This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

Interviewer - so what's your email ID?

Candidate- sir, abc@xyz.com

Interviewer - and password?

Candidate- 12345678

Interviewer - you shared such a confidential information so easily for the job. How can we trust that you will not share any confidential information of the company for some better offers?

Candidate - Sir, I might have shared my password with you but I don't think you can still login to my email account. Let's look for the possibilities. My password can be

12345678

Or

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight

Or

1twothreefourfivesixseveneight

1twothreefourfivesixseven8….. so on

Or

2444666668888888 (one 2, three 4….)

13355557777778 (1, two 3, four 5……, 8)….. so on

Or

Combination of all of these…

By the way, did I mention use of capitals? 😂

Finally that candidate was offered with the position as
" HR Manager"

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

I wasn't going to post this because I expected loads of hate but fuck it, I'd rather share it anyways. Also take into account that sometimes there's no choice because money is needed or other circumstances :)

This one guy told me to never let down my values and what I stand for if I can afford to do that, no matter what they are.

I'd quit my job over having to use tools like Google or Slack (luckily my company is highly against using Slack and most people have moved to ddg) and as for WhatsApp, I said at my interview that I'd either wanted a business phone for using WhatsApp or I wouldn't use it. Boss said 'thats cool!'

I quote from him(that person who said this to me):

"they force you to use something you're uncomfortable with? Fuck'em. They don't understand your reasons? Their problem.
Even if nobody in the entire world understands/accepts your reasons, doesn't mean they're not valid."

Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

So, as everyone knows on here by now (or, a lot of ranters), I am a fervid privacy person.

Appearantly a new surveillance law in my country is about to extend mass surveillance/hacking a lot. So here a rundown of what they are about to be allowed to do (stuff that is not okay imo and this is the reason I am so pro-privacy):

- Mass Data Gathering: The intelligence agency over here (lets call it IA from now) can pretty much record everything send through the country.

- Extra Protection: If they want to conduct surveillance on journalists/lawyers, they have to go through extra channels first at least.

- Data/survaillance sharing: The IA is allowed to share their raw/filtered data with foreign intelligence agencies without limits. Also, they're allowed to conduct surveillance based on foreign requests.

- Secret DNA database: A secret DNA database will be created which can store the DNA profiles of any person who has commited any kind of crime. These profiles are allowed to be stored for a maximum of 30 years. This database is allowed to be shared with any foreign intelligence agency.

- Hacking: Unlimited power to hack any device deemed neccesary to hack in relation to crime. From computers to smartphones and so on. Also, it's allowed to use zero-days without reporting them to the vendor (we have seen what can go wrong with that through the ShadowBrokers scandal).

- Automatic Database Collection: They are allowed to directly tap into any database they see required (banks, healthcare, messaging services and so on). Practically this can lead to backdoors being build in because if you don't cooperate, you can go to prison. (mother of god I am not using anything closed source anymore if possible).

So yeah, this is pretty much the reason why I am so privacy consious. This country is fucked.

Stop it with the Linux shilling already.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one

- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!

- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!

- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts

- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..

- netikras, please share your scripts with your team

- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script

- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!

- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered

A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.

When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.

It just makes me tick!

Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

Found this on discord.
Could be copypasta but I decided to share it anyway.

"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux."

The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long."

With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

Hello again, everyone. As Sunday comes to a close, and Monday is fast approaching, I'll share with you the likely cause of my death by stroke and/or heart attack:
MONDAY MORNING COFFEE OF HORROR
Disclaimer: Do NOT try this. I am a professional addict. I am not responsible for anything this brew from hell causes to you and/or those around you.
So, I wake up, feeling like I haven't slept for days, or just notice the fucking alarm clock shrieking because I pulled an all-nighter.
Step 1: Silence alarm clock via mild violence.
Step 2: Get the coffee machine to brew some filter coffee (espresso works too)
Step 3: Get milk and ice cubes from the fridge (both are needed, I don't care if you don't like milk, trust me)
Step 4: Get 2 spoonfuls (not tea spoon, and actually FULL spoonfuls) into the biggest glass you have
Step 5: Pour just a little of the warm filter coffee into the glass, just to get the instant coffee wet enough, and start mixing, until the result looks like the horror you unleashed in your toilet a few minutes ago (and will do so again in a few)
Step 6: Mix in 25-50 ml milk, just for the aesthetic change of colour of the devil-brew, and to add the necessary amount of lactic acid to react with the coffee to produce chemical X
Step 7: Add ice cubes to taste (if you are new to this, add a lot)
Step 8. Slowly add the filter coffee while mixing furiously, so that the light brown paste at the bottom get dissolved (it's harder than it sounds)
Now, take a deep breath. Before you is a disgusting brew undergoing a chemical reaction, and your moves need to be precise otherwise it will explode. Note that sugar or any other form of sweetener is FORBIDDEN, as it will block the reaction chain and the result won't be as potent.
Take a straw (a big one, not those needle-like ones that some cafeterias give to fool you into believing that the coffee is more than 150ml). Put it inside the mix, and check that the route to the bathroom is free of obstacles.
Now, clench your abs, close your nose if you are new to this, grab the straw and DRINK!
DRINK LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW!
THAT BROWN DEVIL'S BILE WILL HAVE YOUR INTESTINES SPASM AND DANCE THE MACARENA WHILE TWIRLING A HULA HOOP!
YOUR HEART WILL GO OVERDRIVE HARDER THAN YOUR PC'S CPU WHEN COMPILING ON ECLIPSE AND BROWSING WITH IE AT THE SAME TIME.
The combination of caffeine and lactic acid will bring out the perfectly disgusting combination of sour and bitter usually expected in rotting lemons. After you manage to chug it down (DON'T SPILL OR SPIT ANY!) you have 30 - 60 seconds max to run to the porcelain throne, where you will spend the next 30-60 minutes.
After that, nothing can stop you! You will fix bugs, write entire codebases from scratch, punch that annoying coworker, punch that boss! You will be a demigod among mortals for the next 6-8 hours!
Your recipes for Monday morning coffee?

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

Not a rant, just my thoughts :)
At November and October of last year I was very frustrated with everything - everything was annoying me and I was bored even with coding. I needed a break and do something different - go somewhere.

So we decided with friends that we will go to Georgia to spent there New Year Eve. Right now I'm coming back from airport by bus to my city aftertrip but can't sleep because I'm energized as fuck! Whole week without internet (sometimes we got open wifi to check buses or maps), without local sim card, without roaming, just our group and good attitude. We visited almost whole north of Georgia riding in taxis, marshrutka, even autostop, and it was fucking awesome.

So, when you are exhausted, take a break and regenerate your baterries, work is not everything! Just wanted to share this with you :) Can't wait to go to work in monday to write some code :) Life is beautiful!

On photo - my friend takes photo of Kazbek Mountain :)

guys my linux is not booting !
reply:
Find a forest, where no human has ever set foot.
Wait until the full moon rises, and then sacrifice x virgins, where x is the month of the year.
Spill their blood on your device, and wrap in parma ham (if your religion forbids you to make contact with ham, replace it with high quality carpaccio. If you're vegan get youreslf a rope).
Then, build an altar to the gnu God, with feet spelling GPL, and a head that like of a gnu.
When this is done, you shall bow down three times to the altar (thirty if you use tabs), place your wrapped bloody system on the altar, and proceed with dancing on Staying Alive, except you will have adapted the lyrics to your system.
When you are done dancing and chanting, you shall lie down in front of the altar, and you shall not gaze upon your system till daybreak.
Then when the sun rises (sorry if you're in the uk, or one of the poles) you will marvel at your system, thanking the ever potent gnu god forever.

The funniest shit I have ever read 🤣 ... had to share

Fucking stupid arrogant pieces of whale shit in a Node.js group I'm on Facebook, whenever someone posts an issue he/she is having I try to help, I'm far away from a senior but I like to share my knowledge helping others but everytime the post contains a screenshot of windows or the user says it is running on windows all this fucking pendejos blame the OS and instead of replying about what the issue/solution could be they pinches always say:
"oh it's because you are in windows that is shit" -fucking amhed ramadamalamabin
"dude you have to use Linux if you don't want issues Linux is best" -stupid juanito sombrero loco (I'm Mexican don't take it personal)

Can you fucking bitchy please help this poor developers with the actual issue and not fucking say Linux this Linux that when it doesn't fucking even have to do with or is related with the issue? Goddamn

Have a nice day.

I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.

He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)

Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.

