that your personal character