Does that sound strange?
well.

We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").

So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-

What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)

And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.

just. UGH.

every day with this guy, i swear.

A senior developer come to interrupt me.

Senior developer: blah...blah....blah about this concept...... that concept... So, any new things you learn lately that you would like to share?

Me: I am learning back C++
Immediately he stop me and said, "Why did you learn C++? It is obsolete, no one use it anymore"

Me (in my head): But, you just said what I learn. It doesn't matter if its obsolete or not. Infact you are wrong, C++ is not obsolete anytime soon. I was about to share on webassembly.

Senior developer: So, would you like to join me in a short sharing session this afternoon.

Me: No thanks, I am really busy (just want to avoid at any cost)

#LongRant

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!

Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.

The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)

2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)

3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)

5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!

Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.

PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.

tl;dr read the whole thing you lazy goat-molesting arse.

People. It's unpopular opinion time!
Windows is brilliant.
There. I said it.

Why? Because it has the balance of user-friendliness and customisability that is great for most workloads. Its enormous user- and developer- base allow almost anything you want to be done on it.

For instance, a few years ago I hooked up a MIDI synth pad to my PC and found an obscure program to use MIDI events as macros. I did not have to write any code, compile anything or any crap like that. (If you're a developer then you'll have no problem with that kind of thing, but not everyone's an über-technical nerd like you. Deal with it.)

I don't like Windows. But it's still brilliant for most people. All you Linux fan- boys/girls/helicopters are right to advocate it, but it will never expand its market share to more than the percentage of people who are developers, (unless it turns into a corporate enterprise (which it probably won't)). It has its flaws, but most of them will never affect the average end user. OK? Thanks.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

That feel when you’re asked to share work you’re proud of and you’re not proud of anything.

Or rather, you are... but they’re programs written in C/C++ and you’re interviewing for a mostly frontend gig in React.

Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.

I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.

It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.

Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!

Let me share a piece of advice to entry level devs that are getting ready for job interviews that I wish someone gave to me when I was first looking for work straight out of school. Do not focus making yourself look good to this company by trying to make your resume flashy or trying to oversell yourself. Although its important to present yourself sure, but it should not be the foundation for you to base your interview goals around. Rather focus on the company itself. Find out whether the company itself uses modern technology,practices and upholds to project management and the software development cycle, find out how they work,communicate and develop as a team. Simply put focus on whether they are worth working for instead of looking like your worth being hired. Can they collaborate,communicate and solve problems efficiently. Otherwise you may end up getting hired and hating your job. Just a thought and some advice on my own experiences. Hope it helps someone.

Saw this on Facebook and couldn't help but share here! 😂

A young woman submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship to her husband) presumably did it as a joke…
The query:

Dear Tech Support,

’Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as: Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as: NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
What can I do?

Signed,
Desperate

The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):

Dear Desperate,

“First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Please enter command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)
In addition, please, do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0.Good Luck!’

Good Luck!

Today I learned in a cafe why (some) users think that Facebook doesn't allow them data control. Due to drunkness I'm paraphrasing here, but it went something like this:

- I don't trust Facebook, because my posts that I make are visible to people that I didn't want to have it be seen to.

> Audience controls. Use them.

- This guy in town sent me a friend request, why would he be able to??1!1

> He and you share hometown. So probably friend suggestions based on you both explicitly sharing location, or he just visited your profile on name and wanted to get in touch with you. Socializing on the internet, it exists.

That's the kind of user that's roaming the facebooks on the internets and the googles I guess? The type of user that's surprised that their Facebook games and nametests expose information that they explicitly consent to? Give me a break. I care deeply about privacy, but this is just ridiculous.

On a different note, why the fuck is not a single one of those very same fucking Facebook users worried about 25-ish% of websites running their JavaScript (which you can check and block using NoScript and co.), which is the *actual* privacy threat? But muh nametests!!!

Fuck ignorant users!!!

My kid has a toy car he can sit on, ride and play some music by pressing a huge button. He loves it! And he loves that music.

I don't mind the music, but I do mind how loud it is. When it's playing it's VERY hard to understand what other people in the same room are saying. Now imagine that car starts playing while you're still asleep....

It can scare the shit out of someone! Not to mention it is annoying af.

So today I dug up my never-used kit of eclectronics compoents and some tools. Spent an hour or so and installed a potentiometer in that car from hell! Now I can alter its volume.

I know it's not much, but I feel as if I were an engineer :) That's a nice feeling. I like it.

Just wanted to share

Seeing on some other posts I wanted to rant about my uni’s computer science community.

Some background: This is a small uni, not like a community college definitely a little bigger. Located somewhere in WV. There is 2-4 girls in every CS class I have had and at least 27-30 guys.

The reason why I mention this is because there is no sense of team work at all. When it comes to exams or projects I take the initiative and make either quizlets (being freaking nice here) share them or take times after school in the library to work on projects. If I have a solution I will share it, I will try to help you in your problem. If I know how to do it of course.

The real issue is all those CS experts that already fixed or finished their programs, the ones on the top of the class. Is as if the moment I ask something related to the project I am already dumb for not have figured it out on my own.

There is the typical CS student that just tries and gives up or just gives up without trying and the other kind of CS student that does that. Doesn’t help anybody else, wants to be on the top all the time.

What I am trying to say here is that it just feels like a competition all the time. (I consider myself in between this two types of students cause I wasn’t born a genius but I do try my ass off on projects) however, I feel like guys see me every new semester in a CS class and think “oh wow how is she still here? Wait did she pass?”

All I say is “yeah I fucking did, with a C or B but here”. So I don’t know, first rant posted 👏🏽🙆🏽‍♀️

Tried a mobile app club this semester and the second meeting they brought in these two business majors who said they had an idea for an app that would share videos of college parties and the videos would disappear after 24 hours. You could also invite people to the parties as well.

I was like so you basically want snapchat... what happens when cops create accounts and fine people for under age drinking? How will you get market share over snapchat or vine? How much money are you offering?

They were not pleased...

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

!rant

Wanted to share a project with you, which I heard about at a Python Conference I attended.

It's a Raspberry based Hacking Station to educate and sensitize students about data privacy. The amazing thing about the project is, that it is a graduation project from a high school student.

If you're interested, check out spypi.ch

This is not an ad or something, I was just amazed by the talk and the idea of the project and wanted to share it with you.

I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

I know it's not a story and also not a joke or meme but then also I want to share it because this gives me goose bumps

This photo won award for best photo and led the photographer into depression.

The cheetahs chased the mother deer and her 2 fawns(baby deers), the mother could've easily outrun cheetahs but instead she offered herself to cheetahs so that her kids can manage to run safety.

In this picture she is looking at her babies running safely as she is about to get torn into pieces.

She is about to get torn to pieces but she is dosen't look a bit hesitated.
That's mother for you!!

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

How to explode a .NET developer, give them this challange:

Write a method.
- I must HTTP Get any site (does not matter what), and return the result
- It must NOT be async, and must directly return the result string (No Task<string>)
- It must use HttpClient
- It must be in .Net framework 4.5 or lower
- No other nuget packages allowed

This was my job today and i want you to share my pain!

Just wanna to share my story:

I just quit my job 2 months ago to ramp up my own startup. I will be funded with 2k Euro per month for 1 year to prepare the founding of my startup. Basicly that means i got one year to build backend/frontend/app. I have a friend that is doing some nontech related stuff like business development and shit. Sounds good until now i guess.
But:
Developing all that stuff in a one man show as a junior-like developer is really hard. I did not find another dev who wanted to join me as a sideproject or something.

Do you guys think thats even possible to ramp up all this by myself or am i to optimistic? I mean, i learn a lot atm, but i am a bit scared to fail too.

That should not be whining or shit, just gathering some input of you guys.

(excuse typos and stuff as i am not a native speaker :) )

Ok might as well share my misadventure on a phone screen:

It started pretty normal, the guy talks about his background, the position, and asked me about my background.

Move on to the language trivia; I’m not good at memorizing language features, but I guess it’s what people want, so I’ll be working on that down the road… Anyways it didn’t go well, and the guy somehow made me feel like an idiot even on the questions I got right.

It’s really awkward at this point… but let me tell you I was not prepared for what I can only describe as the fucking coding portion of the phone screen…

No computer. No pencil or paper. No whiteboard. Over the phone I’m saying: “class Dog with a capital ‘D’ colon newline tab def space bark open parentheses close parentheses….”

what the actual fuck

So I'm not sure whether this actually is a believable story or not but I think I'll just share the saddest moment in my life with you.

So.... I've been working with a boy 0.5years younger than me on a project in Java so he could learn something about programming. I was actually dictating him code because he wasn't able to JUST WRITE ONE SINGLE LINE OF CODE WITHOUT ASKING ME HOW TO DO SHIT!!! So I dictated him a for each loop:
Me: "for ( Foo foo colon foos ) {doSomeShit();}"
Him: "for ( Foo foo .. foos ) {doSomeShit();}
For your understanding: in German colon means doppel punkt / double dot. I didn't think someone actually writes two dots... THIS IS SO FUCKING SAD

Please don't blame me for being a bad teacher. I'm inn a class with him and I know we did that in class. I also thought it multiple times to him

I'm not going to have a lot of new friends here but I am fed up with all those guys complaining about CSS on devRant.

CSS is damn easy. Get over it. Take some lessons, learn it the right way and shut your mouth.

I'd prefer you share your enlighten opinion on CSS in JS with React Native or CSS compositing with ReactJS which are both huge pain in the ass.

Plain CSS isn't the cause of all your pain. You are.

!RANT

my friend who never smoke or drink or relationship to much career oriended.working in multinational company. recently south african petrol company gave offer letter to him.
he was ill from few days.(completed his engineering in civil with 9.1 pointer last year.)

somekind of syndrome found in him. due to which he will not able to walk in 2 years.

he share this information with me. asking me tips,"how to inform my mom dad? I don't wan to face them. I can't do anything for them."

life is fucking unfair with some peoples.

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

I’ve been at this job 4 months and I feel like I’ve been here long enough to make an accurate opinion of it. From day one I have not felt welcomed. There is no communication within the team.. none of my questions are ever answered.. and when I do ask questions I get snarky answers. I don’t expect my hand to be held, but as someone who is new, I’d like you to give me guidance. Especially since the code is mostly legacy and no one else on the team seems to know anything about anything.

Oh and there are not daily stand ups, project managers, or direction in the tickets themselves.

I guess I should have expected this on the first day when I asked for a SIP or documentation on how to get my environment setup I was practically laughed out of the office and then had the nerve to ask me why it took me the entire day to get 5 environments up and running.. not giving me the custom mappings or the global UDFs.

Today was my last straw.. when I asked a question in three different forms of communication on multiple different channels and was never given an answer.. and then was asked why I did something the way I did instead of doing it the way they wanted me to.

I think the saddest thing is that I felt tricked into this. I was told this position was going to be one way but ended up being something else. I was excited to share my knowledge and best practices to the team. Instead, I’m an outcast and get only be negativity and excuses when I politely bring up suggestions.

I no longer have the will to code here.

A chick asked how much I earn, and I politely declined to answer.

She seemed annoyed and insisted, nudging me by saying how much she earns.

Again I told her I'd rather not say.

She got mad, started trying to emotionally blackmail me into telling her my salary...

This must be a red flag cuz I don't give two fucks about how much money people I date earn/have and expect them to either respect or share my view

Bored waiting for a long running test cycle to complete, so...

Monopoly: Software Dev edition.

All properties are companies with apple and alphabet being the most expensive ones, course the online version plugs into stock tickers to accurately reflect the current share price.

All railroads are broadband providers.

You don't build houses or hotels, but patent portfolios and 'landing on another property' becomes 'infringing on a patent'.

Cards:
- Kickstarter refund, collect £200
- Hit by ransomware, pay 1bitcoin.
- You are sued in East Texas, go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect dividends.
- Get out of court free card.

Yeah, I'm that bored that I'm rewriting bloody monopoly...

!dev

I'm doing some solo karaoking again but with some oldies that I haven't sung in probably 10-15 years. Not my usual song track.

And since I'm deaf, I can't hear the tune, just see the timed words. And just found it interesting the general tune can be recalled at first at all.

Then after a few times, I started remembering how some of the actual singers sound like. But still stumble a bit on some parts.

And then a few weeks. And I have another session and somehow I can pretty much lip sync it with all the emotions and almost perfectly I think.

I just found it strange and wanted to write this down somewhere while I still remember it. And I guess that's sorta the point. Feels like the mind/subconscious to remember things really well but recalling them at either the right moment or randomly....

Anyone else have similar experiences? Wanna share?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks!!

I'm a 16 yrs old student, learning to be a software developer. I have successes, but I can't share with anyone. My parents don't understand what am I doing, my classmates neither. Literally nobody. Maybe 1 or 2 people. Can I share with you, dear devRant community? Or I shouldn't share, 'couse it's not a rant?

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

Boss only likes stuff he can see and that looks pretty. Doesn't understand code, servers, containers, DBs, etc. Praise is attributed by something looking nice in the frontend, whether or not it does crazy stuff behind the scenes.

Spent a week working on a project whilst boss was away. Got to about Thursday and thought, oh poop, I've built all this API stuff, but not much frontend. So I panic built frontend screens with no functionality just so I had something to show.

Wish I had another dev to share backend progress with (and code review)...

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

I just want to share this:

When I start working at my last job, I have little idea of what a unit test was.

My boss on one meeting said that unit testing will be mandatory (wich is ok and umderstandable).

Almost a *year* after that, no one still care about them. I see myself doing them the best I can, but I saw things like wrap the assertion line with "try / catch" to lie to the coverage and unit test percentage. Or in other cases directly uploading *manually* the code on the server without test at all.

And then, as the only developer who do the unit test ok I have to do the missing ones and repair the fake ones.

Then when something explodes the question all the managers love to ask "Did we had the testing?"

At least I quit... that job was some crazy shit, this is just one story of many.

Like that other time that my co-workers did not understand why I needed to do POJOs on an android app because the big bad JSON that the app used was working fine....

So I'm starting a job at a large company in the early part of next year... it's a total mindfuck because the salary is a m a s s i v e bump up and for the first time I'm experiencing imposter syndrome. I never really fully grasped the feeling that a lot of people here described until after that final interview and an offer was extended. I'm stoked AF to start and it's going to be a huge learning experience while working there.

The company wants me and my family to relocate to another state (US) and it's got my stomach doing somersalts.

It's especially painful because the current place I'm working is amazing; the people are great, the work is solid but fairly low pressure, and there's lateral freedom to work on improving the systems and infrastructure whenever there is free time. And I know that the new gig is going to have certain expectations that need to be met or my head could be on the chopping block.

High risk, high reward I guess 😅

My anxiety is raw dogging my brain and it fucking sucks, but my wife has been doing a great job keeping me level headed and thinking logically about the future and growth this opportunity brings with it.

I'm not trying to gloat or brag, just really needed a place to share some of this since I'm freaking out and don't feel like I have enough experience/skills to take on this job. Those interviews left me worn out. 4 rounds and the final interview was 5 hours long all in one day. 😫

I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.

I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.

Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.

God damnit Quora!

I stumbled upon some article or post or whatever they are called on quora.
And I really wanted to read the comments on it. It wouldn’t let me unless I log in.

I normally don’t do that but I thought I’ll make an exception because I really wanted to read the comments.

So I clicked on that comments button and logged in (via google). First it presented me some modal dialog to pick 5 things that interest me. And it was mandatory. Fine… I picked those 5 things.

Finally it presents me the list of articles or whatever. But not the same list that I have seen before I was logged in. Scrolling, the article of my interest is not there. God damnit! Just show me my comments for fucks sake.

I go back to that tab where I was not logged in to somehow copy the link of that article or the link to the comments section. But it doesn’t let me. Some bullshit pseudo smart layer of crap is preventing me from doing anything.

Then I abuse the fucking share link to visit it in my logged in tab to finally see the comments that I came for.

And the comments weren’t even worth it. God! What a waste of time! And how can one fuck up a fucking forum so much?

It will be a lesson for me not to visit Quora ever again.

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

For me there are two kinds of bugs. The ones where you lean backward and the ones where you lean forward.

If you found a bug and you lean backwards in your chair resting your hands behind your head you feel proud and relieved that you found that sneaky bastard. Good for your dev soul.

If you lean forward, resting your forehead on your fists or on the desk then it was a very stupid bug. Not sneaky at all. Something plain obvious. It makes you doubting all your career and life choices you made so far. Like needing one hour to find out that you named the "MANIFEST.in" accidentally "MAINFEST.in"...

Want to share any embarrassing bugs to make me smile again?

Rewrite of the sync api to REST.

Coworker: “hey, I know you’ve written and maintained our sync module for the past 4 years. Something I need to know? Some hints or knowledge you can share?”
Me: only thing you should not do is x and y. Otherwise you will face problems a and b.”
Coworker: “great, thanks a lot!”

2 months later...

Customer call: “da fuck are you doing? When I do stupid stuff then I face problem z and problem a!!!”

*me checking new code*

*me calling coworker*

Me: “WTF did you do? You asked for my advice and then did exactly what I told you NOT to do.”

Coworker: “oh, let me check the code..”

*coworker calls boss*

Coworker: “Boss, I can’t work with this guy, he starts fights all the time..”

*boss comes to my desk*

Boss: “I don’t want you to work on this anymore, people are complaining.”

Me: “what the fuck, I just asked him a question..”

~ 1 month later

coworker quits because he can’t handle all the bugs he caused and I have to maintain this piece of fucking retard code..

(Dev)Life in the past 12 hours

Oh boy have the last 12 hours been a roller coaster ride for me. Noob me decided to "compile" AoSP for my device to get a taste of how custom ROMs are built from source. Overall it was fun but the errors were a very good excercise for googling, SO. Couple stuff I learnt ( possibly useful for anyone who comes here )
* The shebang line ( #!/usr/bin/env python ) on my system translated to Python 3.7 environment instead of the expected Python 2.7. Best solution I think to avoid confusion is to create a python 2.7 environment and source it.
* Get your trees right. A jar file called WfdCommon.jar ( apparently known as wifi-display common ) was the cause of several hours of hunting the fault. My vendor tree somehow didn't have this file so dex2oat was borking out like mad. I'm still amazed how I figured this one out almost by myself. ( Basically I had to check every file included in the boot class path, and find the odd one )
* I wasted a lot of time in finding the right files to change version numbers and all. Maybe I didn't search XDA properly for a guide ?

Overall it was a fun experience. Also if anyone's experienced in this area could you share resources to learn more about custom ROM development? Specifically on the tweaking part where you mix features from different ROMs to make a great ROM ( like AoSP extended or Pixel Experience ). All I could find were on the zips and not on sources.

I'm fed up with you guys ranting about what you SHOULD HAVE said, but instead just walked out, said something cowardly, or nothing at all...

For fuck sake, grow a pair and stand up for yourself! Noone else will...

I get it, this place is a nice vent, people understand, it's not face-to-face, it's easy. But the sheer number of you that had a clear chance to be grow, and ran for the door is alarming.

I also get it, it's mostly difficult to talk back to a client/boss/professor. But there's a few steps between FUCK YOUR FUCKING DIPSHIT FACE and running to the corner to post a rant here.

Find the right words. You don't have to sware, be civilized, but take a stand, present your arguments, present facts and proofs. Don't give in to their scare tactics, earn that respect you need and deserve! Then come here like a winner and share it with us.

It has become quite a tradition here to sware in all caps and then say that's what you should have said, but didn't. From now on, I'm -- these posts to give my two cents in an attempt to make this a community of winners ranting about a stupid world. Not a community of cowards ranting how world is scary.

In my school, eleventh grade (so nearly "Abitur", A levels), we got the task to create a program which will be running on every computer here which should replace the Classbook (like a book where homework and lessons and stuff is written down).
Now, the class before mine already did a part of that, a program to share who is ill/not at school, with a mark whether it is excused or not.
So far so good. They all seemed not that bad when they were presenting it to us. Then, the first thing: they didn't know what git is. Well, okay I thought.
Next, there was this password field to access the program. One of them entered the password and clicked enter. That seemed suspiciously fast for an actual secure login. So fast, the password could have been in the Code...
Yesterday I copied that program and put it into a decompiler.
And... I was right.
There were the login credentials in plain text. Also, haven't thought of it but, IP address + username + password + database name were there in plain text, too.
Guess I am going to rewrite this program down to the core

I know politics is not allowed here, but I have to share this gem with you.

One day before the election for the European parliament the website of the German city Bochum showed a wrong bar diagram with false results of the election for a few seconds.

Everyone was loling. But I was like WTF? They were testing in production. And also they included data were the party AFD had about 50% of the votes. Are they retarded or so?

So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.

*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*

Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.

I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.

And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.

TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...

TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...

devRant community!! My little brother brought me my rubber duck!! (it's not reeaaally a duck.. it's more like a watermelon, and it's name is "senor Sandia"!)
I've lost it a couple of months ago.. but NOW I CAN BECOME AN AWSOME CODER AGAIN!! (or just keep trying.. xD)
sorry, but I had to share it with you!

For the last 20 years, there's one thing I've not been able to do reliably:

Share a folder on a windows computer.

Why the fuck can I write /etc/smb.conf from scratch with a blindfold on and make it securely work from all client devices including auth & acl, but when I rightclick and share on windows it's either playing hide and seek on the network (is it hiding behind //hostname/share? No? Maybe in the bushes behind the IP addresses?), or it's protected by mysterious logins requiring you to sacrifice two kittens a day.

Yes, finally it works! One windows update later... aaaand it's gone.

JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING CONF AND A MAN PAGE, MICROSOFT. I DON'T CARE THAT YOU'RE ORALLY PLEASING ALL THESE MALWARE RIDDEN GUISLUTS ON THE SIDE, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING TEXT FILE TO STORE AND EDIT.

Raise, zero releases on weekend, not mentioning for once that ChatGPT/Bard said this or that ...etc

I swear once ChatGPT gave my boss the exact opposite of what is mentioned in the documentation and I had to literally share the link of the docs so that boss believe me ...

Very random, I’d normally post this on twitter but my girlfriend is there and it’s about her. A bit long and very personal...

to;dr My girlfriend and soon to be fiancé officially who is certain we are going to marry, doesn’t want to invite people to our wedding anymore because she doesn’t have close friends like I do and I’m quite disappointed.

My girlfriend and I have been planning to get married for a while now at least 18 months. I haven’t asked her to marry me yet officially but I know she’ll say yes because we’ve discussed it. We’ve spoken about a small wedding with a few friends not much family but the more we spoke about it the more she’s reduced how many people we should invite. Today she basically said she doesn’t want to invite anyone because she doesn’t have any friends she’s that close to or trusts like that.
By comparison I have about 5 best friends I can count on any day of the week and at least 5 other friends I’d want to be there. We’re both introverts but I’m close to some of these guys because we have similar mental illnesses and trauma from our youth and we gravitated to each other like magic. She kinda gets jealous of that sometimes or sad that she isn’t close to anyone like that besides me. But not like a toxic jealousy or anything. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point it really may just be us at our wedding.
I’m a romantic and the day will be great regardless, after all it’s her I’m marrying not them. On the flip side I’ve always seen my wedding day as something I’d get to share with my close friends I wanted to get married in the past in fact this would be the second time I’d propose to someone. She’s the one that made me feel like I’d marry again after the first engagement went terribly.
I’m disappointed and if I bring it up too much it’s just gonna make her feel awkward and cave for me but I don’t want that. Gonna marry her regardless though.

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

Got tired of these "share or die" messages and sent this to everyone-
"Hey, read this,

1. WA will not give free stuff if you forward a message to 10 groups.

2. You can't send a message to some people and cure someone else's cancer

3. WA won't pay someone else when you forward a goddamn message.

4. WhatsApp gold is fake. It is a fake app that can steal your passwords, pictures and other private stuff.

5. Gods don't use WhatsApp. So you won't die if you don't forward messages. 

6. WhatsApp.com is the only official WhatsApp site. 

Sites like 'whatsapp.xyz.com' and 'claimprize.whatsapp.fml.com' are FAKE.

☺☺

Now you know. Spread this! "

Well since I cannot post my work setup due to post-its with 'important stuff' (NDA, not passwords, mind you!!😋) & a lot of curse words & other stuff.. I decided to shame, I mean share my home laptop.. Most of the time, he is lurking in the shadows, trying to upgrade shamelessly whenever I need to use it, occasionally he embarrasses me in front of clients, or makes my summer days at sea a living hell..
So here he is! Everyone, meet LOKI!! :/

I don't know how managers are planning deadlines and counting December as a full working month!

Most companies that I worked with, count either half a month or push the deadline until the end of January when the workforce is back but not here.

Our division manager has promised the customer that the production environment will be ready on the first week of January, without even consulting the team or checking the schedule like WTF!
The person responsible for setting the infrastructure was on vacation for 2 weeks and he didn't hand over the access to production or share the progress done.
Fast forward, the manager went to slack and pinged the whole company with full caps message that the production should be done today.

Fun times :/

Warning: this is not a rant. I'm too happy and excited to rant right now.

Today I "finished" my first webpage!!!

Wohooo!

It's the blog I'll use. It's currently offline for obvious reasons but I intend to put it out there when I have more confidence on my skills and some content to put in it. I only used django, html and css, and I really dig the looks of it. My gf liked it so it can't be that ugly.

I still have a lot to learn with django, and I will add a thing or two to this
webpage but now I feel confident enough to make the backbone of my first real project : a platform to ease essay writing for history students. It's something simple for students to keep track of their essays thesis and ideas but also the bibliography they'll use and the thesis and ideas they think each text they read for the essay has. I intend later to extend the functionality so it can store all the texts the user has used in some useful and atractive manner so they can keep track of everything they've read, share it and use it for later works.

I'm so fucking excited I can't fucking sleep (it's 3 am right now).

Programmer OAth. Just read on a github repo

0. I will only undertake honest and moral work. I will stand firm against any requirement that exploits or harms people.

1. I will respect the learnings of those programmers who came before me, and share my learnings with those to come.

2. I will remember that programming is art as well as science, and that warmth, empathy and understanding may outweigh a clever algorithm or technical argument.

3. I will not be ashamed to say "I don't know", and I will ask for help when I am stuck.

4. I will respect the privacy of my users, for their information is not disclosed to me that the world may know.

5. I will tread most carefully in matters of life or death. I will be humble and recognize that I will make mistakes.

6. I will remember that I do not write code for computers, but for people.

7. I will consider the possible consequences of my code and actions. I will respect the difficulties of both social and technical problems.

8. I will be diligent and take pride in my work.

9. I will recognize that I can and will be wrong. I will keep an open mind, and listen to others carefully and with respect.

Soo.. we always knew facebook is evil and manipulates aunties into some weird conspiracy theories

But finally got some reason to convince my friends and family to migrate from Whatzap (aka facebook2) to Signal or Telegram :)

Forcing users to share their information went to a complete different direction of the world is going to. Kinda of glad that this finally burst out of the tech bubble

Anyway

My question is if there are any alternatives to Instagram?

Fingers crossed tiktok is not the only other option 😅

So I have a question.

How do you freelancers keep motivated? I'm a web developer and that's all I do. However i made a mistake of dedicating myself a little too much.

I moved to a new country and started with all these new projects that started becoming successful however when I started making friends in Uni and out , those friends were less of friends and I treated them more like workmates who I can share projects with and work on new orojects. Because of this, my career overtook me to the extent that that was all I ever worked on. Literally.

It was only recently that I realized that I have been missing out too much. I miss having a life and being with friends. recently I lost my creativity and productivity. Gave up on an insanely huge project because I have not been able to work on it. Lost a job because Im not productive. My life has started falling apart and I don't know how to keep it controlled. I feel I can't bother my friends because we're not totally close and most are only friends on campus.

I don't know what to do where to start or how to be productive again.

Two months ago I started working at a new company, who's system is a huge monolith. The company is a bit over one year old, and the code base is huge. The desire to move to more of a microservices architecture is on the radar, but one of the biggest issues in moving towards it is how we should keep our models. The stack is basically Node.js and Mongoose, where there's about a few dozen mongoose models that the whole system uses, and the issue is that, if we moved to a microservices architecture, how could we keep the models in sync. One idea I had was to keep the models in a separate (node) package that would be shared across all microservices, but then there's the issue that if one model needs changes, all microservices that use that model will need to be updated. Another idea we had was to not share models, but instead let every microservice be in charge of everything to do with a certain type of data (eg. Users are only directly accessed by one microservice, companies by another, and no two microservices share responsibility over data), but that might bring problems when one microservice depends on a certain set of data from another microservice. How do you guys manage all that? Any ideas or tips? Thanks ^^

When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.

So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.

Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:

No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.

If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.

Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.

What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.

Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.

This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.

It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.

This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.

Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.

So... Today I started using my first Python web framework, web2py. At a first glance I liked it, the templating system, the view/controller thing ecc. But there is one thing in frameworks that I really don't like: they make me feel dumb.
I mean, in just one line of code I can generate an entire form, but if I wanna customize it a little bit... I can't. Or better, it is very hard, also if there is a bug, I have to look for a problem in an entire system that I DID NOT wrote.
I don't like the idea that the frameworksl handles everything for you, like it is teasing me, I don't even know how it works, it just works, and man, I don't like it. There's some kind of hacker in me, I dont like a system that just works, I want to know how it works. But the sad thing is that I will have to learn web frameworks if I want to work in the IT, right? Please If you can help me or share your experience with web frameworks do so.

Once in corporate stuffy devland a major monopoly-in-their-field client was raging at our tiny company and trying to scrutinize everything we did for whatever reason

The client's head huncho, some department head below the execs or something, insisted he have a code review meeting with the lead developer, which was me, and scrutinize my code in a 2 hour impromptu meeting one random Tuesday. Up until this point I was not allowed to even be introduced to the client so I'm a little ticked my company is throwing me under the bus like this.

So I get into this call, share my screen, guy is raging and asking questions left and right about every line I had written, firing, fuming, shouting... But it's clear he doesn't know how code works. So then I start teaching him how variable assignments work and function calls... He got so bored he left the meeting in 30 minutes and it was never spoken of again lmao

I just found out last Friday that my team collegues (all of them are team leads) are suffering from depression or the so called burn out syndrom. I guess it's my boss' fault. He never gives clear jobs, changes his mind from day to day, we have to manage unclear responsibilities and the baddest thing is that we think that our boss is too stressed out himself.

Do you have any advice for me how we as team could solve that besides changing employer? One thing to mention is, that my boss likes to hear himself talking. That makes it even harder for a guy like myself who is more or less introverted to come up with good arguments which are not overheard or overtalked immediately. What are your feedback strategies to your own boss, how do you bring such stuff on the table?

I fear that when nothing happens, my company will suffer very hard when the whole product engineering departement will fall apart (¼ of the whole company and is responsible for engineering and maintaining of internal services and managed services for our customers).

Well at least it was worth writing about it, maybe my subconcious mind will come up with a brilliant idea itself in the near future in some asynchronous way. But you might be the one with that valuable input, then don't hesitate to share, it will be welcome.

So today I found a file share containing some super super sensitive information accessible to what I think was our entire user base (6,500 users) if you knew the server name and had an interest in nosing around.

I reported it to our head of IT and heard nothing after, although 5 mins after reporting I could no longer access...

I suspect the infrastructure lead is going to be a dick (because his one of them awkward non team player kind of guys) and not thank me for preventing our company from being in national news papers... but try to spin it on why am I nosing around his servers in the first place..

I actually feel 50/50 about if I should of told or not.. but on flip side, I guess the access logs of me listing the files as I flick through to confirm my suspicions would of caused s bigger headache.

Fucking useless infrastructure engineers!

long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

My God is map development insane. I had no idea.

For starters did you know there are a hundred different satellite map providers?

Just kidding, it's more than that.

Second there appears to be tens of thousands of people whos *entire* job is either analyzing map data, or making maps.
Hell this must be some people's whole *existence*. I am humbled.

I just got done grabbing basic land cover data for a neoscav style game spanning the u.s., when I came across the MRLC land cover data set.

One file was 17GB in size.

Worked out to 1px = 30 meters in their data set. I just need it at a one mile resolution, so I need it in 54px chunks, which I'll have to average, or find medians on, or do some sort of reduction.

Ecoregions.appspot.com actually has a pretty good data set but that's still manual. I ran it through gale and theres actually imperceptible thin line borders that share a separate *shade* of their region colors with the region itself, so I ran it through a mosaic effect, to remove the vast bulk of extraneous border colors, but I'll still have to hand remove the oceans if I go with image sources.

It's not that I havent done things involved like that before, naturally I'm insane. It's just involved.

The reason for editing out the oceans is because the oceans contain a metric boatload of shades of blue.
If I'm converting pixels to tiles, I have to break it down to one color per tile.
With the oceans, the boundary between the ocean and shore (not to mention depth information on the continental shelf) ends up sharing colors when I do a palette reduction, so that's a no-go. Of course I could build the palette bu hand, from sampling the map, and then just measure the distance of each sampled rgb color to that of every color in the palette, to see what color it primarily belongs to, but as it stands ecoregions coloring of the regions has some of them *really close* in rgb value as it is.

Now what I also could do is write a script to parse the shape files, construct polygons in sdl or love2d, and save it to a surface with simplified colors, and output that to bmp.

It's perfectly doable, but technically I'm on savings and supposed to be calling companies right now to see if I can get hired instead of being a bum :P

Okay, one after another. They like to piss me off, apparently.

Coleague knows something isn't possible with current state of some api and pushes phone to me so I can maybe figure out what to reply to client. I dry-typed in "Its not possible" gave him phone and said "boom done, you know it aint possible"

Okay, TL;DR she got pissed that I am pissed that this BS is thrown at me and I dont want to participate in promissing something I know is undeliverable.

So she told me to go to PM/PO *kind of guy but not rly* with that problem. He aint technical by any mean. We are small company and for some reason this guy has more bearoucratic approach than I thought is possible to fit in one human.

Anyway. Well, apparently we will have meeting what are our options.
It all beginned that one guy promissed other guy undeliverable feature....

And becouse someone couldn't use his fucking brain it's pushed onto me, or I need to figure out how to do it. You cant without introducing safety flaw, period, it's that fuckin' simple.

But nooo, we will have god-knows-how-long meeting, that will bring exacly 0 value, as fking allways, and all I want now is just fucking focus on my fucking code becouse, ya know, I have timeline to follow, I dont have time to all that BS.

And to give you context, while keeping the stuff I cant share secret, imagine you have an API, that is just 'facade' of backend API, and layer of security. And they want to add authoritative endpoint to the facade API. Kind of endpoint "yes, you got paid".

Bravo, big brain, it will not work without like huge-as-fuck vunrability...

IDIOTS

How to not get pissed? Any protips?

It's amusing how every time something doesn't work with Linux somebody spent a bunch of time customising their OS into oblivion (because well, the whole point of using Linux is the ability to have it your way, d'oh), and it's never their fault for changing everything or using some distro with 0.05% market share, it's the company's fault not providing bulletproof support for their exact setup and not testing everything they put out on every combination of kernel & system software.

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

Just spent 30 mins (in bed at 5am) thinking how to improve a mongodb collection sync process from a basic script I wrote years ago to a cleaner Java process.

But then asked myself why.... WHY THE DUCK SHOULD I TAKE THE INITIATIVE TO IMPROVE SOMETHING THAT I WILL RARELY NEED TO USE BUT WOULD MAKE ALL THE MONKEYS JOBS ON MY TEAM A LOT EASIER

NO ONE ELSE TAKES INITIATIVE, WHY THE DUCK SHOULD I...

THEY DON'T LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY EITHER...

Or I could just not share my toys anymore... Watch while everyone else toils in misery...

I have a few questions for the people having a 3D printer and/or are interested in 3D printing.

1. Where do you retrieve your models from? Or do you make them yourself?
2. What is your thingiverse name (if you have it)
3. Personally I'm missing a single good information source where questions can be asked, models can be shared etc. Thingiverse doesn't have a mobile UI and is pretty limited in my opinion. I'm thinking of creating a "social media" platform where people can share their creations, collection of information sources about 3D printing. Would you like to help or is there a good alternative for Thingiverse that I have not found yet?

More masturbation with numbers.

If you take some product p,
and do

√p**(1/p)

and it's factors

a**(1/p)

and

b**(1/p)

you might find something interesting.

Take for example

a=21977
b=43331
p=a*b=952285387

(√p)**(1/p) = 1.0000000108551363

a**(1/p) = 1.0000000104986928
b**(1/p) = 1.0000000112115799

More often then not, a, b, or both, will share one or two of the most significant digits in the mantissa, as the root of p.

It doesn't always work, but it seems to be true more often than you might expect.

This is probably obvious in hindsight but I still think it's cool.

In some instances if you then do, say
sqrt(log(p, 1.000000010)), it comes pretty close to the original factors, but thats really hit or miss.

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating it. I sincerely hope each of you has someone to cozy up this festive season. Remember and share all the good stories that happened this year, all the sores that hurt you back then but turned out well in the end. Share your plans, hopes and dreams to achieve next year.

Be it a friend, a family, a significant other or your neighbour. Cozy up and enjoy. After all this hard year you've all deserved it.

[don't try to trick yourself that you're better off alone. We both know it's not true]

After a long break I'm having a white Christmas this year. That and my kiddo stepping his first steps, apartment nearly done and a huge christmas tree in one of the rooms, and the fact that I've finaly 100% nailed my gift for my wife [never ever has this happened bfore! Can't wait to see her face in the morning :) ] -- I'm full of Christmas spirit this year!

I wish you all have a great holiday!

I'm ashamed of it, but I want to share my tifu-story:
My colleague asked me if I could rename his windows user name because he married and changed his last name. I changed it in the Active Directory, but he got some problems when he wants to log on. On every startup his old name appears. Simpliest task. Let me google that.
Easy going, let me just change this registry entry. Reboot. Old behaviour. Okay, I changed some of the other entries. Reboot. Yeah, his new name appears. But wait a moment. Windows just nulled his entire user profile and deleted all the data. "oh, haha you have a backup, right?" - "no, I saved everything on the desktop, all my work is gone!"
But at the end, the boss was mad at HIM, because he doesn't used the file server or any backup system.

i am not a smart man

A programme I have to maintain (and not allowed to optimise or change):

1) read input from serial connection
2) store data in MySQL database
3) every day convert to CSV
4) store on Windows file share
5) process CSV in access 2000
6) store in MsSQL database

When it was first developed, I said to te developer to store it straight from serial to MsSQL but out boss wanted it to follow the above spec.

He has now left and I have to maintain it

!rant && Android

I thought I found something on devrant app turn out it is an Android thing. Not sure if a bug or not.

I use Android 7.1.2 default keyboard . And Google place a small G logo at the top left corner of keyboard. Clicking that show the gif, emoji, language setting etc menu.

On devrant and a few apps I have tried, that G icon remains on the screen in a transparent and almost not visible state but at the same position after hiding the keyboard. Like a watermark.

At first I thought devrant app background has that mark. Even took a screenshot to share here. Turn out it doesn't show up on screenshot. Because when I zoomed in on the image, the icon remained at same position on screen. So it is showing on Google photo app as well.

Any of you guys have that issue?

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?

guy creates very cool looking, advanced css effects library that went viral

guy puts it up on GitHub

guy writes a ranty post and pins it to top the of issues with stuff like "i'm not going to make this a module or library that can be installed, and also don't try because i've already created a seperate repo for that" ON AN OPEN SOURCE LIBRARY

dude, you already open-sourced it, people are going to use it however they want

idk, just found this to be a very weird vibe, thought i'd share. thoughts?

Title: The problem with "good enough" code

Body:

I'm a software developer, and I've seen my fair share of "good enough" code. You know the kind of code I'm talking about: it works, but it's not pretty, and it's not very maintainable.

The problem with "good enough" code is that it's a slippery slope. Once you start writing "good enough" code, it's easy to fall into the trap of always taking the easy way out.

Before you know it, your code is a mess of hacks and workarounds. It's hard to understand, it's hard to maintain, and it's a nightmare to debug.

I've seen projects go down in flames because of "good enough" code. The code was so bad that it was impossible to fix, and the project had to be scrapped.

I'm not saying that you should never write "good enough" code. Sometimes, you just need to get something working, and you don't have the time or resources to do it perfectly.

But if you're going to write "good enough" code, you need to be aware of the risks. And you need to make sure that you're only writing "good enough" code for a short period of time.

Once you have a working prototype, you need to start refactoring your code and making it better. You need to make it more readable, more maintainable, and more testable.

If you don't, you'll eventually regret it. Your code will become a liability, and it will hold you back.

So next time you're tempted to write "good enough" code, think twice. It might save you some time in the short term, but it will cost you in the long run.

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

I work in a big corporate world where I felt really out of place at first. I didn’t enjoy working there, I could not understand why people would work so hard to keep all the systems happy. No one thanked them, no one gave the smart people maintaining the important systems any credits. I did not understand. Why did they care so much for these systems?

My team split. We were too many with too many systems to care for. After this my team was a lot smaller and therefore I ended up in a more important role. I was forced to do these tasks the more senior engineers had done before me, in the previous team. This was the greatest thing that could happen to me, and I started to like coming into work. Now our team is big again but I’m one of the senior people in it. Not senior as in years active in the industry but senior as in knows the most about our systems and our work environment. I work hard to constantly share my knowledge and try to put the newer members in situations where they also have to take responsibility.

Don’t be afraid to put important tasks on junior or new people. They might fuck up but they will learn, as will you. Don’t hog your knowledge and your team will thank you.

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

New dev guy in office, Does zero research when stuck in somewhere while doing a task. Goes around asking the team if they had done that before. Talks on the phone for like 10-15 mins with god knows who when he has a technical problem.

Doesn't even bother to do a simple debug before complaining about an exception in a service to the dev who wrote it (if he knows the dev who wrote it)

Interestingly, he marks the tasks he does in a google sheet in red, yellow and green rows that's shared with our tech lead.

Not that he bugs me or anything, but just thought i should share this here.

** this means words are muted **

Friday:
I send a mail the client a Google doc with elaborate details about evaluation of an Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer.

Monday:

The client is upset, he says "You say there is no GPS chip on the tablet while the manufacturer says otherwise"

Me- "I have clearly mentioned that it has a GPS chip"

Client- Opens the Google doc, points to a sentence. Looks at me like I did something horrible.

Me - **This guys is either word blind or something else is wrong with him, the line reads 'GPS chip available'**

Me- "Look, it says 'GPS chip available'.

Client- **Blinks n blinks again** "Alright, but why did you share a Google document, why not PDF, docx"

Me-**Politely** "You can download the document in any format, look I will show you..."

Client- "It should have been in the mail itself ideally"

Me- **WTH** "We normally maintain a document for such things to keep everything organised, but if you want I will put everything in mail itself"

Client- "Hmm.. do both from next time"

Me- "Alright" **BS**

Client- "Why is the new feature taking so much time"

Me- "As planned earlier, we going to deliver it tomorrow"

Client- "Why not today??" **Gives a strange look.**

Me thinking - **Enough**

Me- "See, I am trying to integrate a smarten with a socket connection, reading it's data via exposed APIs that are hardly documented, we need faster performance so I need to implement caching, multi threading, offline handling, multiple processes to avoid memory fluctuations, sync adapter to sync data...."

Client- "Ok ok ok, it's fine if you give working build tomorrow"

Me- "Ok, fine"

#limit

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

Just moved this weekend into the first home I've ever actually owned. Bought a scotch older than myself to mark the occasion, but I want to save it to share with my brother sometime during Yule (that's an agonizing abstinence for me). But at least someone gifted me with a Macallan 12 yr for housewarming that has been hitting the spot quite nicely.

Got my PC set up already to unfortunately go back to work tomorrow. Speaking of which, is it like "Recruiting Season" or something? I have been hit up like crazy about other opportunities, at a time when my company that i've been with almost 4 years seems to be floundering to get its shit together.

I guess I haven't paid much attention in the past to whether I get hit up with "opportunities" more at the end of the year or not. But its something I'm seriously considering right now. 2020 was mostly stagnant for me, and ending the year with moving is a high note. Would not mind continuing this trend of change whilst I still have to wait for the world to be able to resume "normalcy" a while longer.

Recruiter on LinkedIn:
"Hi *dev*,
I hope you don't mind me contacting on LinkedIn but I couldn't find your contact details. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't share this awesome job with you. Can U have you're phone number? I think you are a great candidate for this job.

If it's not quite right for you, please refer your contacts!"

Where do I start...
There's a good reason why I don't have my contact details in my profile. I also have a note saying I'm not looking for any jobs at the moment. If I'm "great candidate" what would you ask me to refer my friends? I know they're doing their job, but honestly it feels like they're retarded or something.

So this person is looking for a way to learn how to create websites, but apparently doesn't know what backend or frontend is.
Not sure if he is using the wrong process, or someone teaching him messed things up pretty bad. Or probably my question wasn't properly phrased?

Not sure what to say next. How to help him without investing hours? Should I share a good link for him to read? How do I do that without scaring him away?

!rant

For a bunch of application redesigns that we are doing at work I am letting the other two developers in my department help with selecting the stack. Normally, we work with Java and PHP, and while they seem to enjoy php I find them concerned at the possibility of making it more Java centric.

So I compiled a list of examples of different tech stacks that are not only more modern (cuz our Java stuff is old JSP stuff) but also simple to learn and use. Mind you, the point is to make this a gradual change, not just rewrite the entire house from scratch.

the list contained examples in:
Python: django and flask

Ruby: Ruby on Rails

Java: Spring Boot

Golang: Small self made mvc framework I built, nothing fancy on it, it uses templates and shit, didn't make it api centric

Node: Express examples in both vanilla JS and TypeScript

php with Laravel.

Since we work with php most of the time as well I imagined that they would be more inclined for Laravel, but I was wrong :P they seemed to like the Node Express route and the Golang route more than anything else with Python and Django being close.

Personally I know that there is more to selecting a stack, but initial perceptions make for a lot of things in selection of the stack.

Pretty excited, if they gauge everything considered in regards to what we have and we found Golang to be a clear winner it would give them the chance to add a nice and competitive tech to their resumes.

not a rant, or anything per se, just wanted to share some stuff with y'all

So I now bought an iphone 6 again for development and tried just for fun to make it a daily driver and it feels really limited, especially because apparently theres no jailbreak yet for 11.2.5. (I feel near everything could be solved as soon as cydia etc. get fully released to the alibaba jailbreak)

I didnt even remember, that it doesnt have any option to have haptic feedback when typing, such a basic feature has to be jailbroken..? I thought I remembered that it had it, last time I had one - did they remove such a basic feature?

Also the fingerprint reader is really weird compared to other phones from the same year, first getting it to actually fill all fingerprint lines without saying "try again" or it trolling you and vibrating as if it recognized your finger, but actually didnt (really frustrating when its the last 2 lines...) - is a real challenge, might be that I have some mutant fingerprints, but when I asked my s/o to try it out, it also failed most of the times, so you have to position your finger in a very specific position for it to work, even if you add the max amount of 5 fingerprints.

Most ads on iphones feel HORRIBLE, the amount of lag some can add is incredible, wait till it loaded or youre fucked and besides using some shady adblocker vpn, theres no way to block them, without again - a jailbreak.

Another feature that I used many times on my android phone, is controlling it from the desktop, connect it via usb and then just use it for demonstration purposes on a projector or to instruct how things work - theres no such function without a jailbreak, even if you use osx..

Then theres the feature, that instead of just setting your cursor to a specific location, you have to hold and it zooms in, not sure if I just got too used to the android way of doing it, but I can see myself making less mistakes of where I positioned it with the ios way.

The hardware mute switch feels like a great feature, its just sometimes weird, so if you were inside an app that was playing sound and you mute it, it still plays it until you either close and open that app or just change to another one temporarily, so its not an actual hardware switch as I usually thought, more like a request to mute the phone.

The cable that comes with it is too thin, I am afraid to even unwind it, as it would probably break, so I had to get another one.

Please don't turn this into a shitfest from any of the fanboys, I really just wanted to share my image of finally being able to try it first hand again.

Reading through one of my posts I’ve realized how much ego programmers can actually have. Guys, some of you have already mastered or grasped more than just the foundations of the industry standard languages, as well as developed a very solid intuition behind some design patterns and a solid understanding of some frameworks and libraries, say NumPy, say React... we get it.

You don’t have to be such condescending assholes and be offended by some of the jokes we, programming beginners, make to release stress or just to have fun.

You already have some amazing developer and engineering skills. Do not ruin it with such a detrimental attitude; I make this post because I myself have made this mistake, and I still do to this day. But if what I’ve felt reading your comments is what non-programming people feel when around me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found that some people hated me or just wanted to kill me.

I don’t know if this will get downvot’d or if more people think like this. But I needed to share this, even just as a reflection of my very own attitude.

Thank you for your time,

D.

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

Hi friends and others. There is a task I want to automate. I want to convert .docx files to .pdf and then minify those. Are there JavaScript libraries or npm- packages which can do that? Because I would like to use Gulp or Webpack for this task. I would not mind if external APIs are involved, but I would rather not use those if not required.

Pls share your wisdom. Bye.

Why is there always one asshole!

New job just a month in, had a meeting where we could bring up improvements and put them on cards.

I brought up the idea of using slack so we could collaborate better or maybe a collab space. We all have our own offices or share with high walls.

The guy running the meeting has the same title as me said we never had that before, are you unhappy with yiur onboarding?

Slack or a messaging app is industry standard for even none tech companies. I was polite and said it was just a suggestion and it might make it easier to get help for the new people if there is a group chat.

Also brought up using a formatting standard so code reviews are spent commenting on spacing. I said we could you prettier to implement that and just pick a standard.

He said that was an issue because people were not paying attention before they pushed the code.

I am sorry I am new so I am rewriting and rewriting code all the time. I was to format on save and not spend time fucking formatting!

I could use a package before since it I formatted it would look like a bunch of fucking changes in git.

Why make things harder? Part of the meeting was how to get code done and PR’ed faster so it gets to the testers. Autoformatting shit would help.

We have a three bedroom house that fits us perfectly, or did anyway. In the upstairs there is a master bedroom which my wife and I share, and two smaller bedrooms. One is my son's room and was his nursery when he was smaller, and the other is currently being used as my office.

We had a second child-- a little girl --in October. As she is still very small, she sleeps in a bassinet in our bedroom, but those days are numbered. She will need her own room within a couple months, for naps and for her to sleep all night on her own. That means my office will soon have a crib, dresser, and changing table in it, and I will be unable to use my computer after the wife and kids are in bed.

For this eventuality, I've been preparing what I call my, "table kit." Costco sells these really nice collapsible plastic crates. I have filled one with computer things, with the intention being that when my office is not available to me, I have a crate with everything I need in it, and can quickly set up at the dinner table. When I'm done, I can quickly tear down and pack everything up into that collapsible crate, so none of my equipment will "live" at the table.

My question is: what would you put in your table kit? I currently have a System76 Oryx Pro, a 23" LED display, displayport cable, power cables, mouse, keyboard, microUSB, and type-C cable, Bluetooth headphones, and I'm trying to decide whether I'll need a laptop stand. What would you pack?

I am on a forum where we actually help each other out. However, when I see someone post something, and it feels like they are putting in low effort (post practically empty) I don't spend my time getting info from them. I let others in the forum do the "show us your code" or "explain what this means" posts. I also start getting sarcastic. That is not cool in that forum so I refrain from posting.

So today I saw a post where they posted an ambiguous problem. It had to do with scrolling speed of a list in a gui interface. People made the posts like "not enough info", or "it could be...". The person further explained it was not a performance problem, but a "it just scrolls slow". At this point I can tell they have made zero effort to understand the scrolling mechanics of the object they are using. So I left the post and decided to let others deal with this. I so wanted to post a sarcastic remark though. So I am going to share with you:

That is definitely a case of "pixel drag".

Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.

For starters, it's JavaScript, so you know this isn't gonna end well. Second, it's still in kinda beta phase for some browsers so you gotta add polyfills. Let's talk compatibility now. During normal days, yeah, I could ask for a couple of computers in the office, each using a different browser. But, covid. One browser mishbehaves and doesn't wanna share the camera with the other browser, so I can't really test a connection with the only 1 computer I have. I can't take my partner's computer all day to debug.

Solution: ask the marketing department or even the execs to video chat with you to test it on a staging server. So I push my changes to the server, wait for them to build, call my lab rat, check all the bugs, clean the code, push the changes back up. No fancy breakpoints. I'm doing the old style like my great uncle did. Oh wait no, he was pretty intelligent, but my lab rat isn't. They probably don't know what a console is. So no baby I'm not only talking about console logging the problems, I'm talking `alert` the heck out of the bugs - okay no, I'll just display the objects in the middle of the screen. The screen is my console.

Freenas update from 11.1 to 11.2 beta 2

They added experimental smb direct / multichannel support, yay.

Me tries to connect to the smb share:
->Connection timed out 🤔

Tries something.
->Connection refused 😐

Google foo ....
->Nope, no connection 😔
"Failed to retrieve list of shares from server"

Reinstalls freenas to be sure it's not some janky install.
->Nope.

Google some more
->Nope 😭

*Like a year later*
Look into /etc/samba/smb.conf

Client max protocol = NTLM1

Motherfucker! 😬
Who thought that to be a good Idea!?
😠
It's the default Manjaro smb conf from the official repository by the way.

Seriously.
Didn't even know there was a setting for max client protocol.
Thought it was a server only config.
😵
Nope, some motherfucker trolled me long and hard this time. 😩

But back to getting smb direct working on my setup.

Thunar gvfs is like it's own completely separate thing.

Smb status, and all the other commands don't see any open connections anywhere.
Gvfs still connects fine to the share even though the smb.conf is deleted and everything else is complaining that there is no config.

On the one hand, it uses samba, on the other it's not actually.

Where the heck can I see the connection properties and wether rdma works or not?

Mother trucking, fracking, leg breaking piece of a dance type.

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

I am really curious... who of you actually uses snapchat and why?
In my opinion it's one of the most useless apps out there and one of the best concepts to share all your private information with other people and of course the developers.
Also I'd like to believe that rather intelligent people don't use it or if they use it then just for the sake of not being excluded. Since this is a community of programmers I'd like to hear your opinions.

Randomly one day, out of the blue:

Echelons: You now have Workspace, and it’s a requirement you use it. Make it successful because we paid and are paying a large dollar amount for it, and our competitors have reported success with it. We want email communications companywide eliminated by 50% within the first 60 days.

Management: Ok, excellent! We want to do XYZ.

Echelons: Nope, can’t do any of that.

Management: Ok, how about a, b, and c?

Echelons: Nope, nope, nope.

Management: Alright, let’s try 1,2, and 3.

Echelons: Nope, not possible.

Management: What can we do then? We need further direction at this point.

Echelons: One group for all departments, posts, and attachments only. PDF, .jpeg, .png files only. Everyone in the company must be registered within seven days and using the platform. Only mobile devices allowed.

Management: We have almost 10,000 employees, and the SSO aspect alone could take weeks and months.

Echelons: Insignificant as Facebook said it should be easy to deploy. Also, every post not created by admin will need to be manually approved and done so within 5-10 minutes after its submission 24/7, 365.

Management: Ok, solved. A little shaky, but it’s working. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators?

Echelons: Only 1700 employees have registered; the app has been up 14 days now? What’s wrong? Where’s the engagement? Effective immediately, all members of management must be creating and starting 4 to 7 posts daily, including weekends.

Management: Our registration process with the SSO client isn’t smooth and clean across all devices. We had to implement training to overcome this. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators? Can we make all members of management either administrators or at least moderator? Can we at least turn on live streaming and video formats?

Echelons: No! 10 admin and mods max. Yes to streaming and video.

Echelons: Progress update, please. Include ROI timeline and impactful usage data. This must to pay for itself in the first six months and continue to pay for itself long term, along with showing XYZ company-wide growth quarterly.

Echelons: Hello?

Echelons: Hello?

Having Workplace shoved down your throat has been an interesting experience. Anyone have any exciting ideas or examples to share on what they have utilized with Workplace and increased employee engagement?

This is what I’ve got on LinkedIn today People are getting creative, not sure how to respond to that. I am curious to see what this scam is all about 🤷‍♂️

Dear PappyHans,

I hope this email finds you well and safe. My name is **** and I work for ******, a leading expert network company based in New York. I am currently working with a client who is conducting a project and needs expertise on Digital Engineering - ***** .

After some research I did regarding the topic, I concluded that you would be a great fit for this project, given your experience.

Please, let me know if you would be willing to share your expertise on this subject through a paid phone consultation. For your input and time, you will be compensated with a fee that you can set yourself. As a reference – the average rate of our consultations is around 400$/hour.

It is essential to note that in no way will you be asked to discuss your current employer nor any kind of confidential information during the phone consultation.

Should you be interested in this subject, I would be more than happy to address any questions regarding the topic on LinkedIn or by phone

Kind Regards
(Sender name)

Great... I was hired to make a store system for this newborn startup... which isn't very tough, given I know PHP. Now they want me to build a social media for designers, just like Instagram, to encourage them to share their designs in an attempt to increase sales. And I'm the only Dev in the startup of ten.

Well, initially, I was not very pleased, but as I researched on how would I even do that, I realised it would really help my skill set, not to mention the points I'll be able to add to be resumé.

So far I've looked up how I'll have to use JSON/XML, coupled with PHP. I chose to learn Angular.JS for frontend dynamicity.

Any advice/help for this novice? Or any better frameworks I could use? (Don't say ruby-our web hosting site does not support it.)

Have had multiple interview rejections already at 20. Strongly feel I am bad at it.
Maybe it's because these are my first few interviews and/or that I'm still in college and don't realise how interviews work.

Really hard not to grudge the interviewer after a rejection. Cunts all of them.

Share your story/opinion if you feel like.